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Wireless Threats to
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6 Wireless Threats to Your Business
by Christopher Elliott
reprinted with permission from the Microsoft Small Business Center

If you think a promiscuous client is a scantily-dressed customer, you're in trouble. And I'm not talking about having an affair.

Think an evil twin is a horror-movie villain? Wrong again. The horror you should be bracing yourself for is not on the silver screen — and it's not from a rolling pin flung at you from across the kitchen, for that matter. Rather, the trouble is in the airwaves and targeted to Wi-Fi users.

Both the "Promiscuous Client" and the "Evil Twin" are two of the latest wireless threats to your small business. If you haven't heard of them, you probably will soon.

"What would happen to your business if your strongest competitor gained access to all of your data?" asks Greg Phillips, chief executive for AirTegrity Wireless, Inc., a Stateline, Nev. wireless security company. "Unfortunately, it is a very real possibility if appropriate controls against these new threats are not exercised."

So what's out there?
 

How to Protect Your Network and Your Customers

Defeating the Botnets of the Future

The following article is excerpted from Understanding and Blocking the New Botnets, a white paper researched and written by Scott Pinzon, CISSP, and Corey Nachreiner, CISSP, of the WatchGuard® LiveSecurity® team. For a fascinating look at botnets, how they evolved, and how they work today, download a free copy of the white paper here.

Botnets embody the ultimate blended threat. Botnet code carries almost every conceivable form of malware, from spyware to downloaders, rootkits, spam engines, and more. To answer like with like, defenders must employ multiple layers of security. The good news is that time-honored techniques are still surprisingly effective against botnets. Below we suggest countermeasures that greatly mitigate the likelihood of a bot infection operating from your network.

1. Patch promptly
Bots can draw upon a wide variety of exploits in order to infect victims. However, the biggest and most successful bots have relied upon exploiting vulnerabilities that the vendor patched six to eighteen months earlier. In the most extreme cases, we've seen bots attempting exploits against vulnerabilities that were patched as long as four years earlier. We can't account for why bot communications and back-end systems innovate at a breathtaking pace, while the bot uses exploits that are known and old. Our best guess is that botmasters find exploits by waiting for vendors to patch a vulnerability, then reverse-engineering the patch to find out what the flaw was.

We expect that exploiting more recent flaws will be one of the next areas for botmasters to improve upon. But for now, it is good news for the average network administrator. If you patch promptly when vendors release fixes for software you run on your network, you can move faster than the botmasters and resist their exploits.

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