Corporate Exposures: Malware and Outages

Last week, both Google Inc. and Microsoft Corp. faced online service failures. Meanwhile, according to a report from Juniper Networks, Inc., the volume of attacks that target Android-based mobile devices has skyrocketed over the last year.

Focal Points:

• For most of Thursday, May 12, Google's consumer blogging service, known as Blogger, was inaccessible or slow. While the majority of users simply encountered downtime, a small percentage encountered a number of bugs and errors, according to the vendor. Google attributed the problem to data corruption during maintenance. All Blogger users were unable to make posts while Google restored the software to an earlier version before the data corruption occurred. On early Friday, a Blogger status indicated that 30 hours of posts, dating back to 7:37 a.m. PDT on Wednesday, had been removed to fix the issue. Later on Friday, Blogger began restoring those posts and Google had the service up and running normally. Google apologized for the incident and said that it would share a full incident report soon.
• Microsoft experienced problems for a few days with its Business Productivity Online Suite (BPOS), a set of online applications that includes Exchange Online, Office Communications Online, Office Live Meeting, and SharePoint Online. According to the vendor, on Tuesday morning, the BPOS-S Exchange service began having trouble dealing with malformed e-mail traffic. The result was a growing backlog of e-mail that lasted several hours for some customers. This issue was resolved, but then on Thursday, malformed e-mail again affected BPOS-S Exchange. This second failure delayed some 1.5 million messages, although it was resolved in a few hours, Microsoft said. The e-mail issues were compounded by an unrelated DNS server problem early Thursday morning. This failure prevented customers from using Outlook Web Access hosted in the Americas, and also had some impact on Microsoft Outlook and Microsoft Exchange ActiveSync devices for three hours, Microsoft added.
• According to Juniper's "Mobile Malicious Threats" report, the volume of attacks that target the Android mobile operating system has increased 400 percent since the summer of 2010. The study also found that in that same timeframe, one in 20 enterprise mobile devices goes missing. Additionally, 17 percent of all reported smartphone infections "were due to SMS Trojans that sent SMS messages to premium-rate numbers, often at irretrievable cost to the user or enterprise." Security experts claim that such premium-rate telephone and SMS attacks occur largely in China and Russia, where it is easy to register a premium-rate telephone number but hide an identity. The report also found that official application stores are also not immune to spyware. Despite these mobile security threats, few users secure their smartphones, the report said.

Experton Group believes the availability, integrity, reliability and security of cloud services still has a long way to go before enterprises should feel comfortable enough to commit mission-critical services to most cloud providers.

IT executives need to keep backup copies of critical data at multiple service provider sites and/or within their own facilities. Additionally, IT executives need to scrutinize contract service level commitments and technical specifications to ensure that they are receiving or will receive the expected services and protections, and the appropriate penalties are in place in case of breach. Enterprise threat risk exposures have increased with the proliferation of smartphones and other client devices; but there is no going back. The problem will continue to expand as new devices come on the market and users eagerly embrace them without regard to security. IT executives need to assume that client systems will remain a weak link in the security chain and find a new paradigm of protecting their data and systems from malware and other external threats.