More Questions than answers

This evening has been spent practicing for my SXSW day show: a brief discussion about privacy for which some auditors will be getting CPE. As a result, I have also spent the evening listening to my voice slowly decay into a burbling croak.

But, I was happy that IT Security published what's on their blog feed. Some good stuff there, and I'm definitely subscribing to fellow Texan McKeay's keenly honed published thoughts. He nailed the county clerk bit better than I could. I could have saved some electrons and blood vessels if I read him first.

Speaking of privacy, my favorite bass player got in the mail a solicitation to participate in clinical study of some new medicine that replaces some prescription med. The suggested way to sign up was to go to a url: http://MYWIFESNAME.DRUGCOMPANYNAME.COM. That seemed odd. Half of me want to do some DNS-fu on the beast, see what names I can get (if any), and see what information I can gather. The other half of me is mildly outraged but barely has the energy to google to finder others in equivalently mild states of outrage. The third half feels like having a scotch and going to bed. Strictly for medicinal purposes. In Balvenie veritas.

Repost Redux: Special SXSW Edition

Having read a few additional commentaries, I began to think some more on two issues I posted about earlier.

Greg Abbott vs. The County Clerks
Mordaxus at Emergent Chaos says we need to chill, which made me wonder if there was less to this issue than I previously thought. The more I think of it, thought, the less appealing the whole mess appears. The clerks routinely sell the data in their charge to data brokers. The Open Records Act (Texas' FOIA) allows the clerks to charge for the records. By redacting the confidential parts, the data would be less attractive to the brokers, and the clerks revenue stream might dry up.
The clerks are digitizing and distributing information on the Internet beyond the scope of its original purpose, and counter to Texas law. I don't have a problem holding these folks accountable to the law and their duty as custodians of the data. I will be having a beer or three at SXSW, though, probably at the Yard Dog and at Woody's.

The Hacker vs. The Corporation
Both Emergent Chaos and ArsTechnica have things to say about the study I posted about yesterday. EC posted a link to the study, but after reading it, I don't think I've changed my mind. I am, in fact, more confused about the purpose of the study than before. The distinction between "hacker" and "corporate malfeasance" does not strike me as interesting as the distinction between "stolen" and "lost." The question for me as a consumer remains a question of risk. Am I more likely to suffer damage to my reputation or finances if my personal data is "lost" or if it is "hacked"? No doubt frequency is part of the equation, but so are the capabilities and intention of the threat.

Photo of the Casting Couch in action by me.

Charts 'n Graphs

From Pogo, this article from Physorg on the classic Evil Hacker v. Evil Suit dilemma. From the article:

If Phil Howard’s calculations prove true, by year’s end the 2 billionth personal record – some American’s social-security or credit-card number, academic grades or medical history – will become compromised, and it’s corporate America, not rogue hackers, who are primarily to blame. By his reckoning, electronic records in the United States are bleeding at the rate of 6 million a month in 2007, up some 200,000 a month from last year.

Goodness. This article seems to do more damage than good in increasing awareness of the privacy issue. The key bit of data that seems to be missing is the damage. More from the article:

Malicious intrusions by hackers make up a minority (31 percent) of 550 confirmed incidents between 1980 and 2006; 60 percent were attributable to organizational mismanagement such as missing or stolen hardware; the balance of 9 percent was due to unspecified breaches

So, how many fraudulent charges were made, fake IDs manufactured or reputations horribly disfigured by each category? The author of the study adds:

"And the surprising part is how much of those violations are organizationally prompted – they’re not about lone wolf hackers doing their thing with malicious intent."

So, would you rather Big Nameless Credit Card Company notify you:

A. that your name/credit card/SSN/date of birth were lost at an airport while stored on an encrypted laptop hard drive

OR

B. that Lone Wolf Hacker sniped your digits of their server (running unpatched IIS 2.0 on unpatched Win98)

Of course I can't prove that either scenario is inherently more dangerous for the consumer. I can just shake my angry fist at the data.

SSN Panic, Texas Style

Here's the Computerworld run-down. And here's the Attorney General's letter (worth reading) and the proposed bill to change the law Texas HB 2061 so as all the county clerks don't get thrown in jail.

The AG letter says it in fourteen different ways NO, YOU CANNOT RELEASE SSNs, quoting an imperial raftload of laws, state and federal, why, and why you should even be asking the question. The clerks need to grab a big ol Sharpie and start their redactin'. Shut down your infonet tube, and stop selling your goods to some skanky information brokers from the desolate wasteland known as "Not Texas." Good on the OAG. Shame on collective elected doofi that are trying to find them an out.
I can only take solace in knowing the traditional efficiency and effectiveness of Our Lege.

