Category: security

A breach of trust

In business, trust is essential as security company RSA is discovering

“Today I’m happy not to have an RSA Conference badge on me;” Mikko Hypponen, head researcher of Finnish security company F-Secure told the inaugural TrustyCon conference in San Francisco yesterday.

Hypponen was referring to what was one of the world’s most prestigious information security conferences hosted by industry vendor RSA.

RSA are known to many corporate computer users for their SecurID authentication tags; the little key fobs that give a passcode for secure networks that illustrate this post.

Sadly for RSA’s users those tags were compromised in 2010 and the company did its best to obscure, if not downright hide, the problem both from the industry and its customers.

However the killer blow for RSA’s reputation was an article in Reuters at the end of last year claiming the US National Security Agency had paid the company $10 million to weaken its security protocols.

The company denies this but the damage was done, as Hypponen says “When a security company can’t be trusted, what do they have left?”

How the RSA lost the trust of security professionals is a good lesson for all of us; our businesses rely upon the goodwill of our customers and our peers. If we betray their trust, we’re hurting ourselves.

 

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Trusting the computer security industry

There’s something wrong in the way the tech security industry sells its product

I’ve been sceptical of computer security vendors for a long time and it’s interesting that even as threats evolve, the suspicion remains.

That suspicion comes from running an IT support business though the turn of the century virus epidemic, it’s hard to take the same companies whose products failed to detect the malware — and in some cases made problems worse.

At the annual Tech Leaders Kickstart event today, I found that old hostility bubbling up as a series of security vendors warned us of the terrible threats in cyberland and how their product would solve most, if not all, of our problems.

The irritating thing with their pitches is that none of them would articulate how the threats are evolving, or give real time examples.

Not that there’s any shortage of real time examples with corporate security disasters like Sony and Target as great case studies of what can go wrong. Indeed, there’s very good reasons for businesses and every computer user to take security seriously.

There’s something missing in the way tech security is sold and articulates the industry articulates its message.

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Tech security in a tough world

Even the professionals are struggling to keep up with a rapidly changing IT world, which is why businesses should start taking computer security seriously.

Network giant Cisco Systems released its 2014 Annual Security Report last week which should make sobering reading for every business manager and owner.

If you’re looking at a career change, the survey even suggests a possible new job.

Over two million of Cisco’s customers were examined in the survey and every single company had evidence of their systems being compromised in some way, from staff visiting suspicious websites to full scale hacker break-ins.

Keeping up with change

The survey points out IT security risks are evolving quickly as business technology becomes more complex and it’s hard for even industry professionals to keep up with the pace of change.

“Even the most sophisticated and well funded security teams are struggling to keep on top of what’s happening,” Chief Security Officer of Cisco, John Stewart, told a media briefing yesterday.

That concern was reinforced by Stewart’s colleague Levi Gundert, technical lead at Cisco’s Threat Research Analysis and Communications (TRAC) group.

“It’s not about are you going to be compromised,” said Gundert. “the question is how long is it going to take you to detect and shorten the remediation window?”

If even the world’s biggest corporations are struggling what can smaller organisations do to control the risk?

Disable Java

The biggest computer security risk is Java software. Cisco found a shocking 91% of software exploits were related to the application, “2013 was the year of the Java exploit.

It was a bad year for Java.” Says Gundert. It should also be noted that the first successful malware targeting Apple Macs, the Flashback Trojan, was a Java exploit.

The best way to deal with this risk is keep Java off your systems, the problem with that advice is many business applications – and games if you have a home office or kids use your computer – need the software to run.

If you have to use Java packages, make sure you have the latest version running on your systems.

Keep your systems up to date

It’s not just Java that is a risk, Cisco identified Adobe PDFs and Microsoft Office vulnerabilities as being other threats.

It’s important that all systems – Mac, Windows or any other operating systems – are kept up to date with the latest patches.

Lock down office systems

Except when your computers are being updated, there’s no reason for office computers to be running in Administrator mode.

Day to day use should be done in restricted user profiles; on a Windows machine, workers should be logged on as standard users, while on Macs they should be managed users, the only time an Administrator needs to be logged on is when maintenance is being done.

Watch those mobiles

The IT security industry has been watching smartphones for a while and 2013 started seeing large scale malware appearing on mobile devices, although it’s still small scale compared to PCs.

