Viruses to hit infrastructure: researcher - News - Security

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This story was printed from ZDNet Australia.
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Viruses to hit infrastructure: researcher

By Patrick Gray, 0
February 24, 2003
URL: http://www.zdnet.com.au/news/security/soa/Viruses-to-hit-infrastructure-researcher/0,130061744,120272153,00.htm

A leading anti-virus researcher is predicting an increase in attacks on Internet infrastructure similar in nature to last years assault on the Internet's top level domain name servers and the recent SQL Slammer worm.

Dr Eugene Dozortsev, assistant vice-president, R&D for eTrust Security Solutions at Computer Associates,says that there has been a shift towards attacks that affect the Internet as a whole, and that trend is likely to continue.

"Previously we've seen more targeted attacks, but now we see attacks against infrastructure in general," he said.

Dr. Dozortsev also predicts that viruses are likely to continue arriving primarily by email, but says that hybrid threats may cause a few headaches too.

"Multi-vector worms and viruses will be a problem," he said.

But Dozortsev says that although multi-vector threats do represent a threat, the risks faced by the average Internet user are not likely to change in makeup over the course of 2003.

"We can't see malicious attacks changing dramatically," he told ZDNet Australia.

Dozortsev was in Sydney to speak at a CA roadshow at the ANA Hotel, which attracted several hundred attendees.

He said that attendees were primarily interested in security issues, with enterprise management technologies coming in second.

Alistair Grant, who heads up CA's single sign-on (SSO) product, says that authentication solutions will be big this year.

He says that managing large numbers of user accounts across complicated, multi-tiered networks has forced many organisations into an administrative nightmare, with user provisioning - the administration of access by users to network resources - will become a hot issue.

Rick Harvey, assistant vice-president, R&D, agrees with this, but is quick to add that provisioning users isn't the only problem, cleaning up old accounts is vital too.

"The bigger problem is with de-provisioning," he said.