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A chronology of privacy breaches…

July 7th, 2006 2 comments

Headup
What a staggering number of individuals who have had the privacy of their personally-identifiable information compromised:

    88,795,619

This information comes from the Privacy Rights Clearinghouse and presents a chronology of breaches since the Choicepoint incident in February, 2005. 

I don’t remember seeing or hearing anything about most of these incidents…imagine the many more than none of us do!

Wow.

Chris

[O]ffice of [M]isguided [B]ureaucrats – Going through the Privacy Motions

July 4th, 2006 No comments

Larrymoeandcurly
Like most folks, I’ve been preoccupied with doing nothing over the last few days, so please excuse the tardiness of this entry.  Looks like Alan Shimmel and I are suffering from the same infection of laziness 😉

So, now that the 4 racks of ribs are in the smoker pending today’s festivities celebrating my country’s birth, I find it appropriate to write about this debacle now that my head’s sorted.

When I read this article several days ago regarding the standards that the OMB was "requiring" of federal civilian agencies, I was dismayed (but not surprised) to discover that once again this was another set of toothless "guidelines" meant to dampen the public outrage surrounding the recent string of privacy breaches/disclosures recently. 

For those folks whose opinion it is that we can rest easily and put faith in our government’s ability to federalize legislation and enforcement regarding privacy and security, I respectfully suggest that this recent OMB PR Campaign announcement is one of the most profound illustrations of why that suggestion is about the most stupid thing in the universe. 

Look, I realize that these are "civilian" agencies of our government, but the last time I checked, the "civilian" and "military/intelligence" arms were at least governed by the same set of folks whose responsibility it is to ensure that we, as citizens, are taken care of.  This means that at certain levels, what’s good for the goose is good for the foie gras…kick down some crumbs!

We don’t necessarily need Type 1 encryption for the Dept. of Agriculture, but how about a little knowledge transfer, information sharing and reasonable due care, fellas?  Help a brother out!

<sigh>

The article started off well enough…45 days to implement what should have been implemented years ago:

To comply with the new policy, agencies will have to encrypt all data
on laptop or handheld computers unless the data are classified as
"non-sensitive" by an agency’s deputy director.
Agency employees also
would need two-factor authentication — a password plus a physical
device such as a key card — to reach a work database through a remote
connection, which must be automatically severed after 30 minutes of
inactivity.

Buahahaha!  That’s great.  Is the agency’s deputy director going to personally inspect every file, database transaction and email on every laptop/handheld in his agency?  No, of course not.  Is this going to prevent disclosure and data loss from occuring?  Nope.  It may make it more difficult, but there is no silver bullet.

Again, this is why data classification doesn’t work.  If they knew where the data was and where it was going in the first place, it wouldn’t go missing, now would it?  I posted about this very problem here.

Gee, for a $1.50 and a tour of the white house I could have drafted this.  In fact, I did in a blog post a couple of weeks ago 😉

But here’s the rub in the next paragraph:

OMB said agencies are expected to have the measures in place within 45
days, and that it would work with agency inspectors general to ensure
compliance. It stopped short of calling the changes "requirements,"
choosing instead to label them "recommendations" that were intended "to
compensate for the protections offered by the physical security
controls when information is removed from, or accessed from outside of
the agency location."

Compensate for the protections offered by the physical security controls!?  You mean like the ones that allowed for the removal of data lost in these breaches in the first place!?  Jesus.

I just love this excerpt from the OMB’s document:

Most departments and agencies have these measures already in place.  We intend to work with the Inspectors General community to review these items as well as the checklist to ensure we are properly safeguarding the information the American taxpayer has entrusted to us.  Please ensure these safeguards have been reviewed and are in place within the next 45 days.

Oh really!?  Are the Dept. of the Navy, the Dept. of Agricultre, the IRS among those departments who have these measures in place?  And I love how polite they can be now that tens of millions of taxpayer’s personal information has been displaced…"Please ensure these safeguards…"  Thanks!

