The Internet Security Alliance presented Melissa Hathaway with its annual award for vision in cyber security Tuesday during an event at the National Press Club. Hathaway, the Obama Administration’s former acting cyber security chief, received the McCurdy Award on the one-year anniversary of when she began her 60-day review of the government’s cyber security program. ISA believes that Hathaway’s work, if implemented, would result in the establishment of a modern partnership between the public and private sectors, which is necessary for an effective and sustainable system of cyber security.
An important consideration with information security incidents is identifying if personally identifiable information - PII - is involved. If it is, then the privacy breach response team needs to be put into action to determine whether or not an actual privacy breach occurred. I’m always interested in hearing the challenges and unique situations they run across as they not only create their plans, but also for how they execute them. Here are three of these situations, often overlooked and not planned for, but experienced by organizations.
In your policy it states quite clearly that no claim that you make will be paid. You unfortunately plucked for our Never-Pay Policy, which if you never claim is very worthwhile - but, uh, you had to claim - and there it is… Monty Python’s Flying Circus, circa 1971
Anti-jihadi hactivist The Jester (th3j35t3r), the self-proclaimed Nicest Hacker in the World, has returned for part two of our conversation concerning his campaign of intermittent disruption of militant pro-jihad websites. Part one, Q&A With anti-Jihadi Hacker The Jester, elicited both ire and accolades for the cyber-vigilante in nearly equal volume, revealing just how polarizing the issues surrounding ownership, permissions and access have become in this age of information.
Large enterprises rely on software products. And as everything else in large enterprises, the software products are large, complex, cumbersome and nearly unchangeable. This last attribute is better known as vendor lock-in. Software vendors love vendor lock-in.
In the online world where personal information in extremely large volumes is merchandise for organized crime, where law enforcement is more focused on building war-rooms and appointing cyber security tzars, and where everyone leaves a digital footprint, cyber vigilantes have become something like worshiped heroes…
We have had a few weeks to absorb the implications of wide spread Chinese supported attacks against Google and thirty or so other organizations. The US Secretary of State made one of the most affirmative statements on Internet freedom yet articulated by a government. Various policy analysts have chimed in as well. Some thoughts on what they have said…
The detailed reasons why people fail at DLP implementations merits a separate post – but it’s a lot like why over 50% of the content management implementation from vendors never made it to production in the 90s – the root cause was that there was no real business case for the technology. Unlike business processes – data risk cannot be outsourced.
Fraud as a service or FaaS for the acronym collectors, has been a topic of concern for security professionals since 2008. Gone are the days where the primary theft is being perpetrated by the sociopath lone-wolf in the basement. The major player is now organized crime, responsible for 70 percent of online fraud and billions in ill-gotten gains…
There needs to be a change to email security if we want to stop seeing high profile security breeches such as the ones that hit Hotmail and Google in 2009, and the America law firm Gipson Hoffman & Pancione more recently. The problem is, most email filtering systems will trust the email address and therefore allow it through.
Are you embracing the collaboration phenomenon that has been storming, complete with thunder, lightning and rain over the past few years? Or have you been hiding under an umbrella to avoid this social media storm? Yes, we are all interconnected, whether we want to be, are expected to be, or prefer not to be. We are, as they say in poker, all in, as collaboration is here to stay ― and it’s driven by technology…
Despite the fact that CDI has inherent weaknesses, as do all of the prior fraud prevention technologies, it is providing tremendous benefit to many companies, ranging from credit and loan issuers to social networking sites to online retailers. This is especially true when layering it with other effective technologies.
China is engaging in systematic industrial and military espionage via the Internet. Do not be surprised as more and more organizations announce that they too have been targets. For that matter, do you know if your own organization has been the victim of Chinese cyber spying?
As the Haitian people fight for subsistence, the world is responding with food and medical assistance. This tragedy wreaked havoc on a victim unsung by the news media – the telecommunications infrastructure. However, there is a ground-swell in the technical community targeting this need. George Moraetes is among those that have used their skills to help.
Businesses need to scrutinize the information security and privacy programs and practices of vendors and other business partners, and the cloud computing tools, applications and services should be viewed no differently. If your business is entrusting critical processing and data to another entity, you should first ensure it is trustworthy, secure and will meet your organization’s compliance obligations…
Google has long maintained that by providing their search, hosted blogging, and email services to the people of China they were supporting access to information and community that would be a long term benefit. Last week we learned that engineers at Google have been engaging in their own form of cyber vigilantism by hacking into a command and control server in Taiwan…
Estimating asset value is without doubt the most frequent question we get when it comes to calculating data security risk in monetary terms. A common mistake made by marketeers who work for data security vendors is to estimate the cost of a data security breach as the number of records multiplied by some plug number. The cost of a data security breach to a company is not the same as the cost of a customer data record breach to a customer…
Three million new threats were identified in 2009, which equates to almost one every 10.8 seconds. 2,905,697 threat signatures were released to protect against new or variant threats, an increase of 6.9 per cent from 2008. Most spam and malware originates from botnets and compromised hosts. There’s been a move away from mass-mailed spam and malware of old, to more targeted vulnerability exploits as cyber-criminals look towards more efficient means of carrying out their attacks. These examples highlight the need for all companies to review security policies for the applications and software that they permit people to access via their corporate networks or work computers.
GSM cellular networks in the US and Europe use the A5/1 stream cipher meant to ensure cellular calls cannot be listened into by unauthorized parties monitoring radio traffic. However, the guarantee of privacy is no longer ensured. New attack techniques were unveiled at the Hacking at Random conference in The Netherlends which would allow an attacker to decrypt cellular calls made over a GSM network. The attacker only needs the new software and about $500 in radio monitoring equipment.
Microsoft HealthVault is designed to let us collect, store, and share health information critical to our family’s well-being and Google Health allows us to organize our health information all in one place, gather our medical records from doctors, hospitals, and pharmacies, and share our information securely with a family member, doctors or caregiver. For now, I probably won’t start trusting my medical history to either Microsoft or Google…
