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Ransomware – The Most Feared Threat

January 6, 2015

Web browser vulnerabilities are keeping IT security professionals up at night according to a report from SC Magazine. A recent survey by Lawless Research, LLC found that 72 percent of respondents indicated that the rising number of exploitable vulnerabilities make things pretty tough for security personnel, especially those with more that 1,000 endpoints. In addition, 82 percent have experienced at least one online attack in the past year.

Ransomware such as Cryptolocker and other malware threats are the new enemies. Historically, once a virus infection was discovered, security vendors would update their products to detect and block infection. Today, malware variants are extremely common. Once a piece of malware is identified, a new variant inevitably is released several days after original detection in order to continue its infection capabilities without being detected. The good news is that the “Internet Suites” have heuristic capabilities and are not strictly signature based. The heuristics will watch the computer activity and block actions that act like malware. In other words, if it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it must be a duck.

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