Look, grow a pair, stop spending $600 on toilet seats, give these joes some funding to make it stick, make the damned "recommendations" actual "requirements," audit them like you audit the private sector for SoX, and prehaps the idiots running these organizations will take their newfound budgetary allotments and actually improve upon rediculous information security scorecards such as these:

2005_govscorecard

I don’t mean to come off like I’m whining about all of this, but perhaps we should just outsource government agency security to the private sector.  It would be good for the economy and although it would become a vendor love-fest, I reckon we’d have better than a D+…

/Chris

[IN]SECURE Magazine

July 4th, 2006 No comments

[IN]SECURE Magazine

Insecure_magazine
Many of you may already be aware of this fantastic security eZine, but for those of you who are not, treat yourself to a quick PDF download of this great periodical.

Excellent technical articles, great product and show coverage and some impressive interviews to boot.

/Chris

Categories: Information Security Tags:

UTM is dead! Long live UTM! (or, Who let the dogs out?)

June 28th, 2006 1 comment

Uglydog
One of the things I spend a lot of time doing these days is talking to
analysts – both market and financial – regarding the very definition of
UTM and what it means to vendors, customers, and the overall impact
that UTM has to the approach to security taken by the SMB contingent,
large enterprises and service providers.

The short of it: it means a LOT of things to a LOT of different people.  That’s potentially
great if you’re a vendor selling re-branded UTM kit that used to be a
firewall/IDS/IPS because it allows for a certain amount of latitude and
agility in positioning your product, but it can also backfire when you
don’t have a sound strategy and you try to be everything to everyone.

It also sucks if you’re a customer because you have to put the hip
waders on in order to determine if UTM is something you should care
about, integrate into your strategy and potentially purchase.

I’ve written about how UTM Messaging is broken
before, that there are TIERS of product offerings that are truely
differentiated.  Ultimately, UTM breaks down into two strata: Perimeter
UTM and Enterprise/Service Provider UTM.

For the sake of brevity, here’s the rundown introducing the differences:

…That’s what Enterprise-class UTM is for.  The main idea here is that
while for a small company UTM (perimeter UTM) is simply a box with a set number of
applications or security functions, composed in various ways and
leveraged to provide the ability to "do things" to traffic as it passes
through the bumps in the security stack.

In large enterprises and service providers the concept of the "box"
has to extend to an *architecture* whose primary attributes are
flexibility, resilience and performance
.

I think that most people don’t hear that, as the marketing of UTM
has eclipsed the engineering realities of management,
operationalization and deployment based upon what most people think of
as UTM.

Historically, UTM is defined as an approach to network security in
which multiple logically complimentary security applications, such as
firewall, intrusion detection and antivirus, are deployed together on a
single device. This reduces operational complexity while protecting the
network from blended threats.

For large networks where security requirements are much broader and
complex, the definition expands from the device to the architectural
level. In these networks, UTM is a “security services layer” within the
greater network architecture. This maintains the operational simplicity
of UTM, while enabling the scalable and intelligent delivery of
security services based on the requirements of the business and
network. It also enables enterprises and service providers to adapt to
new threats without having to add additional security infrastructure.

Today, Richard Stiennon (of "IDS is dead" fame) blogged
some very interesting comments ultimately asking if "..your UTM [is] a
Mutt?"  It’s an interesting comment on the UTM market as a whole where
ultimately he gets around to shoring up his question/statement by
referencing Symantec’s exit from the hardware market.

I’d say that most UTM offerings are mutts because that’s
exactly what perimeter UTM delivers — a mashup of every neighborhood
stray that happened to end up humping the same piece of hardware.  Ew.

That’s why unless you want to be king of the pound, sporting papers
which testifies to your pedigree and heritage is really important.
You’re not going to win best of show looking like the sappy little
poodle-chihuahua-dingo-thing featured above.

