Protecting against spear-phishing

Facing an increasing number of threats and stricter business regulations, organisations are continually challenged with ensuring that security and compliance across the IT infrastructure is sufficient. While scams and tricks are hardly new, the speed and reach of them has been magnified enormously with the world's increasing dependence on the Internet, email and social media. In particular, the proliferation of email within the workplace has not only facilitated the success of businesses, it has also opened a door to substantial security threats. The rise of attacks like spear-phishing means that organisations need to revise their ideas about how they protect themselves. While scams and tricks are hardly new, the speed and reach of them has been magnified enormously with the world's increasing dependence on the Internet, email and social media. Spear-phishing, in particular, exploits people's trust, and the results can be devastating. Bimal Parmar of Faronics argues that defence in depth is the answer, and that we need to move away from relying on conventional anti-virus solutions towards greater use of whitelisting and system restore capabilities.