Moving Away from a Swiss Cheese Security Model

For the past few months, our team has been hard at work to research and build our latest Application Usage and Threat Report (see more from Matt Keil on the report here, here and here). Some of the most interesting data that we uncovered addressed the security of Internet social networking applications:

• While most assume social networking applications represent the highest volume of risks, they actually only represented 0.4 percent of all threat logs observed.
• Our research also uncovered that 97 percent of all exploits logs were found in ten applications such as internal or infrastructure applications integral to many business functions.

This research suggests that the old network security model of “hard and crunchy on the outside, soft and gooey on the inside” (shore up your perimeter defenses with firewalls and you’re good-to-go) is no longer sufficient. With internal threats dominant on a network, security must sharply focus on data center applications and the monitoring of internal traffic.

If you’d like to learn more about the best practices to secure data center applications, check out my latest SecurityWeek article.