One of the greatest challenges to privacy and security in the next several years is Social Networks and Social Media. Sites like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, MySpace and others can be the downfall of valuing information. The ability to share and provide information is completely the opposite of network security requirements.  This is really encouraging people to do things that are not security conscious activities. Social media encourages:

• Lack of privacy
• Encouraging information sharing
• Giving away answers to security questions
• Social engineering

As we have seen recently, a lot of spam, spyware and malware is attacking social network. Just in the past week I have probably recieved a 100 requests to be my friend on Facebook from people who I do not know and funny enough, all the message have the exact same personal message. Malicious people are attracted to social networks because of the ease of gaining trust and availability of data for social engineering.  Relationship building is easier through social media which can easily lead to phishing attacks.

With these sites, people install applications without knowing what goes on in the background, and its easy to download malicious code to your computer. There are no external third party audits of these applications before the make it to your Facebook application. Your computer can be easily infected by a virus or spyware.

What does the Social Media user to protect their information?
No Personal information – This is anti-social network, but there are things you can limit about what you post. Don’t post your Birthday! Or your address or your mothers middle name or any really personal data.

Limit who can view and contact you – Don’t let your profile be truly public, restrict to people you know for requested users.  Remember you can’t retract information you put out there. 

Don’t trust strangers – Your mother was right, don’t open the door to strangers. Limit who you accept chat or friend requests from and well as even communicate with.

Trust no Profile – People lie, it’s sad but true. So profiles lie, they might say they went to your college or high school.  They might be interested in your groups, so don’t take anyone at their word.

Restrict your privacy – There are some configuration setting in all the social media applications that can allow you to turn on some restrictions on your privacy. Take a minute to actually look at them. One easy example is in Facebook you can create groups that you can place friend in; you don’t want business people seeing what your friends are posting.

Password management – An oldie but a goodie, always use a strong password and don’t share it. And change it periodically.

Layers of protection – You should be running a personal firewall and antivirus software on the machine you are viewing social networks. This will help if a malicious piece of software tries to download something to your machine. Keep your protection software up to date as well and run the patch management software on your machine, this is especially important for you Windows users.

Child protection software – You should have some kind of child protection software running on machines where children under 13 are using. This will help with all that shady software that is out there.

Gary Bahadur

http://www.kraasecurity.com

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• Are Consumers Becoming More Suspicious of Social Networks? (marketingvox.com)
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The point being, that there are so many areas of security out there that most of us will never touch yet there is a dire need for professionals. The conference was less attended, as are most conferences this year, but I found the folks here are REALLY interested in learning and excited about the classes.

My topic was on Supplier Risk Management processe. You are asking yourself, what is that? I asked myself that same question in coming up with some good processes to target Supplier security. We have to go way beyond a SAS70 if you want real security over the hundreds or thousands of vendors that a large company may work with.

The Problem:

1. No framework for managing vendor risk
2. Inconsistent processes for tracking vendors
3. Lack of enforcement capabilities

The Opportunity:

1. Provide practical steps to manage vendor access/management
2. Provide cost effective solution for risk mitigation
3. Provide numerical risk analysis of vendor/partner security issues
4. Risk reduction or risk acceptance
5. Documented exposure
6. Iterative process for risk management
7. Happy CIO

So a Supplier Security assessment follow 4 main steps:

1. Analyze current vendor database, catageorize each
2. determine risk of each supplier, determine threats posed by each supplier
3. Perform assessment tests of each supplier, their processes of interaction, and data access
4. develop risk mitigation plan, update processed, monitoring processes

Gary Bahadur

http://www.kraasecurity.com

http://blog.kraasecurity.com

http://twitter.com/kraasecurity

*Managed Security Services

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So what can we expect from the Czar?

The White House must take the cybersecurity lead. The current approach to cybersecurity is untenable, said Hathaway at RSA in April.

Well that was obvious. When you have hackers runing around American corporations and in and out of government agencies, I would agree that is “untenable”.

Here is my plan for cybersecurity:
1) Put ME in charge of the whole thing.

Good plan right?

My point is you have to have someone with a practical approach. You to address this both straategically and tactically. Tactically in the short term and strategic in the long term.

We know government cant get out of its own way, so let the private sector have more say in how this is done. Simple way to start:
1) Have a time line, say 2 year to have every government and quasi government computer defined in a risk classification scheme.
2) Conduct continuous vulnerability assessment of the High and Medium risk systems.
3) MUST have Patch management for all systems.
4) Encrypt any data leaving a secure internal system
5) Figure out what Data Loss Prevention means!
6) FUND Cybersecurity like its part of the Defense Budget.

Baha – new Cybersecurity Czar

http://www.kraasecurity.com

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BBC
US President Barack Obama is to set out plans for securing American computer networks against cyber attacks.

In a speech that follows a 60-day review, Mr Obama is expected to announce the creation of a cyber security office in the White House. Both US government and military bodies have reported repeated interference from hackers in recent years.

In a separate development, the Pentagon is to create a new military command for cyber space, the New York Times said. Mr Obama will not discuss the Pentagon plan during Friday’s announcement, the newspaper said.

But he is expected to sign a classified order to establish the military command in coming weeks, it reported, citing officials.

So the employee lost the laptop. Do you blame the employee or the agency for not educating the employee and provide wholedisk encryption? The agency believes that an unencrypted harddrive, but that has a “password” is secure? Well maybe someone should explain computer hacking, windows security, encryption and the concept of intrusion prevention to DHS.

Well you will probably see that laptop on Ebay or in a pawn shop. Some halfway intelligent person who buys it might be able to get to the data. Then what?

Five Steps to Laptop Security 101:

1) Encrypt using wholedisk encryption or at a minimum encrypt your data folders. Try PGP encryption (www.auroraent.com)

2) Patch Management, use automated patch management

3) Firewall, use a managed firewall in a corporate environment or a personal firewall, lots of free ones out there and cheap ones.

4) Hard Disk password, you can protect your drive from even booting with a hard disk password. yes this can be broken and have the manufacturer resetm, but its a pain and the casual person will not know what to do

5) Dont let the government have a laptop.

regards

gary

http://www.kraasecurity.com

*Managed Security Services

*Vulnerability Management

*Compliance & Policy Development

*PGP Security

*FREE Website Security Test

* Managed Firewall

* Managed Antivirus

* Managed IDS

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Unencrypted laptop with 1 million SSNs stolen from state

SC Magazine Dan Kaplan April 24, 2009

The Oklahoma Department of Human Services (DHS) is notifying more than one million state residents that their personal data was stored on an unencrypted laptop that was stolen from an agency employee.

The computer file contained the names, Social Security numbers, birth dates and home addresses of Oklahoma’s Human Services’ clients receiving benefits from programs such as Medicaid, child care assistance, nutrition aid and disability benefits, the agency announced Thursday.

The computer, which was stolen when a thief broke into the car April 3 after the employee stopped on her way home from work, was password protected, and officials do not believe the burglar realized what he or she was stealing. Therefore, the risk of the data being accessed is minimal, according to the agency.

“We feel this was not a situation where someone was targeting the agency or that information,” DHS spokeswoman Mary Leaver told SCMagazineUS.com on Friday. “We feel it was random.”

Leaver said the state Office of Inspector General is conducting an investigation, out of which likely will come a mandatory review of information security policies. However, it is not believed the employee violated existing policy when the incident occurred, she said.

News of the theft comes one day after the Ponemon Institute, in conjunction with Intel, released a study that found the average value of a lost laptop is $49,246. About 80 percent of the cost is related to the chance that a breach could occur, the study showed.