Why cutting off USB ports is not a smart security solution
The USB ports leading to the computers in your network are somewhat of a hell hole, opening up the way to scary security breaches. It all comes down to the use of portable devices that can store large amounts of data that employees and visitors carry around, plug in and use, regardless of all the security red alerts popping up each step of the way.
But completely cutting access to USB ports, although still used, is not a smart move if you’re trying to protect your data against accidental loss or theft. Lawsuits, fines and seeing your customers drop like flies are all scary scenarios, but fear should never prevent you from playing it smart. Read more
Security software sales powered by the free offerings
When it comes to security, nothing seems better when it comes to marketing your product than having a free version to offer. Especially when you’re not the major market share holder, giving products away works miracles. At least that is the hypothesis of a recent DarkReading article.
But is this a new approach? Not exactly. From home user solutions to enterprise class security software, the smartest of the pack have a free version.
And why does this work? Simple. Why trust a sales pitch and a nicely designed demo when you can just download and install the product, test it, see how it works with your current infrastructure, then decide to buy. From one month demos to free, limited editions, this is the miracle of free: real results, real tests, no post-demo surprises.
Check out the success stories on DarkReading for more expamples of how free works in the security field.
IDC: Most Insider Leaks are Accidents
When it comes to security breaches leading to data loss, accidents caused by insiders are more frequent and generally do more damage than those caused by insiders with malicious intents, shoes a new study published by industry research firm IDC industry research firm and sponsored bu RSA.
According to a report, 52 % of respondents characterized their insider threat incidents as predominantly accidental, while only 19% believed the threats were deliberate. Another 26 % said their insider issues were an equal combination of accidental and malicious threats.
“One of the things that jumped out at us from the study was how many insider incidents are unintentional,” says Chris Young, senior vice president of RSA products, quoted by Dark Reading. “These are individual actors who often are just trying to do their jobs and don’t understand that what they are doing is dangerous.” Read more
Obama’s Cybersecurity plan, a resignation marathon
The White House might have a bright, shiny plan for cybersecurity, but it seems unable to keep the security heads it needs to manage and further implement it. No less than the people holding key positions related to the USA’s cybersecurity have resigned in the past few months.
The trend was started in March by Rod Beckstrom, who at the time resigned from his position as head of the National Cybersecurity Center within the Department of Homeland Security. The said center coordinates the defense of civilian, military, and intelligence networks. The reason for Beckstrom’s resignation? As he stated in a letter quoted by the Register, the post was underfunded and unduly controlled by the National Security Agency.
The next person to announce their resignation was Obama’s top cybersecurity director, Melissa E. Hathway. What led to her decision was the long months of delays by the Obama administration in appointing a permanent director to oversee the safety of the nation’s vital computer networks. As the Register points out, Hathway was one of the best candidates for the “cybersecurity czar” position. The czar would hold the authority for securing networks and infrastructure that serve US banks, hospitals and stock exchanges.
The third and most recent top cat in the US government to go is Mischel Kwon, the head of the US Department of Homeland Security’s Computer Emergency Readiness Team. Washington Post rumor has it that Kwon had grown frustrated by bureaucratic obstacles and a lack of authority to fulfill her mission. And it seems people in her position don’t stick around for too long, she was the fourth US-CERT director in five years.
Hopefully, the critical cybersecurity plan will eventually be implemented, without any further delays and resignations. Let’s keep our fingers crossed!
Second Hand Hard Drive with Missile Defense Data
Buying second hand PCs might be quite an adventure. Especially if they contain sensitive information that could blow one’s mind out, as it happened for a group of researchers from the University of Glamorgan in Scotland. According to a DarkReading article, the researchers found their used hard drives to contain details of test-launch procedures for a U.S. defense missile.
The researchers have included these findings in the results of a a five-year study that aimed to show the dangers of poor hard drive and device data-wiping and disposal practices. Acording to this years’ results, which are not yet final, the research also led them to sensitive data from Ford Motor, Laura Ashley, and other businesses.
This year, the researchers found personal or sensitive data on 34 percent of 300 hard disks bought randomly at computer fairs and online auctions in the U.K., U.S., Germany, France, and Australia. The information was enough to expose individuals and firms to fraud and identity theft, they said.
So if someone indulged in the idea of starting a fraud or theft based scam, all they needed is to start buying used computer parts. It’s easy and far less dangerous than actually atemtping to steal the data directly from the businesses currently using them.
I Spy with My Little Eye….
…70 GB of stolen data behind a new botnet that has caught researchers’ full attention. Security researchers have managed to infliltrate, through the Torpig botnet, one of the well known zombie networks in the virtual world. According to their findings, this impressive amount of data was stolen in only 10 days.
As the Register reports, Torpig bots manage to steal more than 8,300 credentials corresponding to 410 different financial institutions. The research team from the University of California at Santa Barbara, over 21% of the accounts belonged to PayPal users. Almost 298,000 unique credentials were intercepted from more than 52,000 infected machines.
