Mobile Device Data Breaches

Comodo Vision Video Blog
Several recent data breaches at major enterprises and governmental agencies stemmed from the loss or theft of mobile computers and USB drives. While encrypting the data on these devices isn’t a bad idea, the larger question is why was sensitive personal information stored on the mobile device in the first place?
See my first video blog for Comodo Vision here.

Comments

Trusteer or no trust 'ere...

...that is the question. Well, I've had more of a look into Trusteer's Rapport, and it seems that my fears were justified. There are many security professionals out there who are claiming that this is 'snake oil' - marketing hype for something that isn't possible. Trusteer's Rapport gives security 'guaranteed' even if your machine is infected with malware according to their marketing department. Now any security professional worth his salt will tell you that this is rubbish and you should run a mile from claims like this. Anyway, I will try to address a few questions I raised in my last post about this. Firstly, I was correct in my assumption that Rapport requires a list of the servers that you wish to communicate with; it contacts a secure DNS server, which has a list already in it. This is how it switches from a phishing site to the legitimate site silently in the background. I have yet to fully investigate the security of this DNS, however, as most

Security Through Obscurity

I have been reminded recently, while looking at several products, that people still rely on the principle of 'security through obscurity.' This is the belief that your system/software/whatever is secure because potential hackers don't know it's there/how it works/etc. Although popular, this is a false belief. There are two aspects to this, the first is the SME who thinks that they're not a target for attack and nobody knows about their machines, so they're safe. This is forgivable if misguided and false. See my post about logging attack attempts on a home broadband connection with no advertised services or machines. The second set of people is far less forgivable, and those are the security vendors. History has shown that open systems and standards have a far better chance of being secure in the long run. No one person can think of every possible attack on a system and therefore they can't secure a system alone. That is why we have RFCs to arrive at ope

ATM & Bank Card Security

I recently read an article in New Scientist entitled " Want to clone bank cards? Just press 'print' ". They state that it has been discovered that "... a devious piece of criminal coding that has been quietly at work in a clutch of cash machines at banks in Russia and Ukraine. It allows a gang member to walk up to an ATM, insert a "trigger" card, and use the machine's printer to produce a list of all the debit card numbers used that day, including their start and expiry dates - and their PINs. Everything needed, in fact, to clone those cards and start emptying bank accounts." This is possible because ATM Terminal vendors have succumbed to financial pressures, and the demand for greater functionality, and moved to using standard modular PC architectures and off-the-shelf operating systems, such as Microsoft Windows and Linux. These ATM devices then become vulnerable to similar malware as their desktop counterparts. SpiderLabs, part of Trust

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