Combating Spyware in the Enterprise

Book excerpt: Combating Spyware in the Enterprise is the first book published on defending enterprise networks from increasingly sophisticated and malicious spyware.Combating Spyware in the Enterprise begins by examining the various types of insidious spyware and adware currently propagating across the internet and infiltrating enterprise networks. This section closely examines Spyware's ongoing transformation from nuisance to malicious, sophisticated attack vector. Next, the book uncovers spyware's intricate economy and network of malicious hackers and criminals. Forensic investigations presented in this section of the book reveal how increasingly sophisticated spyware can compromise enterprise networks via trojans, keystroke loggers, system monitoring, distributed denial of service attacks, backdoors, viruses, and worms. After close examination of these attack vectors, the book begins to detail both manual and automated techniques for scanning your network for the presence of spyware, and customizing your IDS and IPS to detect spyware. From here, the book goes on to detail how to prevent spyware from being initially installed to mitigating the damage inflicted by spyware should your network become infected. Techniques discussed in this section include slowing the exposure rate; web filtering; using FireFox, MacOSX, or Linux; patching and updating, machine restrictions, shielding, deploying anti-spyware, and re-imaging. The book concludes with an analysis of the future of spyware and what the security community must accomplish to win the ware against spyware.* A recent survey published by Information Security Magazine stated that "combating spyare" was the #2 priority for security professionals in 2005* Despite the high priority placed on combating spyware by security professionals, there are no other books published or announced that address this market * Author Paul Piccard is Director of Research for Webroot, which is a market leader for pure-play anti-spyware vendors