Skip to main content

InfoSecurity Europe 2011

InfoSecurity Europe is over for another year. Once again there were several interesting companies and sessions worth noting. The 'themes' (if they can be called that) or 'hot topics' were cloud security again, social media and mobile access/the consumerisation of IT. The big difference seemed to be in the attitudes of people - more 'how can we reduce the risks to an acceptable level?' rather than 'we can't secure it, so we won't allow it!'

We are seeing a shift in the types of systems end users are accessing the corporate network from. The IT department are no longer dictating what will or will not be allowed. More and more users want to use their own personal devices, such as iPhones or iPads, on the network. In the past IT departments have resisted this and said no to the users. However, this attitude is beginning to change and there were a raft of organisations with solutions to help secure these devices and manage the data they contain. However, an awareness of risk and what it means to consumer devices and ownership must be understood beforehand.

With cloud security a big issue, and still stopping some organisations from adopting cloud services, I decided to speak to some of the cloud services providers about their security. Many of them couldn't give me the real technical details, but some of them did have some reassuring things to say. Unfortunately, not all services are equal and organisations are still going to have to do a lot of research on the providers and make sure that they ask to see independant reports on the security of any potential provider. Make sure you ask them the difficult technical questions and only use their service if you are happy with their answers. Again, always remember that you can't outsource risk, so think carefully about what you want to use the cloud for.

Social media is still an issue that some organisations are solving by blocking it and others are ignoring. With the latest generation of products, again we can be quite granular with the level of access granted to social media, so a default blocking isn't necessary in all circumstances. The (ISC)2 have conducted a very interesting survey on security that shows some interesting trends, not least of which is that 49% of organisations block Facebook and around 20% don't monitor social networks at all. As social engineering and backdoors through user activity are some of the main causes of problems, this is worrying. Indeed, the survey showed that security professionals put education and policy mechanisms as the top 6 security security solutions required, with software and technologies coming in 7th and 8th respectively.

Comments

Popular Posts

Coventry Building Society Grid Card

Coventry Building Society have recently introduced the Grid Card as a simple form of 2-factor authentication. It replaces memorable words in the login process. Now the idea is that you require something you know (i.e. your password) and something you have (i.e. the Grid Card) to log in - 2 things = 2 factors. For more about authentication see this post . How does it work? Very simply is the answer. During the log in process, you will be asked to enter the digits at 3 co-ordinates. For example: c3, d2 and j5 would mean that you enter 5, 6 and 3 (this is the example Coventry give). Is this better than a secret word? Yes, is the short answer. How many people will choose a memorable word that someone close to them could guess? Remember, that this isn't a password as such, it is expected to be a word and a word that means something to the user. The problem is that users cannot remember lots of passwords, so remembering two would be difficult. Also, having two passwords isn't real

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

Telephone Systems a Hackable Backdoor?

I have been talking to a company that provides telephone exchanges and services to companies this week on behalf of a client and it has highlighted a worrying backdoor. It turns out that many of these companies have a way to remotely connect to their exchange for support purposes - they can remotely control, configure and troubleshoot your system to get you back up and running. Exchanges often have additional modems in them to allow for remote connections. This is all very well and good from a managed service point of view, but what about the rest of your network? Can this be exploited to gain entry to your network? Quite possibly in some cases - it certainly needs to be included in your security audit and perimeter testing. Talking about a specific company now, they supply the software to monitor and bill phone calls through the exchange. They remotely install, monitor and manage this software. How do they do that? Well, it turns out that they install LogMeIn on your machine. Now t