Social networking, file sharing and video applications are not the major security risk many admins believe them to be despite living up to their reputation as major bandwidth hogs, firewall firm Palo Alto has discovered.
The firm analysed the firewall logs of 3,056 of its customers between May and December 2012, finding that the average network contained 30 video applications, 19 file-sharing applications and 17 social networking applications.
These applications including popular names such as Facebook, YouTube and Dropbox - consumed an average of 20 percent of available bandwidth but, surprisingly, accounted for only 0.4 percent of the threat logs (i.e. detected malware).
Conclusion: blocking these apps wont generate much of a security boost and could simply annoy users by cutting the ways they can communicate with one another and customers.
Conversely, if bandwidth is the issue block or manage video applications because these were found to consume an average of 13 percent of network bandwidth.
According to Palo Alto, the real security risk lies with a clutch of ten popular applications and that accounted for 97 percent of all software exploits.
These included, web browsing, Microsoft SQL, MS SQL Monitor, MS Office Communicator, MS Remote Procedure Call, Server Message Block, SIP (VoIP), Active Directory, and DNS.
Second conclusion: these internal applications and their vulnerabilities are the real target and protecting them should be priority number one.
In Palo Altos view, such an approach allows an attacker to exploit a system without ever crossing a perimeter IPS, underscoring the importance of organizations bringing IPS and threat prevention measures deeper into the network and not exclusively monitoring at the perimeter.
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File-sharing, video and social apps are tiny threat, Pal Alto finds