The yearning for openness and ease of access ends up coming with a price. And precisely it is this same need for having the world at our fingertips has led to an exponential increase in cyber crime. With each new advance, criminals and rogue nation states are getting emboldened with opportunities to steal, manipulate, disrupt and destroy.

But not the one to sit back and relax in an effort to thwart these attacks, the Security industry has delivered a range of technologies. Whilst, many of such technologies offer limited benefits and have been quickly shelved, others have gone on to become a de facto standard for sprucing up security in any organizational setup.

But then again no matter how big the contingency would be there are four knights which are always willing to defend an organization even in the most contingent scenarios. Popularly comprising of:

·         Firewalls

·         Intrusion Prevention Products

·         Anti Virus Software

·         Web Gateways

All PC users know an Effective Defense against an incoming threat would go a long way in keeping their PC up and running. So, in this regards, as it goes what better way would be there do the same than to spruce up the defenses by means of anything but:

Firewalls are configured with the sole purpose of strictly limiting which systems can communicate with internal systems and what ports could be used for communications. They shield systems and services not generally considered as accessible and otherwise known to be vulnerable. However, in spite of being considered as a necessity for most organizations, firewalls are completely blind when it comes to preventing any targeted and zero-day malware attacks.

Network intrusion prevention systems (IPS) and intrusion detection systems (IDS) have been developed to address any firewall’s visibility and granularity limitations. To filter out attacks, IPS solutions inspect network communications and try to understand various application data being transmitted. Earlier IDS solutions performed passive monitoring, thoroughly analyzed network traffic and identified attacks based on signatures of known exploits. But then again as IDS morphed into IPS, these solutions could not prevent attacks in which signatures ended up matching a known exploit.

Every Antivirus application ends up maintaining a large database of known Threats. Should at any time a signature of a threat be identified on a system file, it quarantines or removes that file. Here once again, security teams would be required to use a reactive solution for identifying threats well in advance. But then again somewhere down the line as advanced malware and other threats increasingly focused on unknown threats and became more dynamic, an antivirus solution became completely redundant in combating such threats.

While Web gateways provided some initial security value, attackers have shifted tactics. They have moved to completely dynamic and obfuscated models of both attack delivery and malware communication, rendering lists of malicious Web sites obsolete. Consequently, just as Web gateways started to be widely adopted, they became outmoded from a security perspective. While these technologies still have utility in enforcing HR policies limiting employee Web browsing, in combating modern attacks, Web gateways have been relegated to an increasingly marginal security role. Then again the same is also true of antivirus and other technologies due to a radical shift in tactics adopted cyber criminals.