Security’s Rough Ride

1 if by land, 2 of by sea, 0 if by IP

I know I’ve said this before but it sure seems like almost daily there is a security breach somewhere. Over the years, the thought process has changed from prevent all attacks to, it is inevitable that we will be breached. The massive number of attacks occurring daily makes it a statistical reality. Now organizations are looking for the right solution (both technology and practice) to quickly detect a breach, stop it, identify what occurred and what data may have been compromised. Over the last couple of days various entities have had their security breached.

As you are probably already aware either due to the headlines or a direct note in your email inbox, Zappos, a popular online shoe site, was compromised exposing information on 24 million customers. While a good bit of info was taken, like usernames, passwords, addresses, email and other identifiable information, Zappos claims that the stored credit card information was apparently spared due to being encrypted. There are still many details that are unknown like how it occurred and how long it had been exposed but all users are being required to change their passwords immediately. Users might also want to change similar passwords on other websites since I’m sure the criminals are already trying those stolen passwords around the web. These days it's entirely too easy to use information from one hack in many others. It doesn't even matter if passwords were compromised. Your can change your password, but the make and model of your first car, and your mother's maiden name can't be changed. Yet, online service providers continue to rely on these relatively weak forms of secondary authentication. The interesting thing is Zappos is/was apparently PCI-DSS compliant, proving once again, PCI compliance is a first step, not the goal. Being PCI compliance does not mean that one is secure and this also underscores importance of using WAF like BIG-IP ASM. And if it was not a web app that was owned on the server in Kentucky, then Section 6.6 is irrelevant. But again, all the details are still to be uncovered and as far as I know, no-one has claimed responsibility.

Overseas, there is an ongoing cyber-war between a Saudi (reported) hacker and Israel. 0xOmar, as news articles have identified him, claims to have posted details of 400,000 Israeli-owned credit cards and Israel’s main credit card companies have admitted that 20,000 cards have been exposed. Along the way, he has also attacked the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange and Bank Massad. In an interesting and potentially scary turn of events, a group of Israeli hackers, IDF-Team, took down the Saudi Stock Exchange (Tadawul) and the Abu Dhabi Securities Exchange (ADX) as a counter-attack. Another Israeli hacker going by Hannibal claims to have 30 million Arab e-mail addresses, complete with passwords (including Facebook passwords), and says he’s received e-mails not only from potential victims but from officials in France and other countries asking him to stop. This cyber-conflict is escalating.

In a very different type of breach, you’ve probably also seen the cruise ship laying on it’s side a mere 200 yards from the Italian shore. While not necessarily a data security story, it is still a human security story that, so far, has been attributed to human error – like many data security breaches. Like many data breach victims, people put their trust in another entity. Their internal risk-analysis tells them that it is relatively safe and the probability of disaster is low. But when people make bad decisions which seems the case in this situation, many others are put at greater risk.

Put on your virtual life vests, 2012 is gonna be a ride.

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