Skip to main content

InfoSecurity Europe 2010

Once again InfoSecurity Europe was an interesting place to visit. Lots of good sessions and interesting people to talk to. Most of the usual protagonists were there and the organisers have increased the educational part of the exhibition as well, which is good.

I thought I would put down a few things that I thought were noteworthy from the exhibition. I've already blogged about the GrIDsure anti-phishing sender verification and the new 3M mobile phone privacy filters, but there were a few other things I want to mention.

The first one is Panda Security's new Panda Cloud Internet Protection. This is a cloud-based service that provides consistent security and access policies to all machines within an organisation. The key thing is that it will protect mobile machines that are outside the corporate network with the same policies as those within the network. Protecting corporate machines when mobile is a big concern and a good way to reduce malware or hacking problems on the main network.

The usual problem is that mobile devices connect to public, unsecured (or badly secured) networks and either pick up some malware that they bring back with them, or they connect back remotely and open a soft doorway into the corporate network. By securing machines with this cloud service, it should stop them from being a soft target and weak link in your security chain. If you already do something similar by allowing VPN access into the corporate network and allowing them to create connections out, you are using additional bandwidth for this traffic and having to open a VPN connection, which isn't always wise.

Another topic talked about (mainly by Sophos) was the security, or lack thereof, when using social media. Graham Cluley gave a really good talk on the subject on the Sophos stand including the use of SPAM avatars on sites such as Twitter. The attack is centred around the fact that anti-SPAM filtering finds it hard to scan the content of images, e.g. by doing Optical Character Recognition (OCR). So, people have been putting written messages in their ID picture to get past any filtering. You can find out more from his blog.

The final mention has to go to Ian Mann from ECSC. He, once again, talked about several Social Engineering techniques to get past security. He stated that he always likes to see security guards when trying to gain unauthorised access, as it usually makes the system much less secure. He gave a talk in one of the main theatres as well as several talks on the ECSC stand, all of which were interesting. He has written a book called Hacking the Human, which is worth a read if you want to find out more.

Beyond that, most of the usual suspects were there and many things were as before with incremental changes and updates. There didn't seem to be a central theme or message from all the vendors or industry in general. Everyone seemed to be concentrating on their own topics and products. One new addition to the exhibition was the University Pavilion. I think this could be put to good use to show people what's coming over the horizon or how these technologies that the vendors are pushing actually work.

Comments

Popular Posts

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

How Reliable is RAID?

We all know that when we want a highly available and reliable server we install a RAID solution, but how reliable actually is that? Well, obviously, you can work it out quite simply as we will see below, but before you do, you have to know what sort of RAID are you talking about, as some can be less reliable than a single disk. The most common types are RAID 0, 1 and 5. We will look at the reliability of each using real disks for the calculations, but before we do, let's recap on what the most common RAID types are. Common Types of RAID RAID 0 is the Stripe set, which consists of 2 or more disks with data written in equal sized blocks to each of the disks. This is a fast way of reading and writing data to disk, but it gives you no redundancy at all. In fact, RAID 0 is actually less reliable than a single disk, as all the disks are in series from a reliability point of view. If you lose one disk in the array, you've lost the whole thing. RAID 0 is used purely to speed up dis