Paul Wallbank – Brilliant Communications

Tag: security

  • Will the internet’s insecurities damage economic growth?

    Will the internet’s insecurities damage economic growth?

    “No country is cyber-ready” warns Melissa Hathaway, author the Cyber-Readiness Report.

    Hathaway’s warning is that the economic benefits of the internet are being lost to the various vulnerabilities in our information infrastructure.

    Dutch research company TNO claims that the Netherlands lost up to 2% of their GDP to cybercrime in 2010 and Hathaway claims similar losses are being incurred in other developed countries.

    Supporting Hathaway’s views at a function in Sydney today, Cisco System’s Senior Vice President and Chief Security Officer, John Stewart, made a frightening observation about corporate networks.

    “Every single customer we have checked with, and these are the Fortune 2000, has high threat malware operating in their environment – every single one of them.”

    So the bad guys are in our networks and causing real economic damage. The question for businesses and governments is how do we manage this threat and mitigate any losses?

    On our more intimate level, how do we manage our own systems and online behaviour to limit our personal or business losses?

    Hathaway makes the point that the internet was never intended to do the job we now expect it to do and as consequence security was never built into the net’s design.

    Today, we rely upon the internet regardless of its lack of inbuilt security. With everyone from governments through to organised crime and petty scammers wanting to peek at our data, we have to start taking security far more seriously.

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  • Malware writing becomes bigtime crime.

    Malware writing becomes bigtime crime.

    “Fifteen years ago we saw a thousand types a malware a month, now we see a three thousand a day,” states Richard Cohen, Threat Operations Manager of Sophos Lab during a tour of the company’s head office outside Oxford in England last week.

    That one statistic alone describes the scale of online security risks facing every computer user. Making matters worse is that the attackers have moved from enthusiastic amateurs to committed professionals.

    A particularly notable change for home and small businesses has been the risk of ‘ransomware’ where a computer’s data is held hostage by the bad guys until an unlock code is paid for.

    Like many things in the computer world, ransomware isn’t new however the latest breed uses the latest cryptographic tools.

    “Now there’s money involved, there’s serious effort,” says Sophos Labs’ Vice President Simon Reed. “The quality of malware has gone up.”

    The early versions of ransomware were a joke, usually just being a scary opening screen warning people of the FBI or a similar agency had detected illegal downloads on their computer. Today – according to Sophos’ researchers – the new breed of malware features high level encryption that locks away data fairly comprehensively.

    While the researchers at Sophos were briefing me on the online risks they see, on the other side of the world Eugene Kasperski, founder of Russia’s most successful computer security company, was addressing an Australian National Press Club lunch on the state of the anti-virus market.

    “Traditional criminals are stupid,” Kasperski told the lunch. “Computer criminals are different. They are geeks; geeks with broken minds.”

    The message to homes and small business from both Kasperski and Sophos is quite clear – you have to take online security seriously. Start doing so now.

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  • Google, Facebook and the Silicon Valley paradox

    Google, Facebook and the Silicon Valley paradox

    One of the great advertising campaigns of the 1980s featured entrepreneur and Remington Shaver CEO Victor Kiam telling the world “I liked the product so much I bought the company”.

    The modern equivalent of Victor Kiam’s slogan is “eating your own dogfood” where businesses use their own products in day to day operations. It’s a great way of discovering weaknesses in your offerings.

    One of the paradoxes of modern tech companies is how they don’t always eat their own dogfood when it comes to their business philosphies – they expect their customers to take risks and do things they deem unacceptable in their own businesses and social lives.

    The best example of this are the social media services where founders and senior executives take great pains to hide their personal information, a phenomenon well illustrated by Mark Zuckerberg buying his neighbours’ houses to guarantee his privacy.

    Just as noteworthy  are the policies of Google’s IT department, for past five years most tech evangelists – including myself – have been expounding the benefits of business trends like cloud computing and Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) policies.

    Now it turns out that Google doesn’t trust BYOD, Windows computers or the Cloud, as the company’s Chief Information Officer, Ben Fried tells All Things D of his reasoning of banning file storage service Dropbox;

    The important thing to understand about Dropbox,” Fried said, “is that when your users use it in a corporate context, your corporate data is being held in someone else’s data center.”

    This is exactly the objection made by IT departments around the world about using Google’s services. It certainly doesn’t help those Google resellers trying to sell cloud based applications.

    Fried’s view of BYOD also echoes that of many conservative IT managers;

    “We still want to buy you a corporate laptop, get the benefits of our corporate discounts, and so on. But even more importantly: Control,” Fried said. “We make sure we know how secure that machine is that we know and control, when it was patched, who else is using that computer, things like that that’s really important to us. I don’t believe in BYOD when it comes to the laptop yet.”

    Despite these restrictions on Google’s users, Fried doesn’t see himself or his department as being controlling types.

    “But the important part,” Fried said, “is that we view our role as empowerment, and not standard-setting or constraining or dictating or something like that. We define our role as an IT department in helping people get their work done better than they could without us. Empowerment means allowing people to develop the ways in which they can work best.”

