NetBooks and the surprises they come with

Portable storage device applications and endpoint security solution provider CoSoSys has just risen the red flag regarding Netbooks. As they explain, although treandy gift and excellent PC replacement for all offices, netbooks embed serious threats to corporate and individual security. While their seamless connectivity and increasingly large solid state disks (SSD) or traditional HDD capacities can help everyone of us increase productivity while considerably decreasing the weight we carry around, they are also the perfect means for both intentional and unintentional data breaches.

“Corporate IT departments needs to consider Netbooks as a serious issue when it comes to Endpoint Security and they are advised to take control over them as they enter their networks rather than waiting for the first data breaches to happen. Enforcing Endpoint Security policies with Endpoint Protector allows IT administrators to fully control all ports and data transfers from endpoints, including Netbooks, to any other portable device such as USB Flash Drives or External HDDs to prevent data loss” said Roman Foeckl, CoSoSys CEO.

While the CD or DVD drive is  no longer a threat, netbooks come with almost immediate access to any data through wireless networks, USB Ports, SD Card readers and other ports, making it extremely easy for confidential details to be transferred in and out of unsecured networks. And if you run a  search through our blog to see how many laptops have been lost, stolen and misplaced in the past, we have to also wonder about how much easier it is to steal or lose a much smaller version.

So take this warning seriously and stay trendy and safe at the same time!

New Flaws in Wireless Security Exposed

The Wi-Fi Protected Access or WPA is aone of the most popular forms of security used by wireless networks. Yet the potential risk and ease of breaching it might trigger some alarms for a lot of poeple especially if they were at PacSec 2008 confefence in Tokyo.

A week before the conference, the Register announced two German researchers, Martin Beck and Erik Tews, were going to expose a vulnerability exposing WPA protected networds to an attack that could compromise certain communications in less than 15 minutes. If anyone reding our blog attended the conference, we’d love to hear how it all went.

But this is far from being the first vunlerability to go public.

In 2001, three researchers found a way to reliably break the previous wireless security protocol, known as Wired Equivalent Privacy (WEP), in less than two hours. By 2007, the latest refinement in attacks against WEP – found by Tews and two other researchers – reduced the time to recover a WEP key to less than a minute of calculations.

While those discovering how to tear security systems apart, those actually depending on them seem to be learning one thing: you’re never really safe! So if any extra security is at hand, apply it asap!

Wireless Vulnerabilities Are the Greatest Threats to Corporate Network

AirPatrol CEO Nicholas Miller said wireless vulnerabilities are the greatest Internet-related threat to all corporate networks. The statement was made within the Interop/CSI SX Conference from Las Vegas, at the Computer Security Institute’s CSI CX conference and was subsequently picked up by DarkReading. According to Miller, the rapid growth of wireless networking has generated an unprecedented increase in threats caused by wireless vulnerabilities.

“The problem is that wireless vulnerabilities don’t just expose the user who’s unaware of them, but the whole corporate network the user is attached to.”

A large number of companies are nowadays moving towards a wireless infrastructure to save money and reduce current infrastructure. But according to Miller, this move exposes them to greater risks, given that the wireless environment is known to harbor old vulnerabilities that are yet to be resolved.

Wireless infrastructure vendors offer some security capabilities, “but they are really looking for rogue access points, which is a tiny issue compared to the total problem associated with laptop security,” he said. “You really need to look at the entire network — you need to secure the endpoints.”

The problem with most wireless technologies is that they don’t account for the end user’s location, Miller said. “All of a sudden people can have access to the network as if they were in the building, which is why we need location-based access in wireless. Any wireless product you’re looking for should have that capability. If a hacker wants to break into the network, they should have to break into the building.”