Suggested Blog Reading – Wednesday to Friday July 4th-6th, 2007

ReadThere was a lack of news on the blogosphere the past few days due to the July 4th holiday in the U.S. so I’ve decided to hold off until today to post my suggested blog reading.

Here’s the list:

Don’t think about it, just get on the plane – Wow, this made my morning. Kind of goes hand in hand with my earlier post on lack of due diligence at the airport. Thanks Mike!

I came across this unbelievably funny YouTube video and had to share it. If you ever travel, especially if you travel frequently, you’ll ROFL (roll on the floor lauging) watching this. I still laugh each time I watch it. As the saying goes, you just can’t make this stuff up. Truth is funnier (as well as stranger) than fiction most of the time.

Video: Geeksquad caught copying personal files from PC – I had a feeling that deploying under trained, fresh out of school kids with their CompTIA A+ certification was a bad idea. Now I know that feeling was justified.

Do you expect privacy when you’re computer is repaired? Trust your technicians?

You shouldn’t. In this case it’s porn. This video is a great argument for keeping your data on a high capacity external hard drive.

Security Views Case Study #3 – The long-time employee threat – Another good case study from Scott.

The individual, a senior database administrator who had worked at the company for seven years, saw the opportunity, didn’t think he’d get caught, and took the chance.

1) Either there were no confidentiality safeguards on the client’s information, or the safeguards that existed were weak enough for a single person to exploit.

2) Access logging and/or audits of access logs were not being done. (If they were, the thief would have known he would get caught, unless he was the only one responsible for the audits. But then the theft might never have been detected.)

7 Deadly Sins of Website Vulnerability Disclosure – Good post…only Jeremiah forgot to post a “7th Deadly Sin”

Someone you don’t know, never met, and didn’t give permission to informs you of a vulnerability in your website. What should you do? Or often just as important, what should you NOT do? Having security issues pointed out, “for free,” happens to everyone eventually (some more than others). People unfamiliar with the process often make poor judgment calls causing themselves more harm than good. We witness these missteps regularly, even amongst security vendors who should know better. I figured that if we document some of these mistakes, maybe we’d start learning from them. Then again, the original seven deadly sins certainly haven’t vanished. 🙂

Email encryption with GPG and Mail.app – I’m still new to my Mac but I’ve been searching for a way to leverage the power of GPG. Now I can 🙂

Email is sent across the Internet as plain text, which means that almost anyone can read your private emails and sensitive information. We’ve already covered before how to send encrypted emails with Mozilla Thunderbird, and while Thunderbird is a cross-platform email client that will work on Mac OS X, it just might not be your favorite email application.

If you’re concerned about your email’s security, this hack shows four easy steps to configure Apple’s Mail.app email client to send and receive encrypted emails.

Top 11 Reasons to Look at Your Logs – Another great post by Anton. The excuse I typically hear is “I don’t have time to look at ALL my logs”. Unfortunately this just isn’t going to cut it anymore with so many powerful tools out there to assist you in collection and analysis.

As promised, I am following my Top 11 Reasons to Collect and Preserve Computer Logs with just as humorous and hopefully no less insightful “Top 11 Reasons to Look at Your Logs.”

Malicious insider sells Fidelity

National customer data

– Still don’t think the insider threat is something to worry about in your organization?
Fidelity National Information Services Inc. admitted this week that Certegy Check Services Inc., a Fidelity subsidiary that provides check processing services, was “victimized” by a database administrator who stole and sold bank and credit card data on up to 2.3 million customers.

Fidelity said in a statement that the St. Petersburg, Fla.-based administrator misappropriated and sold consumer information to a data broker who in turn sold a subset of that data to a limited number of direct marketing organizations. The incident does not involve any outside intrusion into or compromise of Certegy’s IT systems, the company added.

The “Insider Statistic”, Good Data, & Risk – Pursuant to my previous entry above 🙂

One of the most hallowed statistics quoted by consultants and analysts alike is what I like to call the “Insider Statistic”. You know the one – a few years back somebody, somewhere, released a study that said 60% (I’ve seen quoted as high as 80%) of all attacks come from the inside. I’m not even going to bother going into the history here, as I don’t feel like spending the 20 min. Googling for the source.

Now every.freakin’.time I’m in some meeting room somewhere and somebody brings that one up, it’s used to justify controls to reduce the probability of a technically sophisticated attacker within the perimeter who intends to harm. I always wonder if it matches reality. There are so many variables to consider that I always wondered what the “catch” was. Now I think I know.

New INFOSEC workbook now online – You may want to download this for research or bed time reading.

Regular readers of this column know that I give a graduate seminar to my MSIA students every year in June called “INFOSEC Year in Review” or “IYIR” for short. This year the 135 graduating students and about 50 more students who will graduate in December received a 453-page book with 1,240 abstracts (including introductory material such as the list of categories) dating from Jan. 1, 2006, through May 30, 2007, classified using 280 possible categories.

The workbook is a selection I made from a total of 3,532 abstracts in that period. The full database and a complete PDF listing of the contents will be posted on my Web site later after some volunteers and I finish adding keywords to the abstracts.

At least I know one thing I don’t want to do with my life – I was quite surprised when I saw that Martin was leaving his “dream” job. This is kind of a wake up call to me as I have often thought that I would like to be a product evangelist too. Maybe I need to put some more thought into it 🙂

Mitchell Ashley, Alan Shimel and the whole crew at StillSecure did everything they could to help me, but it turns out I’m just not built right to be in marketing. Obviously, I love spouting off my own opinions, but when it comes to representing a company and speaking on their behalf, my own instincts are my own worst enemy. I like to tell the whole, direct truth, and that’s not what marketing is about; it’s about shading the truth to put your company and your product in the most positive light possible. Not that marketing is a bad thing, it’s just not how my thought processes work.

Scroll to top