    Fine words indeed when you don’t let people use their own equipment or ask for a business case before you can use Microsoft Office or Apple iWork.

    That Google doesn’t give its staff access to many cloud services while Facebook’s managers restrict their information on social media shows the paradox of Silicon Valley – they want us to use the products they won’t use themselves.

    Back in the 1980s, Victor Kiam liked what he saw so much that he bought the company. You’d have to wonder if Victor would buy Google or Facebook today.

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  • On the internet, the Feds know what breed of dog you are

    On the internet, the Feds know what breed of dog you are

    The arrest of alleged Silk Road founder Ross Ulbricht – also known as the Dread Pirate Roberts – has attracted plenty of media attention.

    What’s particularly notable is the FBI is claiming Ulbricht made a basic mistake in posting to a website under his real name that gave his identity away.

    If true, Ulbricht’s trivial mistake illustrates how easy it is for any determined investigator to find someone’s identity online from the trillion points of data we all create in the connected world.

    Anyone who wants to be truly anonymous on the web has to work extremely hard to protect their identity. Most of us aren’t prepared to trade convenience for security, particularly given the massive effort required.

    Even if we could protect our online habits, the use of credit cards, loyalty plans and even driving our cars still it almost impossible to escape the watch of a determined investigator.

    In the early days of the web, it was said “on the internet, no-one knows you’re a dog.” Today the feds can figure out not only what breed of dog you are, but what your name is and your favourite brand of dog food.

    The modern panopticon we live in is a very efficient machine and it’s difficult to hide from society’s gaze. It’s why we need to rethink privacy and information security.

    Image of Presidio Modelo by Friman through Wikimedia.

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  • A trillion points of data

    A trillion points of data

    Last night, current Affairs program Four Corners had a look of the risks to families in the age of Big Data.

    Earlier in the day I had the opportunity to speak on ABC 702 Sydney with the program’s reporter, Geoff Thompson, to discuss some of the issues and take listeners’ calls about Big Data and security.

    What stood out from the audience’s comments is how most people don’t understand the extent of how data is being shared. The frightening thing is the Four Corners program itself understated the extent of how information is being distributed around the internet.

    Looking beyond social media

    Social media sites like Facebook are an obvious and legitimate area of concern with most people not understanding the ramifications of the terms and conditions of these services, however Big Data is a far more that what you share on LinkedIn or Instagram.

    A major point of the program was how the New South Wales police force’s Automatic Number Plate Recognition (ANPR) equipment stores photographs of car license plates.

    One of the applications of ANPR shown during the program was how an officer can be warned that a vehicle has owned by someone potentially dangerous or used in a suspicious situation, allowing them to be more cautious if they decide to pull a car over. Probably the greatest application is getting unregistered, uninsured or unlicensed drivers off the road.

    Those sorts of usage is the positive side of Big Data and its role in reducing the road toll, the example also illustrates how data points are coming together with the internet of machines as traffic lights, road signs and cars themselves are communicating with each other and those police databases.

    When that information is put together there’s a lot valuable intelligence and that’s why people are concerned that the NSW Police are storing millions of apparently useless images of car number plates with the time and location of the photographs.

    These technologies aren’t just being used in shopping centres; instore mobile phone tracking combined with the same numberplate recognition the police use watching who is entering the carparks makes it possible to predict buying patterns and target offers to shoppers.

    Couple that information with store loyalty cards and add in rapidly developing facial recognition, retailers have a very powerful way of monitoring how their customers behave.

    “What instore analytics does is it takes the same kind of capablities that e-commerce sites have had for more than a decade and apply them to brick and mortar stores,” says Retail Next’s Tim Callen. Using the store’s CCTV system the company applies facial recognition software to track shoppers’ behaviour.

    Securing the data feeds

    The immediate concern is the security of this data, we’ve covered the hackable baby monitor and the Four Corners program examined Troy Hunt’s exposure of security flaws in Westfield Shopping Centres’ Find My Car App. Similar security concerns surround government databases like the NSW Police’s numberplate store.

    As we’ve seen with the repeated data breaches of 2011, the management of big and small organisations like Sony or Stratfor don’t take security seriously. It’s hard to recall any senior public servant being held accountable for a security breach by their department.

    A billion points of data

    On their own, each of these data points means little but for a motivated marketer, tenacious police officer or determined stalker pulling those separate information sources together can pull together an accurate picture of a person’s private information, habits and beliefs.

    Almost all the collectors of this data claim this information is anonymised or isn’t personal information, unfortunately there’s mismatch between the definition of private data and reality as number plates and mobile phone MAC addresses are not considered private, however they provide enough insight for an individual to be identified.

    That aspect isn’t understood by most people, the final caller to the ABC Radio spot asked why she should be bothered worrying about privacy – it doesn’t matter.

    As French politician Cardinal Richelau said in the Seventeenth Century, If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him

    Today we each have six million points of data that can hang us, in a decade it could easily be a billion. We need to understand and manage the risks this presents while enjoying the benefits.

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