How could this happen so fast? It’s all due to the “unusually large haul is Torpig’s ability to siphon credentials from a large number of computer programs”.
After wrapping its tentacles around Mozilla Thunderbird, Microsoft Outlook, Skype, ICQ, and 26 other applications, Torpig constantly monitors every keystroke entered into them. Every 20 minutes, the malware automatically uploads new data to servers controlled by the authors. Because the software runs at such a low level, it is able to intercept passwords before they may be encrypted by secure sockets layer or other programs.
Definitely scary!
Dark Reading Starts Educational Series
The Dard Reading reporters have set their mind on educating their readers and helping them understand IT security better. The series is also designed to help IT people explain such topics to atechnical employees easier and faster. They have started with a piece explaining Data Loss Prevention (DLP) – the concept, what DLP solutions can and can’t do.
Here’s a short excerpt of the article defining and explaining what a Data Loss Prevention solution is and does:
In a nutshell, DLP is a type of software that is designed to seek out sensitive data — either traversing the network or sitting idle on your computer systems — and enforce policies for handling it. If a user attempts to send out sensitive data via email, post it to a Website, or copy it to a USB storage drive, DLP technology can identify that activity and record it.
More important, most DLP applications are also designed to prevent the user from executing tasks that might compromise the data or cause it to leak out to unauthorized sources. The DLP software might turn off the “write” capability that would allow a PC to copy certain data to an external storage device, or it might disallow an email user from sending the data to another user.
Read more on Dark Reading and make sure to read the next articles on this subject as well.
The Latest Trick in Biometrics: Finger Vein Authentication
When I say biometrics, most people think of fingerprints, face recognition, eye scanning and other cool but rather common tricks we’ve seen in movies and run across in real life. I might add a ear scan from some Batman movie, but that’s it.
Sony has come up with a new idea, recently covered by The Register in its Hardware section. It’s a camera-based system that analyses veins in people’s fingers. This new technology also comes with it’s own name: Mofiria.
How does the new biometric tech work?
Here’s the explanation given by the Register:
The user first lays one side of their index finger down on a small pad, after which a series of LEDs shine infrared light onto it. A CMOS sensor sat on the other side of the finger then picks up light scattered off of the veins inside the user’s finger.
Why is this better than other technologies in the biometrics field?
I found the answer to this question in Sony’s official press release. I’m still waiting for some comparative reviews and tests. If you happen to run across one, feel free to share it in the comment box.
Compared to the other biometric authentication techniques, vein authentication technology achieves higher accuracy on personal identification and forgery resistance because it uses the veins inside the human body. Finger vein patterns differ from person to person, each finger to finger, and it is said that they do not change over the years.
I am looking forward to an action movie depicting a breach of this new technology 
NetBooks and the surprises they come with
Portable storage device applications and endpoint security solution provider CoSoSys has just risen the red flag regarding Netbooks. As they explain, although treandy gift and excellent PC replacement for all offices, netbooks embed serious threats to corporate and individual security. While their seamless connectivity and increasingly large solid state disks (SSD) or traditional HDD capacities can help everyone of us increase productivity while considerably decreasing the weight we carry around, they are also the perfect means for both intentional and unintentional data breaches.
“Corporate IT departments needs to consider Netbooks as a serious issue when it comes to Endpoint Security and they are advised to take control over them as they enter their networks rather than waiting for the first data breaches to happen. Enforcing Endpoint Security policies with Endpoint Protector allows IT administrators to fully control all ports and data transfers from endpoints, including Netbooks, to any other portable device such as USB Flash Drives or External HDDs to prevent data loss” said Roman Foeckl, CoSoSys CEO.
While the CD or DVD drive is no longer a threat, netbooks come with almost immediate access to any data through wireless networks, USB Ports, SD Card readers and other ports, making it extremely easy for confidential details to be transferred in and out of unsecured networks. And if you run a search through our blog to see how many laptops have been lost, stolen and misplaced in the past, we have to also wonder about how much easier it is to steal or lose a much smaller version.
So take this warning seriously and stay trendy and safe at the same time!
US Army bans USB devices to stop worm from spreading
The US Army has temporarily banned the use of USB devices, along with floppy discs, CDs, external drives, flash media cards and all other removable media devices, to prevent a worm from spreading through its networks. According to the Register, the worm that caused this extreme measure is Agent-BTZ, a variant of the SillyFDC worm.
While the ban itself is bound to cause some distress, as it would in any other organization, the work flow will be more extensively affected in the US Army because for some offices email or online file transfers are not allowed either.
The measure is a bit drastic, but at least something was done. I personally would have expected a safer endpoint security system and protected USB drives, given the Army’s impressive history with lost hardware and data breaches (see some examples here, here and here). Who knows, maybe this time they will learn
