Trend Micro discusses industrial level threats
March 2016 – At the RSAC in San Francisco, we spoke to Trend Micro about the changing landscape of the security marketplace and the times of threats and threat sources that are present. As an overriding observation, the environment for security has changed – it is no longer trying to be disruptive on just a data integrity level, rather they are temporally oriented and directed at logistics from a risk, response and remediation perspective.
The team at Trend Micro mentioned that the profile of the attackers has changed. It is no longer a single individual who is looking for a unique and creative way to infiltrate a system. Rather, the attacks are methodically and broadly structured on an industrial scale by companies and in some cases countries. The hacking is now dominated not from a infiltration to show capability, but by profit in the marketplace either from the data retrieved or from the value of the breach and/or disruption of service. The Ransomware attacks are now moving ahead to the “protection” and “extortion” practice to pay to avoid interruption, in addition to the release of access and data.
These structured attacks have created a new avenue for the criminal element participation and have increased the sophistication of the threats. This includes the shift from DDOS to Ransomware and the ability to adjust for the timeliness of adaptive threats. The threat of the transport paths to withhold information on a time valued basis is becoming a challenge for CDNs, media suppliers, and anyone in traditional business activities that has shifted their business models to require real time data. These threats and the need to integrate the response model lead to the Tipping Point acquisition.
The shift to the cloud has brought this to the front lines of threat defense for both the cloud data center and the thin client device on the end point. The move now has both the data and the data processing in the cloud where it is stored, processed, consumed, and imported/exported in a globally accessible location that needs to support a large number of connection devices. This leaves a vulnerability at all levels of the data retention process (in motion, in process, at rest) from threats created by people and automated M2M devices. These vulnerabilities are being protected at the device level, the platform level, the application level and now have to support both up looking and down looking malware vector paths as well as weakness that may be introduced into open source code that is implemented in products.
Trend Micro is working with developers to create an API centric security model address some of these issues on a system basis, as well as new techniques to identify and protect against adaptive code that is use in ADP scenarios. These threats are no longer limited to attacks at edge of network, they are pervasive and targeted at all levels of the devices from the end point thin clients to edge of network devices, to SDN & NFV programmed devices in the network to core computing servers and the applications that are running on them.
In addition to having services to address these threat levels, the Trend Micro team has a number of products, including appliances, for individuals, SOHO, SMB through Enterprise and Data Center scale prevention, protection and remediation applications.
