The Common Admission Test (CAT) for admission to business schools went online for the first time this year. However, the experiment had a faulty start. Servers at 11 centres across the country crashed, as faults occurred unexpectedly as soon as the test began. It affected 12,000-odd aspirants, who appeared for the test on the first day of the examination.
Virus attack remains the major reason for the fault. Conflicker and W32.Nimda were named the principal culprits. Such viruses were reported way back in 2001. Nimda, which first appeared in September 2001, is a complex virus with a mass mailing worm component, which spreads itself in attachments named README.EXE. Like a number of predecessors, its payload appears to cause traffic slowdown.
Conflicker, also known as Conficker, Worm.Kido and Trojan.Kido, spreads among computers across a network by exploiting the vulnerability in the Windows server service (SVCHOST.EXE). It is also capable of spreading through removable drives and weak administrator passwords.
According to Shantanu Ghosh, vice-president, India Product Operations, Symantec Corporation, effective security solutions are a crucial line of defence for organisations to foil such attacks. Even if one computer on the network gets infected with a virus, all unprotected systems will suffer. These threats can also be spread through removable media such as CDs, pen drives and external hard disks.
One of the primary reasons why viruses infect networks is the absence of up-to-date security software. ‘Free’ software downloaded from the Internet can also be a threat, as it gives the user a false sense of security while being either ineffective in protecting computers or, even worse, downloading a malicious code, says Mr. Ghosh.
Mr. Ghosh says organisations should adopt a proactive, risk-based approach to security to ensure that infrastructure as well as information is protected. Deploying a data loss prevention solution, which can discover where confidential data is stored, monitor its usage, protect information, prevent its loss and manage and remediate security incidents, is crucial.
Data loss prevention solutions can monitor what enters and leaves the network to ensure that only those who have permission to access or modify data do so. Organisations also need to ensure that the variety of end-point devices that connect to the network — desktops, laptops, smartphones and removable media — is secure.
