On a day that the Internet’s search and ad leader reports rises in spam, a Santa Barbara, California-based company is launching secure virtualization features in its flagship platform.

 

Officials at Green Hills Software, Inc. say their so-called “Platform for Secure Networking” (diagrammed below) helps Linux operating systems coexist with the performance, reliability-critical, and real-time portions of networking devices, and all on a single general purpose microprocessor.

 

At a trade show in California this week, the company is demonstrating how its platform is being applied to a new reference design, the “Vegas” from Fulcrum Microsystems.

 

According to Green Hill’s director of networking solutions, Sue Hares, her company offers the only one-stop solution for high reliability operating systems, secure virtualization, IPv4/IPv6 routing stack protocols, and field-proven control and data plane functionality.

 

“The increased adoption of the Platform for Secure Networking by leading networking equipment manufacturers is a result of the excellent return on investment and increases in system availability provided by superior platform software technology, best-in-class developer productivity tools, and outstanding technical support,” Hares said.

 

Here’s how the company diagrams its platform:

 

Security is emerging as a hot topic in the communications technology space.

 

As TMCnet reported today, officials with Google Inc. say spam is on the rise, and that the cyber-criminals behind it are developing more sophisticated attacks, thanks in part to the shut-down of a California-based Web hosting service provider that carried massive amounts of malware and botnet traffic.

 

According to Adam Swidler, a product marketing manager at, spammers have become more media-savvy and are using “newsy” hooks – such as an economic recession that’s fueled record unemployment levels – to get computer users to click on infected items, add a machine to a botnet and introduce malware.

 

“The big thing is that spammers are taking advantage of the economic situation and the kind of stress that people are feeling every day,” Swidler told TMCnet. “They’re developing content that’s related to preying upon that insecurity and people’s uncertainty, whether it’s refinancing a house, improving a resume or continuing education. In general, what we’ve seen from spammers is the ability to take advantage of what is going on.”

 

Swidler’s comments come as his colleague at Google (News - Alert) – Amanda Kleha of the Mountain View, California-based company’s security and archiving team – posts here about rising spam trends.

 
“Spammers have clearly rallied following the McColo takedown, and overall spam volume growth during Q1 2009 was the strongest it’s been since early 2008, increasing an average of 1.2 percent per day,” Kleha writes. “To put that number into context, the growth rate of spam volume in Q1 2008 was approximately 1 percent per day – which, at the time, was a record high.”

 

Also as TMCnet reported today, many security experts are trying to quell fears that the so-called “Conficker” worm is poised for a massive April Fools’ Day attack tomorrow.

 

Conficker surfaced in October and it targets the Microsoft (News - Alert) Windows operating system – not Macs. The worm, which exploits vulnerabilities in the Windows Server, has been difficult for network operators and law enforcement to counter because it uses several advanced malware techniques.

 

Swidler told TMCnet that although there’s something in the worm (its most recent variant is called “W32.Downadup.C”) that refers to April 1, there’s no hard data to predict what will happen tomorrow, one way or another.

 

Even so, the cyber-crime market is fertile. Just this week, federal officials warned in a new report that Web fraud reported to U.S. authorities increased by 33 percent last year.

 

According to the so-called “Internet Crime Complaint Center,” or “IC3” – a joint agency of the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the National White Collar Crime Center – that trend marks the first rise in three years, and is surging this year as the recession deepens.

  

One official behind the report, John Kane, reportedly told journalists that “2009 is shaping up to be a very busy year in terms of cyber-crime.”

 

Specifically, of 275,284 complaints received in 2008 by IC3, about 72,940 were referred to U.S. law enforcement agencies for prosecution.

 

“It is our belief that these numbers, both the complaints filed and the dollars, represent just a small tip of the iceberg,” Kane, managing director of the National White Collar Crime Center in Richmond, Virginia.

 

Officials at Green Hills say their offering helps boost system availability by eliminating the possibility for a non-critical application failure or corruption in the Linux environment to compromise the critical real-time packet traffic applications and services running on the INTEGRITY RTOS.

 

“High availability and secure isolation between networking subsystems is assured by INTEGRITY, the world’s first Common Criteria EAL6+ certified operating system technology,” company officials say. “The INTEGRITY advanced security architecture prevents denial-of-service attacks while guaranteeing optimal real-time performance for packet processing applications.”

 

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