In his scribble, Richard makes the following statement which I exactly addressed in the comment above:

I have a problem with the idea of Universal Threat Management
appliances.  Leaving aside the horrible terminology (Who wants to
manage threats? Don’t you want to block them and forget about them?)
the question that I always ask is: If best-of-breed is the standard for
large enterprises why would it be good practice for a smaller entity to
lump a lot of security functions such as firewall, email gateway, spam
filter, anti-virus, anti-spyware, IDS, IPS, and vulnerability
management all in one under-powered device?

Firstly, the ‘U’ in UTM stands for "Unified" not "Universal,"
however I *totally* agree with Richard that managing (T)hreats and
vulnerabilities is the WRONG approach and UTM has become this catch-all
for the petty evolution of any device that continues to lump ad hoc
security functions onto an existing platform and call it something
else.  That’s perimeter UTM.

So, intead of manging threats, we should be managing risk.  Call me psychic, but that’s exactly what I wrote about here when I introduced the concept of Unified Risk Management (URM.) 

URM provides a way of closing the gap between
pure technology-focused information security infrastructure and
business-driven, risk-focused information survivability
architectures and does so by using sound risk management practices in conjunction with best
of breed consolidated Unified Threat Management (UTM) solutions as the
technology foundation of a consolidated risk management model.

Moving on, I’m not sure that with where we are in today’s compute
cycles that it’s fair to generalize that the companies Richard mentions
such as Astaro, Fortinet, or Watchguard are actually "under-powered,"
but  one could certainly  argue that extensibility, flexibility and
scalability are certaintly constrained by the practical limits of the
underlying machinery and its ability to perform and clumping lots of
these individual boxes together isn’t really a manageable solution.

That being said, I also wrote about this issue here whereby
I make the case that for the Enterprise and service provider markets,
commoditized general purpose boxes will not and cannot scale to
effectively meet the business and risk management requirements — even
with offload cards that plug into big, fat buses.

The reality is that like anything you do when you investigate
technology, concepts or strategy, you should map your business
requirements against the company’s appetite for risk and determine what
architecture (I didn’t say platform specifically) best fits the
resulting outcome.

If "good enough" security is good enough, you have lots of UTM
choices.  If, however, what you need is a balanced defense-in-depth
strategy invested in best-of-breed (based upon your business
requirements) which allows you to deploy security as a service layer in
an extremely high-performance, scaleable, extensible, flexible and
highly-available way, may I suggest the following: (blatant plug, I
know!)

Products_overview_1Finally, Symantec exiting the hardware business is a fine thing
because all it really does is galvanize the fact software companies should produce good software and do what they do best. 

What they (and others, mind you) realize that unifying hardware and software in a
compelling way is hard to do if you want to really offer
differentiation and value.  Sure, you can continue to deploy on commoditized hardware if what you want to do is serve an overly-crowded market with margins lower than dust, but why?

Richard further goes on to  talk about how Symantec is focusing on a more lucrative market:  services.   This, in my opinion, is a fantastic idea:

Evidently Symantec is more interested in software and services going
forward. I think they may be on to something.  If the appeal of
mixed-bread, easy to manage security appliances is so great for small
businesses maybe managed security services are set to take off.

Alan Shimel responded with a follow-on perspective to Mike Rothman’s post in which he said:

If big companies want best-of-breed, why should smaller companies
settle for less than that?  It just doesn’t make sense to me.  Mike Rothman
, in his big is small theory, says that customers are willing to put up
with less than best of breed by getting it all from one big vendor.
But some of the "pile them high" UTM’s are not big companies.  Astaro,
Fortinet, Baracuda are not exactly Cisco, Symantec or McAfee. However,
they are all grabbing market share with UTM’s that do not offer best of
breed applications.

This simply comes down to economics (see "good enough" comment above) where they may want an enterprise-class UTM product, but that doesn’t mean they’ll pay for one.  Doing battle in the SMB UTM space is brutal — don’t let the big, bold numbers impress you that much.  When you’re dealing with ASP’s in the $500 range, even with margins in the 40-50% bracket, you’ve got to sell a BOATLOAD of boxes to make money — then there’s the cost of all those adminstrative assistants-cum-network security administrators who call your support center further burdening the bottom line.

