We had a big event in our Abingdon, UK headquarters this week to showcase our fastest UTM appliances ever — the Sophos SG Series. Check out the launch event video, so you can see just how cool (and fast!) the new UTM boxes are.
On the security news front, the Heartbleed bug in OpenSSL continues to dominate the conversation — so our experts talked about two-factor authentication (2FA), and how it can improve security over just using a password alone.
And we released our quarterly Spampionship tables, which rank the spammiest countries based on volume of spam and spam per person. It’s often surprising when countries suddenly rise in the rankings — we’re looking at you, Spain.
Introducing the SG Series
Built on Intel Core processors, the six new appliances in the SG Series deliver performance and protection for businesses of any size. Independent testers at Miercom Labs put our SG Series up against the competition, and the results were impressive.
As Guenter Junk, senior VP and general manager of the Network Security Group at Sophos, said in a media release introducing the SG Series:
The new Sophos SG Series appliances are the fastest UTM and Next-Gen Firewall devices we’ve ever produced. They run our latest operating system, version 9.2, and are optimized to get the most out of latest performance innovations from Intel to ensure our customers and partners get an unrivaled performance and protection combination.
Heartbleed and password security
The Heartbleed bug in OpenSSL software left everyone’s data vulnerable, and we may never know if or when anyone was able to exploit the bug before it was discovered by researchers.
Even though the big websites have patched the security hole, many more smaller websites and millions of devices like smartphones and medical devices are vulnerable.
That means Heartbleed is going to be around for a long time to come, James Lyne, Sophos global head of security research, said during a Twitter Q&A hosted by Forbes.com.
After news of the Heartbleed bug set off a tidal wave of password resets, our Sophos security experts have been fielding lots of questions about two-factor authentication as a solution to the problem of leaked passwords.
“Clearly passwords alone are not an adequate security measure,” Chester Wisniewski, senior security advisor at Sophos, told Gizmag.com. “When combined with other factors though, they can be a part of the solution.”
Spammiest countries revealed: the quarterly Spampionship
This week we released the latest results from our quarterly Spampionship — in which we rank the top countries for spam by volume (the “Dirty Dozen”) and by population.
Once again, the United States is the spammiest country when measured by volume, but we got a surprise entry at number two — Spain. We found that zombie computers in Spain were responsible for 5% of spam worldwide over the last three months.
Because the U.S. has so many spam-sending zombies, it produces 16% of spam volume — making the USA number one in spam volume for the fifth quarter in a row.
Find out where your country ranks in our spam charts at Naked Security.
Sophos Security Chet Chat #143: Heartbleed revisited
Listen to this week’s episode of the Chet Chat podcast to hear Sophos experts and Naked Security writers Chester Wisniewski and Paul Ducklin discuss Heartbleed and the other big stories happening in the security world.
60 Second Security: Heartbleed bust, Fingerprint fakery, WhatsApp privacy SNAFU
Paul Ducklin runs down the news of the week in just about a minute.
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