A single defence against nasties

By RICHARD WOOD

Security software vendor Symantec has combined its "anti-nasty" technologies to create one device to beat them all.

Spokesman Charlie Johnson said the biggest danger to corporate security now was the "blended threat", which combined hacking, denial of service, and worm-like propagation - all done with military precision.

A recent example of this three-headed beast was Code Red, which caused an estimated US$2.6 billion ($5.7 billion) in damage, - although quite how these figures are calculated is anyone's guess.

But blended threats are difficult to deal with, said Johnson.

"You take a traditional virus, you use it as a distraction, you come in with a denial-of-service attack, you run a worm that propagates itself and then you come behind and start hacking."

He said the difficulty arose because security systems - antivirus firewall, intrusion detection, content filtering - operated independently.

Businesses were now conscious that security was a corporate management issue. This suited Symantec's strategy of covering all bases of network risk at the gateway, the server, and the client PC.

Its just-launched Gateway Security appliance, built by Sun Microsystems and running a specialised "hardened" operating system, is a specialised computer running an integrated version of Symantec's security suite.

Three models can handle from 50 to 1500-node networks and range in price from $26,000 to $115,000.

The rack-mountable box sits on the edge of the network and provides the functionality of a firewall, anti-virus protection, intrusion detection, content filtering, and virtual private networking capability.

Johnson said figures from various industry associations show virus outbreaks are more than doubling every year, as are hacker attacks. Distributed denial of service attacks were up 16 per cent last year, he said.

* Richard Wood attended the Gateway Security product launch in Sydney as a guest of Symantec.