That dove-tails right into the argument regarding managed services and security in the cloud — these really are beginning to take off, so this move by Symantec is the right thing to do.  Let the folks who can deliver BoB hardware running your best-in-breed software do that, and you can have your customers pay you to manage it.  In the case of Crossbeam, we don’t market/sell to the SMB, as they are our customer’s customers…namely our enterprise and service-provider UTM offerings are deployed in a completely different space than the folks you mention above. 

In this case, we win either way: either a large enterprise buys our solutions directly or they sub-out to an MSSP/ISP that uses our solution to deploy their services.  Meanwhile, the perimeter/SMB UTM vendors fight for scraps in the pound waiting to be put down because nobody claims them 😉

We’ll cover the hot topic of security outsourcing here shortly.

/Chris

If news of more data breach floats your boat…

June 26th, 2006 No comments

Sinkboat
U.S. Navy: Data Breach Affects 28,000

It looks like we’re going to get one of these a day at this point.  Here’s the latest breach-du-jour.  I guess someone thought that our military veterans were hogging the limelight so active-duty personnel(and their families, no less) get their turn now.  From eWeek:

Five spreadsheet files with personal data on approximately 28,000 sailors and family members were found on an open Web site, the U.S. Navy announced June 23. 

The personal data included the name, birth date and social security
number on several Navy members and dependents. The Navy said it was
notified on June 22 of the breach and is working to identify and notify
the individuals affected.

"There is no evidence that any of the data has been used illegally.
However, individuals are encouraged to carefully monitor their bank
accounts, credit card accounts and other financial transactions," the
Navy said in a statement.

Sad.

Why are people so shocked re: privacy breaches?

June 25th, 2006 4 comments

Shocked
This is getting more and more laughable by the minute.  From Dark Reading:

JUNE 22, 2006 | Another
day, another security breach: In the last 48 hours, Visa, Wachovia,
Equifax, and the U.S. Department of Agriculture have joined a growing
list of major companies and government agencies to disclose they’ve
been hit by sensitive — and embarrassing — security breaches.

The organizations now are scrambling to assist customers and
employees whose personal information was either stolen or compromised
in recent weeks. They join AIG, ING, and the Department of Veterans
Affairs, all of which have disclosed major losses of sensitive data in
the last few weeks.

Each of the incidents came to light well after the fact.

Disclaimer: I am *not* suggesting that anyone should make light of or otherwise shrug off these sorts of events.  I am disgusted and concerned just like anyone else with the alarming rate of breach and data loss notifications in the last month, but you’re not really surprised, are you?  There, I’ve said it.

If anyone has any real expectation of privacy or security (two different things) when your data is in the hands of *any* third party, you are guaranteed to be sorely disspointed one day.  I fully expect that no matter what I do, that some amount of my personal information will be obtained, misappropriated and potentially misused in my lifetime.   I fully expect that any company I work for will ultimately have this problem, also.  I do what I can to take some amount of personal responsibility for this admission (and its consequences) but to me, it’s a done deal.  Get over it.

The Shimster (my bud, Alan Shimel) also wrote about some of this here and here.

Am I giving up and rolling over dead?  No.  At the same time, I am facing the realities of the overly-connected world in which we live and moreso the position in which I choose to live it.  It isn’t with my head in the sand or in some other dark cavity, but rather scanning the horizon for the next opportunity to do something about the problem.

Anyone who has been on the inside of protecting the critical assets of an Enterprise knows that isn’t "if" you’re going to have a problem with data or assets showing up somewhere they shouldn’t (or that you did not anticipate) but rather "when" … and hope to (insert diety here) it isn’t on your watch.

Sad but true.  We’ve seen corporations with every capability at their disposal show up on the front page because they didn’t/couldn’t/wouldn’t put in place the necessary controls to prevent these sorts of things from occuring…and here’s the dirty little secret: there is nothing they can do to completely prevent these sorts of things from occuring.

