Why should you switch from the Blackberry? Well there may not be a good reason. The Blackberry has a number of apps and it is secure, it has encryption and has been beaten up on the security front like network security assessment and application security testing. It’s ingrained in businesses and Blackberry Enterprise Server is well known to many IT administrators.

The Entrepreneur can use both devices. Let’s assume there are at least some people using the IPhone, what apps should they have in their toolkit?  Of the thousands of apps, how can you pick a few that would be beneficial to the Entrepreneur Road Warrior? Well the way I picked them is through word of mouth , that are of benefit to me and comes with network security assessment tools. I travel, work in my car, have meetings at all times of day, I am away from the office for days or weeks.

Take these with a grain of salt and do not send any flame emails. But please send in the apps that you think should be shared with the world or at least readers of this Blog.

Urban Spoon

First up is Urban Spoon. You are thinking, well that’s not some kind of spreadsheet or financial app. What is the business purpose? The lifeblood of the Entrepreneur is networking , managed security services, application security risk assessment and deal making. Where deal making most of the time involves some kind of meal. Urban Spoon can find you restaurants by cuisine, by neighborhood, by cost, by distance. Everything you need for a meeting is the most random city.

AroundMe

In the same vein as Urban Spoon, is AroundMe . Say you are on your way to an important lunch you have setup with a restaurant you found on Urban Spoon but you are almost out of gas. Use AroundMe to find the closed gas station. Or if you need cash to pay for that gas because your Amex Card has been cancelled, find the closest bank.

GoogleMaps

Well this is pretty obvious. But when you are traveling and maybe forgot to bring your Garmin GPS and do not feel like paying the rental company an extra $11.99 a day to rent their GPS , this is just as good.

ReQall

This is a pretty useful app. The developers were one of the www.TiE.org Top 50 companies this year at TiECon. The app captures your voice, translates it to text, organizes your calendar based on your voice messages, integrates into Outlook or Google Calendar and provides memory assistance. It’s great when you have no pen or driving in a car or need a memory reminder.

FlightAware

For the true Road Warrior, there is no road, there is the sky. So when you are rushing to the airport or think you need to rush to the airport, track down what is going on with your flight. Check out FlightAware to get an update and help you plan that trip to the airport.

TweetDeck

Social Media, the latest buzz word, actually has some teeth. Small companies and the Entrepreneur have to be connected to the work whether you like it or not.  Twitter is a way of life these days even if people seem to be twittering their lives away. How do you tell your followers that you are stuck in an airport in Baltimore? Try using TweetDeck.

These Apps don’t seem very business-like, but the Entrepreneur is practical, cheap, requires network security audit tools and has to get things done today . These help you achieve your million tasks on a timely basis.

Gary Bahadur

http://www.kraasecurity.com

http://blog.kraasecurity.com

http://twitter.com/kraasecurity

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Network Solutions, one of the largest domain registrars recently announced a data breach. Malicious code was found on its e-commerce server which may have captured transactions from thousands of websites and capturing half a million or more credit cards. The company said they found the code during a routine check. Since the breach occurred between March 12 and June 8th, how routine was the actual checks? I wonder when their last vulnerability assessment or Information security risk assessment was conducted? Data loss prevention is sorely lacking in just about every industry.

Here is what the company said “At this point, we have no reports or other reasons to believe that any credit card account information has been misused and, under established practice, credit card issuing companies generally will not hold our merchants’ customers liable for any fraudulent purchases made using their credit card account numbers that are reported in a timely way to the issuer,” a statement from the company reads. All these statements around hacker breaches and stolen credit cards read the same.

The process now begins where all the merchants have to be identified, then each merchant has to notify their customers. Their customer then have to work with their banks to stop credit cards, have to get credit monitoring and thus goes the Circle of Life (of data breaches) Here is the list of data breaches in 2009 alone. If you recall the breaches of Heartland Payment Systems and RBS WorldPay, the breachescaused them to be removed from the PCI security audit () list . Well that should be obvious, or should they have been rated compliant int he first place. Known non-compliance might be a better than weak compliance.

The basic question is what was Network Solution not doing to have malicious software installed on key servers? Was it a breach through a web application, was it through malicious email, a browser based attack, some insider who didn’t know enough about security and clicked on the wrong thing? What routine check found it and why wasn’t this check run on a more routine basis, such as weekly or even daily?

At the end of the day, security is a moving target. We can utilize encryption, vulnerability management, application security risk assessment, email filtering, backup and recovery, but all will be useless is we follow poor practices or do not have good procedures in place to take into account the human element. Most breaches are insider problems or mis-configurations or plain old stupidity.

Gary Bahadur
http://www.kraasecurity.com

http://blog.kraasecurity.com

*Managed Security Services
*Vulnerability Management
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*FREE Website Security Test

The study also found that 33 percent of C-level executives replied that attacks happened “hourly or more often,” while only 17 percent of CEOs said the same thing. That’s a pretty big difference of opinion. Whose responsibility is it to manage, monitor and report on hacker activity? Obviously tactically speaking it fall under IT, the CIO or maybe even the Chief Compliance Officer. But ultimate responsibility in any company falls to the CEO. If a data breach happens such as in the case of TJ Max, it’s the CEO who has to appear on television to explain what happened and answer to their customers.

How do you apply security metrics to report appropriately to the CEO? That magic “Dashboard” is what everyone is after and no one gets right. A good Compliance dashboard that you may want to check out comes with the reports from RiskWatch software (www.riskwatch.com). Its worth a look.

The category of technology CEO’s need to focus on these days is Data Loss Prevention (DLP). Every major company in security has a DLP product and the reason is probably because the education is finally in the market around the necessity of looking at all inputs and output of data in the organization. A data breach can be caused by lack of proper firewalls, no antivirus, no browser protection, not malware protection, lack of patch management or no vulnerability management. Or it could be a hundred other things. A CEO needs to know these terms, how data flows and what the data life cycle really means if they are to truly grasp the threat to their environment.

Prevention is really worth more than detection. If the CEO doesn’t bridge the gap to thinking they might be secure to understanding that they are under attack ever day and perhaps every minute, data breached will continue to occur.

Gary Bahadur

CEO KRAA Security,  baha@kraasecurity.com

http://www.kraasecurity.com

http://blog.kraasecurity.com

http://twitter.com/kraasecurity
 

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Technorati Tags: data breach, data loss

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

http://blog.kraasecurity.com

http://twitter.com/kraasecurity

*Managed Security Services

*Vulnerability Management

*Compliance & Policy Development

*PGP Security

*FREE Website Security Test

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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.