TW3

Another week and another summary. There’s been very much and international feel to the labs this week. We’ve had Russian denial of service tools, German phishing Trojans and stock spam, Malaysian worms compromised sites in Italy and spoof emails from a British store. Actually it’s just a regular week here in SophosLabs.

I was pleased we achieved another VB100 award, especially as it is not simply a detection test, but also a review of the entire product and how products work.

Protection is not simply about detection, it includes performance overhead, impact on machines resources, and how well a product can be managed and kept up to date. Time after time we’ve seen networks infested with malware that has been around for a very long time, continue to cause havoc. Security products need to be able to take control and clean a network and then keep it secure. You only have to look at the top ten email borne malware to see a plethora of malware that first appeared months and even years ago.

Having spent just one week back in the UK labs, I’m off on my travels again, this time to the US for the annual get together of security vendors at Microsoft. This initiative started in 1995 when macro viruses started to abuse Microsoft Office and has grown into a much broader collaboration.

Then it’s down to Silicon Valley to meet with a number of partners and customers.

Whilst I’m out of the office, there are just 3 emails a day I need to read. These are the handovers from each of the labs (UK to North America, North America to Australia, then Australia back to the UK) listing major events during that labs “˜shift’, it makes it straightforward to keep track of what is happening and stop me fretting. Not that I need to worry, I have only ever had one out-of-hours phone call in my time at SophosLabs and that was to authorise a payment for an analyst that had been called into the office on New Years Day (one of the 2 days of the year we don’t have someone physically in the office).

PS – In case you were wondering TW3 is an old TV show called “That Was The Week That Was”