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Network-Based Solution for Phishing Attacks?
An anonymous reader is curious about this: "A company called TippingPoint (3com) sells an Intrusion Prevention System (IPS) that promise 'to block phishing attempts and guard against identity theft'. What I found interesting is the wide spectrum of actions they take to acheive a single goal: 'The IPS uses a variety of mechanisms to detect and prevent phishing scams including vulnerability protection, pattern-matching protection, and behavior-based protection.' What do you think about the effectivness of IPS?"
... I've lost 20 pounds, my acne has cleared up, my wife moved back in and doesn't want a divorce anymore, my dog somehow got un-hit by a car and is alive again, my son stopped using drugs, my daughter isn't pregnant anymore, my truck magically fixed itself and runs again, my boss called and gave me my job back, my dialup connection allows me to surf up to 5x faster than before, I'm not dumb enough to click on emails from banks anymore, I'm suddenly brilliant enough to realize that I've never had an EBay account, and I'm suddenly brilliant enough to realize that Paypal doesn't NEED to verify what my password is.
Yep, this IPS is amazing. It is only rivaled by the greatness of the Virus Scanner that runs on my PocketPC, which detects every known PktPC virus ever created. I'm still trying to figure out how they do that with a signiture database that is 0 bytes in length, but...
help me i've cloned myself and can't remember which one I am
A few months ago I took part in a test of several IPS units from major manufacturers. We had the manufacturer set them up with the "toughest" settings to make our network as secure as possible. We ran several different hacks, malicious code, exploits, etc through the IPS. The IPSs blocked hardly any attacks through. Even exploits that were a decade old that the unit was supposedly blocking were allowed through. From what we could determine, they were pretty much glorified anti-virus boxes. They relied far too much on signature files instead of heuristics. IPSs have a long way to maturity IMHO.
They appear to be supremely effective in getting a Slashvertisement. An anonymous reader my ass . . .