Editor's Corner

I had the good fortune to attend the RSA Conference 2007 in San Francisco in early February as part of my ongoing market research. Two of the conference tracks (because one was not enough) were on hackers and threats. A session I attended was an excellent analysis of how the malware menace that IT professionals constantly defend their infrastructures against is clearly part of a criminal underground that is becoming increasingly organized and stratified to the point of being its own market ecosystem.

What caught my interest the most in this session was the sophistication and breadth of this market. Clearly it was evolving and adapting in the most logical sense of a free-market economy that was enabling thousands of independent agents to provide point solutions to other agents (or more accurately criminals). This underground market was promoting, recruiting and educating those who were interested in making easy money. It was easy to acquire the tools, data, and techniques that would allow someone to begin their own criminal enterprise. Clearly, the barrier to entry has been reduced which means that corporations and users will continue to be barraged by an ever growing army of malware attackers.

Before the conference, I was educated on a new term for a category of services – one that bridges the gap between personal and corporate usage. These are technologies that are running on corporate infrastructures – some are knowingly allowed so that innovation and progress are not impeded, others are allowed because an organization isn’t completely aware of the impact or how extensively the applications or protocols are being used. This semi-sanctioned part of the infrastructure was defined as greynets.

Greynet applications that enable real-time communications - IM, VoIP (i.e. Skype) P2P, Chat – can deliver business benefits through better availability, productivity or cost efficiencies. But these greynet applications also pose risks from inbound and outbound threats because they are not monitored, managed, or controlled. Potential issues that can arise include new channels for malware to infiltrate a corporate network, compliance breaches, or information leakage. When I and others at Akibia thought about the increasing prevalence of these greynets along with the increasing size of the criminal malware market – clearly we felt that organizations would begin to address issues and risks associated with these greynets.

To help our clients address these issues, we have entered into a new partnership with FaceTime Communications. FaceTime is a leading provider of security solutions helping businesses to secure and control greynet applications such as instant messaging, webmail, P2P file sharing, web conferencing and instant voice. In addition to these greynet applications, new legislation that took effect on December 1, 2006 (eDiscovery) requires organizations to keep track of all emails, instant messages and other electronic documents and be able to produce “electronically stored information” as part of the litigation discovery process.

The ability of FaceTime to both manage and control greynet applications as well as helping organizations safeguard and archive these conversations in order to comply with the new eDiscovery laws will help many organizations to improve the security, management, and control of their infrastructures.

In this issue of Bandwidth, FaceTime discusses the scope of the new eDiscovery legislation and how they are helping organizations manage and control the impact of this new mandate as well as many other regulations and greynet applications.

Tim Richardson

Product Marketing Manager, Akibia, Inc.