Have you heard of Shnakule a major threat to security?
September 9th, 2011 by BrightCloud
I heard about this today while looking at the latest security information from Blue Coat and if you think about it it can be quite worrying even for small businesses.
The growth in social media gives everyone a new way to approach the web, and is generally more trusted than other more general sites. But social networking sites link through to other sites where the user will be able play games, view video content and interact with other users. Behind these sites users may be directed to points of interest – for example the royal wedding generated enormous worldwide interest and spawned many sites – not all of which were honest.
Malware, a generic term for malicious software, is a very dangerous threat to organisations and computer users, creating damaging and irritating software which can infect any PC that finds it hidden in web pages all over the internet. Malware is also used extensively by criminal organisations to capture personal data.
So what is Shnakule?
It’s a word used to describe the biggest Malware network to allow you to visualise the enormity of the problem. The number of sites changes as sites are added and removed however it’s currently on over 4000 sites. The green dots represent good and popular sites, the yellow dots are safe sites that they link to and the red dots are Malware sites that you don’t want to go to – but you are lead there from the green sites!
This Multi-layered environment is waiting for you and your users how may start browsing perfectly acceptable well known sites and finish with malware or worse.
Should the company have any responsibility to protect its employees from the web? I certainly think so, it makes sense to protect your employees while they are at work but also you are protecting the business assets included in your confidential information and of course improving the efficiency of staff. Every business should have an acceptable user policy regarding what its employees are entitled to use the IT systems for, including browsing, and the same technology can be used to enforce the acceptable usage policy at the same time as protecting users. It’s a win-win for the business and the employee.
Blue Coat isn’t the only game in town, in fact we offer Blue Coat and Webroot as different solutions depending on our customer’s requirements. Blue Coat solve the problem with either an appliance or a cloud service – or a mixture of both.