Cisco’s survey found only 1.2 percent of web based malware coming from mobile devices with almost all the infections being on Android systems.

Most of these Android infections were game add-ons downloaded from unofficial Android app stores so the message is to stick to the official, trusted services for Android apps.

Website risks

Another risky area for businesses identified by Cisco identified are websites being compromised and hijacked.

The software on these needs to be updated to the latest versions just as office computers should be.

Often, disused websites and blogs aren’t updated, the ABC discovered last year that abandoned, neglected websites are a great way for hackers and malware distributors to launch attacks or spread problems.

So if you have older websites or blogs, shut them down and redirect the domains to operating addresses.

For those operational websites password security needs to be beefed up as Cisco found ‘brute force’ attacks – where automated systems try every conceivable password combinations – were up threefold in 2013.

Professional skills shortage

A big problem facing the IT industry is a worldwide skills shortage: “There are essential a million jobs across the globe that can be filled but we don’t have trained people to fill them,” says Cisco’s Stewart. “We’ve got a dearth of talent and skills.”

For smaller businesses that means it’s harder to find someone to fix problems when they happen, for both business managers and owners it’s smarter to reduce the likelihood of having a problem rather than scrambling to find an IT professional to help after the event.

The good news from Cisco’s survey is if you’re thinking of a career change, or you have a teenager moping around looking for a job, then IT security could be the answer.

For everyone else, as business and the world in general becomes more connected the security of the systems our world is coming to depend upon is something we have to take more seriously.

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2014 – the year privacy and security will be defined

Security will be the big technology story of 2014

Happy New Year – 2013 might have been a disappointing year for tech, but for many it was a weird, wild roller coaster ride. Hopefully that ride is going to result in some very interesting destinations in 2014.

It’s tempting to make predictions about 2014 and wise heads prefer not to – what I’d refer to is a failed prediction from 2011, that that year would be remembered as the year of the security breach.

That was wrong. 2012 was worse and 2013 continued the trend of ever increasing corporate glitches and finished the year with two massive security breaches at Target and Snapchat. 2014 promises to be a year when the stakes become higher.

And then there were Edward Snowden’s revelations. Everyone who’s worked in or reported on the tech sector knew security agencies had the ability to snoop on the data of anyone they thought might be of interest, but few of us thought they would have engaged on such massive sweeps of the planet’s personal and business data.

Snowden’s leaks and the fallout from them have a long way to play out and the big story is going to be how the US justice system reacts to the creation of a surveillance state.

In countries like Australia that lack the US’ constitutional protections, fighting the constant spying of government agencies is probably a lost cause unless an economic collapse sees the authorities running out of money to operate their comprehensive monitoring programs.

What we can be certain of in light of ongoing privacy breaches by governments and businesses that the technology world is going to obsessed about security. That’s probably going to be the big, ongoing story for 2014, even if the mainstream media outlets focus on big TVs and the latest smartphone.

So Happy New Year and play nice on the internet. The Feds are watching.

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Balkanising the internet

Breaking up the internet into different standards would be a backward step, but it might happen.

Could the current internet spying scandals result in the internet become fragmented into different national empires?

Over dinner with President Obama with fourteen other tech industry leaders, Yahoo!’s CEO Marissa Mayer warned that US spying threatens to ‘Balkanize the Internet’, Bloomberg reports.

Mayer has reasons to be worried, the scale of the US National Security Agency’s multiple programs monitoring internet traffic around the world has surprised even the most hard bitten commentator and it is already affecting US technology sales to China.

Coupled with  revelations that Britain’s GCHQ was tapping the subsea cables themselves in concert with US agencies almost every national government is now pondering the fact that, as an invention of the US military, the internet itself is open to being misused by its creators.

The Internet’s critical economic role

As online communications become more critical to nation’s economies and security it’s understandable that governments would be considering how to make their networks more hardened to interception or interference and creating whole new protocols outside current standards is one way of doing that.

With the industrial sector increasingly being connected through the internet of machines the stakes suddenly become much higher, as the Iranian government discovered with the Stuxnet worm that crippled the country’s nuclear research program.

After Stuxnet every country and business with critical systems exposed to the internet is now working on hardening those systems from similar attacks.

