Exaprotect Issues Warning on Apple Trojan

PRESS RELEASE

Mountain View, CA—January 27, 2009—Exaprotect, a leader in enterprise security management innovation, today urged the IT Industry to secure their virtual networks not just from external and internal attacks, but also from unwittingly giving remote malicious users the tools to attack other networks.

On January 21, 2009, Intego (http://www.intego.com/news/ism0901.asp) first reported a new Trojan horse, OSX.Trojan.iServices.A, which is currently circulating in pirated copies of Apple's iWork 09 found on BitTorrent trackers and other sites containing links to pirated software.

Additionally, on January 26, 2009, a new variant of the Trojan, OSX.Trojan.iServices.B, was discovered on BitTorrent trackers, this time bundled with copies of Adobe Photoshop CS4 for Mac. These attacks represent the first widely-spread Trojan horse targeted at Mac platforms.

According to Intego, the malicious software connects to a remote server over the Internet. The creator of the Trojan horse is alerted that it has been installed on multiple Macs, and has the ability to connect to them and perform various actions remotely. If the infected computer is connected to a company's server, that network is in danger of unwittingly giving remote malicious users the tools to attack other networks. The risk of infection is serious due to the number of infected users which could reach tens of thousands. The code, downloaded to the infected computers, is used in a DDoS (distributed denial of service) attack on certain web sites. Protecting networks from these DDoS attacks is important, but insufficient, as it addresses only the symptom and not the root cause.

"IT Security executives are focused on protecting against external security attacks, but they have not put the same protection in place to detect infected desktops or servers within their IT environments. If we adopt an industry-wide best practice to diligently monitor and protect our internal networks, we can remediate DDoS at the source, and protect each other against external security attacks, too," said Christophe Briguet, CTO of Exaprotect.

"In this economy, people are going to be tempted to download pirated software from questionable sources without even realizing that their computers, and subsequently their networks " and others' -- have become infected.

Obviously, the best way not to be blindsided by a security threat is to download software from legitimate software vendors' sites, but these days you also must have in place the right technology that allows networks to sound an alert and use a preconfigured response that shuts down the threat in minutes instead of hours or days," continued Briguet. "Our lives are becoming more and more virtualized. Just as we learned to put our seatbelts on before we drive, we need to adopt good habits to avoid future professional and private identity threats."

To protect against these types of attacks, Exaprotect suggests a threat detection system, combined with an automated response and remediation process.

Exaprotect's Products Respond Exaprotect's award-winning enterprise security products help networks combat security threats, with unique integrated Event Management and Network Security Configuration Management appliances:

EventManager is a fullfeatured security breach and threat detection appliance that vastly improves an organization's ability to identify and respond to security threats. It provides realtime monitoring, alerting, and provides precise recommendations for threat removal.

Solsoft ChangeManager is the only centralized, intelligent multivendor platform that streamlines the endtoend design and generation of network security rules for Firewalls, Router, VPN, IPS's. ChangeManager translates highlevel security policies into multivendor, devicespecific security configurations, allowing enterprises to track and quickly implement robust security protection strategies, using a simple draganddrop interface.

About Exaprotect Exaprotect (www.exaprotect.com ), located in Mountain View, California, is a leading provider of enterprise security management for hundreds of enterprises and service providers with large-scale, heterogeneous infrastructures. By linking business policies to specific network configurations, Exaprotect's products increase operational efficiency of network and security teams, facilitate meeting regulatory and audit compliance and mitigate security risks.