Tag: security

InfoSec’s looming labor shortage

A looming shortage of IT security experts is one example of new jobs being created.

For the last few days I’ve been reading Cisco’s 2014 annual security report and trying to decide exactly which parts are suitable for this site, Networked Globe and the various other outlets I write for.

One of concerns Cisco raises in their study is the labor problem facing the information security (InfoSec) community with a shortage of a million workers this year.

Even when budgets are generous, CISOs (Chief Information Security Officers) struggle to hire people with up-to-date security skills. It’s estimated that by 2014, the industry will still be short more than a million security professionals across the globe. Also in short supply are security professionals with data science skills—understanding and analyzing security data can help improve alignment with business objectives.

“There are essential a million jobs across the globe that can be filled but we don’t have trained people to fill them,” Cisco’s Chief Security Officer John Stewart told a media conference yesterday. “We’ve got a dearth of talent and skills.”

As governments tighten up laws on liability for data breaches and privacy lapses a lot of businesses will be fighting to find people with the right skills to fix their problems or help them manage various technology and security risks.

So if you have a teenager moping around the house wondering what to do for a job, or you’re looking for a career change, becoming an IT security expert might be the answer.

Just as we see many jobs disappear in the face of technological change, we see new ones appear. This is a good example.

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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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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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Microsoft and the zero day Tiff

The Windows TIFF exploit is a good reason for being careful with your email attachments.

One of the most dangerous things in computer malware is the Zero Day Exploit where an error in a program is used by the bad guys before it can the hole in software can be fixed.

A particularly irritating zero day exploit is the TIFF bug in Windows systems where users using Microsoft products can be fooled into opening what appears to be an image file but what turns out to be something more malicious.

Even more irritating with this bug is that Microsoft aren’t going to fix the problem in Windows XP systems until January’s patch Tuesday which means many people will be susceptible to this problem for nearly two months.

Zero day exploits are a good reason why every computer user needs to have an up to date virus checker and to take basic precautions before surfing the web or downloading email.

For Windows users it might be worthwhile taking extra care with email attachments for the next few weeks.

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Potentially unwanted applications – what are we are installing on our smartphones?

Do we really understand what we are installing on our smartphones? Sophos Labs thinks potentially unwanted applications or PUAs are a growing problem.

One of the notable things about the technology industries is there are always new terms and concepts to discover.

During a visit to Sophos’ Oxford headquarters last month, the phrase ‘Potentially Unwanted Applications’ – or PUAs – raised its head.

PUAs come from the problem application developers have in making money out of apps or websites. The culture of free or cheap is so ingrained online that it’s extremely hard to make a living out of writing software.

As result, developers and their employers are engaging in some cunning tricks to get customers to download their apps and then to monetize them, particularly in the Android world which lacks the tight control Apple exercises over the iOS App Store.

“What’s interesting about Android,” says Sophos Labs’ Vice President President Simon Reed, “is it’s attracting aggressive commercialisation.”

The fascinating thing Reed finds about this ‘aggressive commercialisation’ is where the distinction lies between malware and monetisation and when does an app or developer cross that line.

Reed’s colleagues Vanja Svajcer & Sean McDonald explore where that line lies in a paper titled Classifying PUAs in the Mobile Environment which they submitted to the Virus Bulletin Conference last October.

In that paper Svajcer and McDonald discuss how these applications have developed, the motivations behind them and the challenge for anti virus companies like Sophos and Kaspersky in categorising and dealing with them.

The authors also flag that while the bulk of the revenue generated by these apps comes from advertising, there are serious privacy risks for users as developers try to monetize the data many of these packages scrape from the phones they’re installed on.

Svajcer and McDonald do note though that potentially unwanted applications aren’t really anything new, we could well classify many of the drive by downloads that plagued Windows 98 users at the beginning of the century as being PUAs.

What we do need to keep in mind though that what is driving the development of PUAs is users’ reluctance to pay for apps and that it’s going to take a big change in customer attitudes for this problem to go away.

For businesses, this is something managers are going to have to consider as they move their line of business applications onto mobile devices, as Marc Benioff proposed at the recent Dreamforce conference.

Sophos’ Simon Reed believes potentially unwanted apps won’t be such a problem in the workplace however. “Consumers may have a different tolerance towards PUAs than commercial organisations,” he says.

The prevalence of PUAs on mobile devices does underscore though just how careful organisations have to be with who and what can access their data. It’s another challenge for CIOs.

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The ghost in the internet of machines

What happens when your internet connected egg tray gets a virus?

A funny thing happened two hours out of Auckland, the cabin crew on the Air New Zealand flight to San Francisco announced the inflight entertainment system had to be rebooted.

In the thirty minutes it took for the system to reset and reload, various in-seat functions such as the cabin call button and light switch froze, it was a basic example of how complex systems interact with each other.

The benefits of a connected egg tray involve the device telling us when more eggs are needed, but what happens when the thing tries to tell your online shopping service that you need 200 dozen?

As the internet of things develops and business systems become more automated, complexity is going to become greater and more subtle. Understanding and managing the risks that extend from that is going to be essential for both public safety and the economy.

“The Internet of Things creates a whole new range of attack surfaces” Cisco Systems’ Enterprise Group Vice President Rod Soderbery told the Internet of Things conference in Barcelona last month.

One of those many ‘attack surfaces’ identified by Fraser Howard, Principle Researcher of Sophos Labs are the dozens of household devices from smart TVs to internet connected egg holders that are beginning to appear in homes.

Almost all these devices will have flaws in their firmware and yet almost no vendor has an interest in maintaining or patching the firmware of this equipment.

“Consumers have no way of managing this problem” says Fraser as it’s almost impossible for householders to upgrade their systems and consumer electronics manufacturers have a poor track security track record.

“There’s a long history of companies with mass market items which deal with things like important items like credentials where they have not had a single thought about security,” says Fraser.

Security is one the many challenges facing the internet of things along with to manage rogue devices in grid networks. There’s a lot of work to be done in ensuring systems aren’t disrupted by an outlier sensor or critical information disclosed by a poorly secured or out of date smart device.

As connected egg trays start talking to the supermarket, we have to be confident that we aren’t going to come home to find our connected device hasn’t delivered a pallet load of fresh eggs or that it hasn’t given away our banking details to an organised crime ring.

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