ReadWriteWeb

Do you have users who have more rights to network resources than they should have? Chances are the answer is yes. A new study from Ponemon and sponsored by HP along with another paper sponsored by Symantec point out the old security saw that the threat from within is still real and still a big deal. Maybe it is time this holiday season to finally clean up your network's access rights.

These privileged users, as Ponemon calls them, include database administrators, network engineers, IT security practitioners and cloud custodians. (Now there is a job title that brings up all sorts of interesting imagery.) A majority of them "will look at an organization's most confidential information out of curiosity," not because they are trying to do anything nefarious with this information.

Security firm BitDefender has come out with a new cloud-based endpoint security service. Called Cloud Security for Endpoints, it is available now. You can centrally manage a variety of clients across different locations, provided you have an Internet connection to all of them most of the time.

We last wrote about them earlier this summer, covering their Total Security 2012 product. and last covered cloud-based endpoint tools in August when we wrote about Digital Persona.

No, that's not a typo in the headline. You've heard of virtual sprawl already, no doubt, and you may have experienced it in your own company. But virtual stall or VM stall refers to a concept coined by CA Technologies, from a landmark white paper published in August 2010.

Essentially, the idea is this: Many enterprises have launched their boats already, and are heading toward a virtualized data center or a reputable hybrid cloud solution. The problem is, they're not halfway there yet, and the reasons are often more political than technological.

On Tuesday, ReadWriteWeb hosted the second in a series of live chats on the changing nature of virtualized storage. We fielded questions on best practices for storage provisioning, reducing storage resources and dealing with low-bandwidth environments.

During the one-hour live chat we had Ruchi Goya, Steve Hindman, Eric Hennessey and John Cronin from Symantec. We also had a lot of questions from the audience and before the chat.

Today, Tuesday October 18 at 10 a.m. Pacific, we'll be holding our live chat on Virtualized Storage and High Availability Made Easy. Like our previous chat on the changing nature of storage virtualization, we'll be taking a deep dive into the tech of virtualized storage.

The discussion will be led by our very own Joe Brockmeier, and will include Andrew Nelson from VMware, and Ruchi Goya, Fahima Zahir, Eric Hennessey, and Steven Hindman from Symantec.

Cybercrime is booming business. According to Symantec's newest Norton Cybercrime Report, the money involved with digital attacks is now almost as lucrative as the illegal drug trade - $388 billion last year. That includes productivity lost to cyber attacks, money corporations and individuals use to thwart cybercrime and direct cash losses associated with viruses, malware and identity theft.

Norton says that 73% of adults in the United States have experienced cybercrime in their lifetime. That seems low. If you use the Internet, you navigate phishing scams, viruses, spam and poisoned search results on a daily basis. Are the cybercriminals winning?

Acronis is trying to make things easier for SMBs to make backups of their VMs, announcing v6.0 of their vmProtect, which is actually a new product. In our story on VM backup technologies earlier this summer, we mentioned several different vendors and their solutions. Despite this collection of products, more than 40 percent of SMBs in the US are NOT backing up their virtual servers, according to the Acronis Disaster Recovery Index.

A new study from research firm Forrester shows that consumer attitudes towards Internet security are significantly changing. Consumers are now more aware of cyber security and are taking more steps to protect themselves on the Web. At the same time, consumers are gravitating to a select group of security vendors with freeware products dominating the industry.

Forrester used data from its Technographics survey over 16 major world markets to note that users are indeed more savvy about the threats to their computers and what they can do about it. The benefactors are the major players in security, most of which have been operating since the mid-1990s, when the first criminal hacker scare and spam started to weed into the mind share of the Internet populace. Norton, AVG, McAfee were the leaders then and are the leaders now. Yet, the vendors are seeing a lot more churn, with consumers dividing brand loyalty among several different products and suites from the major vendors. Have you become more cognizant of Web security in the last couple of years? What kind of products are you using to protect yourself on the Internet?

We have written earlier this summer about the need for two-factor authentication solutions in the wake of various hacking scandals with compromised account sign-ons. A new solution from Confident Technologies called Multifactor Authentication is now available that makes two-factor as easy as clicking on a sequence of images on your smartphone. For those of us that are numerically challenged, it is an intriguing idea.

By now the use of phones as the second factor in a security solution is well known and there are any number of vendors operating in this space. Even Google and Facebook have added this to their services, as we wrote about earlier this summer.