Virtualization is an important development in the fight against malware. In virtualization, activities are isolated from one another in "containers" so that if an activity is evil, the evil is isolated to that container.  This security approach is also known as sandboxing. In another demonstration of the important cybersecurity maxim of Dr. Frederick Chang, former NSA Director of Research: … cybersecurity is fundamentally about an adversarial engagement. Humans must defend machines that are attacked by other humans using machines. the humans at Samsung developed Knox as a way to segregate processes into containers on secure cell phones.  By segregating processes, bad [...]

Iconix has just release a new whitepaper, Advanced Persistent Threats - Human Factors Based Defense. In this new whitepaper we discuss how do defend against email based attacks. The NSA recently described the use of emails to infiltrate computers  on 60 Minutes on December 15, 2013. You can watch this discussion, starting at 5 minutes, 30 seconds.   NSA Discusses Spearphishing on 60 Minutes You can download Advanced Persistent Threats - Human Factors Based Defense for no charge from the White Papers page on our website.

In a December 13, 2013, blog posting Letting The Wrong Ones In: Email Security’s Big Blind Spot, Tim Ricketts of FireEye discusses the key deficiency of spam filters -- they are ineffective against extremely low volume highly targeted emails.  At Iconix, we call this the Toxic Trickle.   The blog is an excellent discussion of the spearphishing phase of the APT problem.  It concludes: And that’s the problem. A person-to-person email doesn’t have  spam or bulk phishing characteristics. Any malicious payload is likely to be a weaponized document or a common file type that attachment filters allow through. And URLs contained in [...]

Proofpoint recently posted its Ten Most Dangerous - Discover the Top Ten Advanced Threats Impacting Business Today. Number 1 was the media spearphish attack which compromised the Associated Press Twitter account, causing $150 billion in stock market decline. Proofpoint shows us spearphishing's devastating effectiveness:   This is like an email marketing conversion funnel, only this conversion funnel is evil.  By reducing the 70% open rate of this funnel, the downstream damage can be mitigated.  How can this conversion rate be reduced?  By reducing the power of deception used in these attacks.  In the AP case, the victim thought the malicious [...]