Today we focus on "network security" or "information security" instead of "information defensibility" or "information survivability" and this is a tragic mistake because we’re focusing on threats and vulnerabilities instead of RISK and this is a losing proposition because of these little annoyances called human beings and those other little annoyances they (we) use called computers.

Change control doesn’t work.  Data classification doesn’t work(* see below.)  Policies don’t work.  In the "real world" of IM, encrypted back channels, USB drives, telecommuting, web-based storage, VPN’s, mobile phones, etc., all it takes is one monkey to do the wrong thing even in the right context and it all comes tumbling down.

I was recently told that security is absolute.  Relatively speaking, of course, and that back in the day, we had secure networks.  That said nothing, of course, about the monkeys using them.

Now, I agree that we could go back to the centralized computing model with MAC/RBAC, dumb networks, draconian security measures and no iPods, but we all know that the global economy depends upon people being able to break/bend the rules in order to "innovate" and move business along the continuum and causing me not to put that confidential customer data on my laptop so I can work on it at home over the weekend would impact the business…

The reality is that no amount of compliance initiatives, technology, policies or procedures is going to prevent this sort of thing from happening completely, so the best we can do is try as hard as we can as security professionals to put a stake in the ground, start managing risk knowing we’re going to have our asses handed to us on a platter one day, and do our best to minimize the impact it will have.  But PLEASE don’t act surprised when it happens.

Outraged, annoyed, concerned, angered and vengeful, yes.  Surprised?  Not so much.

Until common sense comes packaged in an appliance, prepare for the worst!

/Chris

P.S. Unofficially, only 3 out of the 50 security professionals I contacted who *do* have some form of confidential imformation on their laptops (device configs, sample code, internal communications, etc.) actually utilize any form of whole disk encryption.  None use two factor authentication to provde the keys in conjunction with a strong password.  See here for the skinny as to why this is relevant.

*Data Classification doesn’t work because there’s no way to enforce its classification uniformly in the first place.  For example, how many people have seen documents stamped "confidential" or "Top Secret" somewhere other than where these sorts of data should reside.  Does MS Word or Outlook force you to "classify" your documents/emails before you store/print/send them?  Does the network have an innate capability to prevent the "routing" of data across segments/hosts?  What happens when you cut/paste data from one form to another?

I am very well aware of many types of solutions that provide some of these capabilities, but it needs to be said that they fail (short of being deployed at aterial junctions such as the perimeter) because:

  1. They usually expect to be able to see all data.  Unlikely because anyone that has a large network that has computers connected to it knows this is impossible (OK, improbable)
  2. They want to be pointed at the data and classify it so it can be recognized.  Unlikely because if you knew where all the data was, you’d probably be able to control/limit its distribution.
  3. They expect that data will be in some form that triggers an event based upon the discovery of its existence of movement.  Unlikely because of encryption (which is supposed to save us all, remember 😉 and the fact that people are devious little shits.
  4. What happens when I take a picture of it on my screen with my cameraphone, send it out-of-band and it shows up on a blog?

Rather, we should exercise some prudent risk management strategies, hope to whomever that those boring security awareness trainings inflict some amount of guilt and hope for the best.

But seriously, authenticating access *to* any data (no matter where it exists) and then being able to provide some form of access control, monitoring and non-repudiation is a much more worthwhile endeavor, IMHO.

Otherwise, this exercise is like herding cats.  It’s a general waste of time because it doesn’t make you any more "secure."

I’m getting more cynical by the (breach) minute…BTW, Michael Farnum just wrote about this very topic…

IDS/IPS – Finger Lickin’ Good!

June 13th, 2006 6 comments

Colonelsanders
[Much like Colonel Sander’s secret recipe, the evolution of "pure" IPS is becoming an interesting combo bucket of body parts — all punctuated, of course, by a secret blend of 11 herbs and spices…]

So, the usual suspects are at it again and I find myself generally agreeing with the two wisemen, Alan Shimel and Mike Rothman.  If that makes me a security sycophant, so be it.  I’m not sure, but I think these two guys (and Michael Farnum) are the only ones who read my steaming pile of blogginess — and of course Alex Neihaus who is really madly in rapture with my prose… 😉

Both Alan and Mike are discussing the relative evolution from IDS/IPS into "something else." 

