Government Archives

Government

The Security Week In Review: Same Breach, Different Day

November 24, 2013 Paul Roberts

It’s the end of another week and, as has become a pattern, we’re weighing the impact of another massive data breach: this one at Cupid Media, the owner of a network of dating web sites. According to a report on Krebsonsecurity.com, data on some 40 million Cupid Media customers turned up on the same servers that were found holding data stolen from Adobe Inc., PR Newswire and other victims. To get a handle on the impact of this breach and others like it, I invited Ted Julian, the Chief Marketing Officer of CO3 Systems, to talk about the recent string of embarrassing breaches and how companies go wrong (and sometimes right) in responding to them. Co3 sells a service that helps companies structure their response to data breaches and other adverse incidents. We also took the time to talk about the recent FTC Workshop on security and privacy on The […]

Verizon: New Cloud Encryption Service Will Secure IoT Devices

November 21, 2013 Paul Roberts

Identity is one of the biggest challenges facing companies that are deploying products for the “Internet of Things,” as well as traditional enterprises that find IoT technologies of all types knocking at the door. The question, in short, is “how do I know that this device is legitimate, and ties back to an identity that I trust with access to my network resources and data? Of course, identity management has always been an aching problem in the enterprise space. The problem with the IoT is scale – given the sheer size of the IoT (30 billion connected devices by 2020), you can add a few “zeros” onto the number of devices that could, potentially, be seeking access to your network at any time. [Related read: Identity Management’s Next Frontier: The Interstate] It makes sense that, in a distributed environment like that, the cloud may be the best place to address […]

At FTC Forum, Experts Wonder: Is Privacy Passé?

November 20, 2013 Paul Roberts

The U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) used a one-day workshop to highlight security and privacy issues prompted by so-called “Internet of Things.” But attendees at the event may have walked away with a more ambiguous message, as prominent technologists and industry representatives questioned whether conventional notions of privacy had much relevance in a world populated by billions of Internet-connected devices. “I don’t feel like privacy is dead,” keynote speaker Vint Cerf, a Vice President and Chief Internet Evangelist at Google, told an audience at the FTC workshop. “I do feel like privacy will be increasingly difficult for us to achieve,” Cerf warned. And Cerf wasn’t alone in wondering whether that might not be such a bad thing – or even that unusual. “Is privacy an anomaly?” Cerf wondered aloud, recalling his experience living in a small, German town where the “postmaster knew what everyone was doing.” Our modern concept of being ‘alone […]

FTC Taps Data Privacy, Security Experts For Top Posts

November 19, 2013 Paul Roberts

Amid high-profile scandals over government spying and concerns about the security of individuals’ data, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) appointed experts in privacy and data security to two senior positions this week. FTC Chairwoman Edith Ramirez on Monday announced the appointments of Latanya Sweeney as the agency’s Chief Technologist and Andrea Matwyshyn as a Senior Policy Advisor on privacy and data security issues. The appointments bring expertise in data privacy into the FTC’s senior ranks, as the agency wrestles with the implications of headlong expansion of Internet connected device, sometimes referred to as the “Internet of Things.” Sweeney is a professor of government and technology at Harvard University and the founder and director of Harvard’s data privacy lab. A Ph.D in computer science with degrees from Harvard and MIT, her research has focused on the de-identification of data, developing privacy technologies, and the protection of health information, according to the FTC. At […]

Snowden Borrowed from APT Playbook In NSA Hack

November 16, 2013 Paul Roberts

We know for sure that Edward Snowden made short work of the protections that the National Security Agency used to segregate classified data. Snowden’s revelations about government spying on foreign governments, domestic and foreign firms and…well…just about everyone else first appeared in print in May. Since that time, a looming question is “how?” In other words: how did a single contractor gain access to such a massive trove of classified intelligence while working for the most security conscious organization in the world? While the exact methods used by Snowden are still not known, there are many theories. Now the security firm Venafi thinks that it has an answer, and is challenging the NSA to prove it wrong. In a blog post on Wednesday, the company laid much of the blame on poor management of digital certificates and user credentials, which allowed Snowden to move laterally within the NSA’s classified […]