This fiasco is an example of why privacy principles rather than mere compliance is important to an organization. Even if the Ft. Bend clerks were ignorant of the law, they reflected a disregard for the citizens they are charged to serve.

Learn to Play Sonic Reducer

I was going to write about this article on Dark Reading, that includes this power-quote of insight and mind-blowitude:

"A lot of blogs now have become very big on the Internet," noted OSC Director Douglas Naquin in an interview with The Washington Times.

...but I figured my time (and yours) would be better spent learning to play "Sonic Reducer" with Cheetah Chrome.

E flat, C sharp, and lots of feedback.





Photo of Mr. Chrome from John Santanello

It's the Crime, Not the Tool

Tim Wilson at Dark Reading on IT Security: The New Big Brother:

"To identify potential insider threats, IT must monitor end users' behavior by scanning email, tracking network activity, and even watching employees for "trigger" events that might cause disgruntlement. Right now, I'm working on a story about ways corporations might monitor their employees outside the workplace to determine whether their out-of-office conduct might cause data leaks."

This is how the TSA dealt with the "insider threat" (i.e., passengers) on airplanes. Like the TSA, Mr. Wilson's focus appears to be on the tools that commit the crime (box cutters, e-mail, 3 oz. containers of fluid, USB drives) rather than the crime itself. Schneier has harped on this non-stop since 9/11. The proposed regime of surveillance will result in myriad false positives and employees as happy as your average passenger who has to remove his shoes and toss his shampoo and nail clippers into the trash at the security checkpoint.

In addition, what qualifies your IT Security department to be skilled in identifying what is legitimate and what is suspicious? How many eyes does the CEO want looking at legitimate confidential traffic? This filtering and monitoring scheme seems to be increasing risk of exposure rather than decreasing it.

Part of the solution does not involve any IT at all. Supervisors supervise. Their job is to monitor the employee activities. Managers should insure this happens.

Another part is development of an ethical culture within the corporation, where people have a channel to report if someone is acting "hinky." Internal and external auditors and ethics officers play an important role in an ethical environment. All the monitoring software in the world couldn't have prevented Enron, but an internal auditor put a stop to it.

Privacy and Security Lessons from Criminal Enterprises: The Corner & PCI

Either you have heard the stories, or encountered first hand the difficulty in convincing an organization's leaders to take adequate precautions to insure the privacy of identity related data, and maintain the integrity, confidentiality and availability of their information assets. Privacy and security have to be marketed to management since privacy and security are "non-functional" without a "ROI." As a last ditch effort, privacy and security can be pitched as a compliance effort; these activities must be performed to satisfy the requirements of an
independent, potentially hostile third party.

Nonetheless, criminal organizations, which by definition care not one whit about compliance, and have a vigorous appreciation of the bottom line, focus significant efforts on the privacy of personal data and the security of transactions and communications. For example the following story of touts, runners, ground stashes* and the electronic processing of credit cards.

The typical drug transaction occurs thusly:

• Junkie finds slinger. Junkie's selection may be based on the Slinger's reputation, effectiveness of the Touts, past business practices or location.
• Slinger takes order, collects cash from Junkie.
• Slinger signals the order to a Runner.
• Runner distributes product to Junkie, either from minimum amount on person, or collected from ground stash.
• Junkie moves on to consume product.

So the slinger is the payment processor, and the merchant is the runner. Both will be held accountable for inventory, and separation of duties not only minimizes the compliance risk (i.e., being observed by law enforcement), but also provides an accounting control. The corner boy who put out the package knows that even if the slinger and the runner collude, the collusion will result in a wrong count at the end of the day.

So what part of this transaction is so hard for folks like TJX to understand? A couple items to consider:

• Although the merchant may mitigate risk by gaining distance from the transaction (Verified by Visa, PayPal), the merchant is more interested in the customers than the Slinger is in the Junkies. The merchant and the processor want to keep all that secondary data and compile it, and convert it into cash. The Slinger wants only not to get burned by a counterfeit bill.

• No one is responsible for the "count" on credit card transactions. Unlike the corner, the matching of goods, customer and payment is out of order in electronic commerce, with each party shirking responsibility for the transaction.

• Each has to deal with impostors, though. The seller of baking soda is the "phisher" of the drug trade.

Next, yelling "5-0" as an intrusion detection mechanism.


*taken largely from Simon & Burns terrific book The Corner
or on most episodes of Simon's The Wire.