Alan references a specific evolution from IDS/IPS to UTM — an even more extensible version of the tradtional perimeter UTM play — with the addition of post-admission NAC capabilities.  Interesting.

The interesting thing here is that NAC typically isn’t done "at the perimeter" — unless we’re talking the need to validate access via VPN, so I think that this is a nod towards the fact that there is, indeed, a convergence of thinking that demonstrates the movement of "perimeter UTM" towards Enterprise UTM deployments that companies are choosing to purchase in order to manage risk.

Alan seems to be alluding to the fact that these Enterprises are considering deployments internally of IPS with NAC capabilities.  I think that is a swell idea.  I also think he’s right.  NAC and about 5-6 other key, critical applications that are a natural fit for anything supposed to provide Unified Threat Management…that’s what UTM stands for, afterall.

Mike alludes to the reasonable assertion that IDS/IPS vendors are only riding the wave preceeding the massive ark building that will result in survival of the fittest, where the definition of "fit" is based upon what the customer wants (this week):

Of course the IDS/IPS vendors are going there because customers want
them to. Only the big of the big can afford to support all sorts of
different functions on different boxes with different management (see No mas box). The great unwashed want the IDS/IPS built into something bigger and simpler.

True enough.  Agreed.  However, there are vendors — big players — such as Cisco and Juniper that
won’t use the term UTM because it implies that their IDS and IPS
products, stacked with additional functions, are in fact turkeys (following up with the poultry analogies) and
that there exists a guilt by association that suggests the fact that
UTM is still considered a low-end solution.  The ASP of most UTM
products is around the $1500 range, so why fight for scraps.

So that leads me to the point I’ve made before wherein I contrast the differences in approach and the ultimate evolution of UTM:

Historically, UTM is defined as an approach to network security in
which multiple logically complimentary security applications, such as
firewall, intrusion detection and antivirus, are deployed together on a
single device. This reduces operational complexity while protecting the
network from blended threats.

For large networks where security requirements are much broader and
complex, the definition expands from the device to the architectural
level. In these networks, UTM is a “security services layer” within the
greater network architecture. This maintains the operational simplicity
of UTM, while enabling the scalable and intelligent delivery of
security services based on the requirements of the business and
network. It also enables enterprises and service providers to adapt to
new threats without having to add additional security infrastructure.

My point here is that just as firewalls added IDS and ultimately became IPS, IPS has had added to it Anti-X and become UTM — but, Perimeter UTM.   The thing missing there is the flexibility and extensibility of these platforms to support more functions and features.

However, as both Mike and Alan point out, UTM is also evolving into architectures that allow for virtualized
security service layers to be deployed from more scaleable platforms
across the network.The next logical evolution has already begun.

When I go out on the road to speak and address large audiences of folks who manage security, most relay the fact that most of them simply do not trust IPS devices with automated full blocking turned on.  Why?  Because they lack context.  While integrated VA/VM and passive/active scanning adds to the data collected, is that really actionalble intelligence?  Can these devices really make reasonable judgements as to the righteousness of the data they see?

Not without BA functionality, they can’t.  And I don’t mean today’s NBA (a la Gartner: Network Behavior Analysis) or NBAD (a la Arbor/Mazu: Network Behavioral Anomaly Detection) technology, either. 

[Put on your pads, boys, ‘cos here we go…]

NBA(D) as it exists today is nothing more than a network troubleshooting and utilization tool, NOT a security function — at least not in its current form and not given the data it collects today.  Telling me about flows across my network IS, I admit, mildly interesting, but without the fast-packet cracking capabilities to send flow data *including* content, it’s not very worthwhile (yes, I know that newer version of NetFlow will supposedly do this, but at what cost to the routers/switches that will have to perform this content inspection?)

