– David Perry, Global Director of education, Trend Micro (www.trendmicro.com), says:
One of the biggest threats in the modern data center is posed not only by catastrophic events like power failure and backplane slowdowns, but by the effects and side effects of malware. Early detection and mitigation of this malware is among the essential steps for anyone considering full time service.
By averting the effects of a botnet infestation, the data loss associated with a key logger, or the downtime caused by a Denial of Service attack, every data center must take under consideration the damage that can be done to one’s reputation by being an unwitting accomplice in these very activities. To put it plain, the data center not only needs to protect it’s own house, it can’t be part of an attack on any of it’s vendors, customers or users. To this end, the data center needs more protection than the casual user. The recent Conficker worm actually closed hospitals in the UK not intentionally, but as unintended side effects of the lack of protection in those networks. This is as good an example of malware causing loss of service to critical infrastructure that I can imagine.
The terms antivirus and antispam are actually obsolete. I know of no pure antivirus or antispam protections still in production for the enterprise. Antimalware protection includes viruses, trojans, worms, botnets, rootkits and hundreds of other agents we all agree to exclude from our systems.
It is important to note that today we are faced with tens of thousands of new examples of malware each and every day. Especially in a data center, this is too much to handle with the old style (pattern file update) based protection. At Trend Micro we have developed a series of reputation based tools that we refer to as the Smart Protection Network. This moves much of the heavy lifting of protection up into the internet cloud. Leaving your systems and your network for the important work you intended for them to do.