Until recently, almost all the profits from the internet’s growth have gone to US technology companies so its not a surprise that Facebook chief Sheryl Sandberg and Google chairman Eric Schmidt were with Mayer when she expressed her concerns to President Obama.

Balkanising the web

A balkanisation of the internet along national lines and industrial sectors is bad for US business which already struggles to get traction in non-Western markets like China and India.

The irony is though that Yahoo!, Google and Facebook are all trying to balkanize the internet themselves in locking users into their own networks.

While that’s a concern for internet users, it appears those commercial walled gardens don’t seem to be working.

The failure of commercial walled gardens

Yahoo!’s attempt to monopolise their corner of the web has clearly failed and it’s appearing that Google’s attempts to take over social media are failing despite forcing YouTube users onto Google+ while Facebook is beginning to buckle under the sheer weight of its own News Feed.

Common wisdom about internet markets is that you have to be the number one provider in your niche to succeed, what we may well be seeing is those niches are smaller than we thought and leadership in one sector doesn’t automatically guarantee success in another.

As Deloitte’s Eric Openshaw told this blog last week, ““one way or another, these things can be problematic in the short run but typically over time they are resolved.”

Tesla, Edison and Jonathan Swift

One of the reasons for the internet being one of the most successful technologies is that it was standardised relatively early, it didn’t have the battles over industry standards like the AC versus DC electricity arguments between Edison and Tesla, or the insanity of different railway gauges plaguing countries and international trade.

Jonathan Swift parodied these technological arguments in Gulliver’s Travels where the main point of contention between the warring empires of Lilliput and Blefuscu was over which end boiled eggs should be cracked.

It would be a great economic loss if security concerns or commercial opportunities saw the internet follow those examples and saw the online world carved up into many little empires.

Should it happen, we deserve a future Jonathan Swift to parody us mercilessly.

Walls of Constantinople by Bigdaddy1204 through Wikimedia

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Silos and security in the internet of things

Is vendor lock in a bigger risk than security in the internet of machines?

Last week Deloitte launched its list of  500 fastest growing Asia-Pacific Technology companies.

At the Australian media briefing on the list and the company’s predictions for the telecommunications market in 2014 Deloitte’s Jolyn Barker and Eric Openshaw discussed the some of the implications of the report.

During the briefing Openshaw was asked about the risks of vendors creating their own Internet of Things standards to lock customters into proprietary platforms.

Openshaw isn’t convinced, “over time when technologies develop out of significant players in an attempt to create or extend a vertical stack, over time the market tends to revolt against that.”

“There’s usually one or two forces working against that, either the market revolts against it and insists on a new standard or the stack is too successful and regulators will come in and say ‘we don’t like your stack, dismantle it’ .”

His view is that in the long term issues of vendor lock-in and proprietary platforms fix themselves. “One way or another, these things can be problematic in the short run but typically over time they are resolved.”

Where Openshaw does see risks with  lying in the security of machine to machine technologies.

“The security aspect just can’t be overstated in terms of how important it is,” says Openshaw. “When we have demonstrations now of being able to hack a pacemaker, that’s a problem.”

“So the security issues on these networks is important.”

The interplay between the software, network protocols and security is going to be complex and may well be what makes or breaks some vendors products.

It’s still early days to fully appreciate all the risks with the internet of machines, but securing networks and devices will be one of the most important tasks ahead for the industry.

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Discussing Cryptolocker and Internet of Things security on ABC Radio

This morning with Linda Mottram on ABC 702 I’ll be discussing Cryptolocker ransomware and the security of the Internet of Machines.

If you missed the program, you can listen to the segments through Soundcloud.

Tuesday morning with Linda Mottram on ABC 702 I’ll be discussing Cryptolocker ransomware, the security of the Internet of Machines and the tech industry’s call for less internet surveillance.

It’s only a short spot from 10.15am and I’m not sure we’ll have time for callers, but one of the big takeaways I’ll have for listeners is the importance of securing your systems against malware, there’s also some security ideas for business users as well.

We’ll probably get to mention the ACCC’s warnings on smartphone apps and the current TIFF bug in Windows as well.

If you’re in the Sydney area, we’ll be live on 702 from 10.15, otherwise you can stream it through the internet.

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