NBA(D) today takes xFlow and looks at traffic patterns/protocol usage, etc. to determine if, within the scope of limited payload analysis, something "bad" has occured.

That’s nice, but then what?  I think that’s half the picture.  Someone please correct me, but today netflow comes primarily from routers and switches; when do firewalls start sending netflow data to these standalone BA units?  Don’t you need that information in conjunction with the exports from routers/switches at a minimum to make the least substantiated decision on what disposition to enact?

ISS has partnered with Arbor (good move, actually) in order to take this first step towards integration — in their world it’s IPS+BA.  Lots of other vendors — like SourceFire — are also developing BA functionality to shore up the IPS products — truth be told, they’re becoming UTM solutions, even if they don’t want to call their products by this name.

Optenet (runs on the Crossbeam) uses BA functionality to provide the engine and/or shore up the accuracy for most of their UTM functions (including IPS) — I think we’ll see more UTM companies doing this.  I am sure of that (hint, hint.)

The dirty little secret is that despite the fact that IDS is supposedly dead, we see (as do many of the vendors — they just won’t tell you so) most people purchasing IPS solutions and putting them in IDS mode…there’s a good use of money!

I think the answer lies in the evolution from the turkeys, chickens and buzzards above to the eagle-eyed Enterprise UTM architectures of tomorrow — the integrated, consolidated and virtualized combination of UTM with NAC and NBA(D) — all operating in a harmonious array of security goodness.

Add VA/VM, Virtual patching, and the ability to control how data is created, accessed, manipulated and transported, and then we’ll be cooking with gas!  Finger lickin’ good.

But what the hell do I know — I’m a DoDo…actually, since I grew up in New Zealand, I suppose that really makes me a Kiwi.   Go figure.

Full Drive Encryption on Laptops – Time for all of us to “nut up or shut up!”

June 11th, 2006 7 comments

Laptopmitm275300
…or "He who liveth in glass houses should either learn to throw small stones or investeth in glass insurance…lots and lots of glass insurance. I, by the way, have lots and lots of glass insurance ;)"

Given all of the recently disclosed privacy/identity breaches which have been demonstrated as a result of stolen laptops inappropriately containing confidential data, we’ve had an exponential increase in posts in the security blogosphere in regards to this matter.

This is to be expected.  This is what we do.  It’s the desperate housewives complex. 😉

These posts come from the many security experts, analysts, pundits and IT Professionals bemoaning the obvious poor application of policies, procedures, technology and standards that would "prevent" this sort of thing from happening and calling for the heads of those responsible…of the very people who not only perpertrated the crime, but also those responsible for making the crime possible; the monkey who put the data on the laptop in the first place.

So, since most of us who are "security experts" or IT professionals almost always utilize laptops in our lines of work, I ask you to honestly respond in comments below to the following question:

What whole-disk encryption solution utilizing two-factor authentication do you use to prevent an exposure of data should your laptop fall into the wrong hands?  You *do* use a whole-disk encryption solution utilizing two-factor authentication to secure the data on your laptop…don’t you?

Be honest. If you don’t use a solution like this then please don’t post another thing on this topic condemning anyone else.  Ever.

Sure, you may say that you don’t keep confidential information on your laptop and that’s great.  However, if you’ve got email and you’re involved in a company as a security/IT person (or management or even as a general user,) that argument’s already in the bullshit hopper.

If you say that you use encryption for specifically identified "confidential" files and information but still use a web-browser or any Office product on a Windows platform,  for example, please reference the aforementioned bovine excrement container.  It’s filling up fast, eh?

See where this is going?  If we, the keepers of the gate, don’t implement this sort of solution and we still gabble on about how crappy these errant users are, how irresponsible their bosses, how aware we should make and liable we should hold their Board of Directors, the government, etc…

I’ll ask you the same question about that USB thumb drive you have hanging on your keychain, too.

Don’t be a hyprocrite…encrypt yo shizzle.

If you don’t already, stop telling everyone else what lousy humans they are for not doing this and instead focus on getting something like this, or at a minimum, this.

/Chris