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Information held and shared electronically proves rich pickings for cybercriminals. Businesses are actively targeted for specific information, and the threat can hit using email, Internet and data stealing technology - all from one campaign. In February for example, the Websense Research Labs discovered a new banking data stealing Trojan specifically targeting workers from government and military departments in the UK. Thousands of emails which pretended to be from the National Intelligence Council were sent, encouraging victims to download a document from a Web page that looked trustworthy. It was actually a Zeus bot with rootkit capabilities to download more malicious files on the victim’s computer and even prevent updates from popular anti-virus vendors.

With this real life example, you can see how important it is to protect all communication channels with a security solution that can see the whole picture. The email in this instance was in itself not dangerous – but the Web link it contained needed further scrutiny. When you consider this, would your existing security recognise a Web link hosting a data stealing download before anyone had even opened the email? At the moment many businesses stick to legacy security solutions which don’t talk to each other. This leaves them unprepared to deal with sophisticated blended threats happening today.

Modern threats require coordinated management, which legacy point security solutions often fail to recognise, much less manage effectively given multiple policy, detection engine, and reporting frameworks. The sort of blended attacks we are seeing today can easily dodge stand-alone tools. Reputation-based methods and URL filtering lacks the speed and agility to identify threats linked to dynamic content or attacks on legitimate Web sites. The holes left by these point based security solutions can be, and are, exploited by cybercriminals. Furthermore, overlapping products, multiple vendors and redundant management and reporting systems actually drive up ownership costs while reducing ROI. Software, hardware and infrastructure investments add further layers of cost and complexity and the resulting eclectic mix of security presents integration challenges.

Unified content security allows businesses to manage risk without hindering legitimate business operations. Such a system understands the role that ‘context’ plays in the security decision-making process; it reaches across multiple communication channels, content categories, and usage scenarios to recognise potential security threats. It covers both external and internal security threats, preventing the loss or misuse of business data just as effectively as it stops traditional malware or perimeter security attacks.

Companies should be able to choose the deployment that best suits their needs so that security is seamless as an employee moves about the office or around the globe. A modern enterprise network extends far beyond a single location; it must also encompass branch offices and mobile workers. A true hybrid solution meets this need by integrating both cloud-based and on-premise (software or appliance) delivery platforms with equal effectiveness A unified platform enables administrators to reduce complexity, take full advantage of existing infrastructure, and eliminate management overhead — all while reducing the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO).

There’s a clear market need for a truly unified security solution and Websense today is in a unique position. No other vendor in the security industry provides a truly unified Web, data and email security solution that spans on-premise, SaaS and hybrid deployments with one unified architecture and management console. There’s nothing else quite like TRITON on the market, and won’t be for a long while because of the engineering resource required.

The threat landscape is fuelling demand for new security measures for modern threats. To put it bluntly, legacy point solutions were designed to protect against yesterday’s threats, today’s threats need unified content security.