Mobility and the cloud are the top two trends affecting enterprise networks, and application visibility is becoming increasingly important to network security as businesses put more of their functions into cloud-based apps, according to Yaniv Sulkes, AVP of marketing for Allot.
He said that while content filtering is the most common security measure in place, “this method is ineffective against many of the threats we see today.”
Accessing social media at work, whether for personal or business use, is one of the biggest risks, Allot found, because it’s easy to target people by sending links to malicious pages. Even when business policies against social media sites were “in place and well-communicated,” Allot found that the typical employee still made more than six attempts each day to access such sites, with half trying to get to Facebook. Dating and gaming sites accounted for another 1.5 daily attempts.
Whether people are at work or at home, he noted, “most of us use the same device the same way we are used to” – continuing to access the same applications in the workplace that we do at home, and vice versa.
While the most common single-malware files were JavaScript, images are another increasingly frequent source of malicious code, Sulkes said, because of the high potential for them to be shared. Allot found that more than 20% of blocked malware files were images with extensions that people generally think of as benign: jpg, pnj, gif and ico.
Meanwhile, instant messaging is 10 times more likely to contain malware than average network traffic, Sulkes said. He expects video to become another source, as it is considered highly “clickable” content.
“Organizations need to be aware of the applications being used by employees, not just how they browse the Internet,” Sulkes said.
Applications can facilitate business transactions and communications, but any particular enterprise’s policy on their use can vary widely. Sulkes shared a personal anecdote that represents some of the common back and forth and accompanying security concerns. While working with an Allot service provider customer, a file could not be e-mailed due to its large size, and Dropbox was suggested as an alternative – until the service provider said that its security team had asked all employees to eliminate the use of Dropbox accounts and not use them to exchange information.
Although PCs are still considered significantly more vulnerable than mobile devices, business applications are being accessed from multiple types of devices with the increasing use of iCloud, Google Drive and similar cloud-based storage for both business and personal use, as well as specific enterprise applications for customer data, inventory and other business information.
Sulkes expects that application visibility will become a growing need for the enterprise and for service providers, and that offering security as a service is going to be an area of opportunity for service providers. A number of network monitoring companies have been expanding their capabilities in app visibility and the overarching area of network visibility recently, including Fluke Networks’ new solution to monitoring cloud-based apps and, in a larger sense, the split of JDSU into two companies – one of which, Viavi, will focus on network visibility.
Allot’s full report can be downloaded here. The survey is based on data gathered through Allot’s security offerings for large enterprises and service providers offering security as a service to small and medium-sized businesses.
