APT Archives

APT

Anonymous Email Services Shutter In Wake Of Snowden

August 9, 2013 Paul Roberts

Faced with the prospect of being forced to turn over metadata from their customers’ private correspondence to secret courts in the U.S. or other countries, two prominent secure e-mail services decided this week to cease operation. The secure email service Lavabit – lately the choice of NSA leaker Edward Snowden – announced that it was ceasing operations on Thursday after ten years of operation. The announcement was followed, on Friday, by a similar one from the security firm Silent Circle, which operated Silent Mail. Both companies cited the difficulty of securing e-mail communications and the prospect of secret government subpoenas to obtain information on the activities of their customers as the reason for deciding to stop offering secure email services. In a message posted on the Lavabit.com web site, owner and operator Ladar Levison said that he was being forced to “become complicit in crimes against the American people or […]

Emergency Alert System: Vulnerable Systems Double, Despite Zombie Hoax

July 12, 2013 Paul Roberts

You’d think that the prospect of a zombie invasion would prompt our nation’s broadcasters and others who participate in the Emergency Alert System (EAS). Just the opposite is true. Months after a bogus EAS message warning about a zombie uprising startled residents in Michigan, Montana and New Mexico, the number of vulnerable EAS devices accessible from the Internet has increased, rather than decreased, according to data from the security firm IOActive. In a blog post Thursday, Mike Davis, principal research scientist at IOActive said that a scan of the public Internet for systems running versions of the Monroe Electronics software found almost double the number of vulnerable systems in July – 412 – as were found in April, when an IOActive scan of the public Internet using the Shodan search engine found only 222 vulnerable systems. IOActive first notified Monroe Electronics about vulnerabilities in its DASDECS product in January of […]

NIST Cyber Security Draft Framework Puts Execs In Driver’s Seat

July 3, 2013 Paul Roberts

The U.S. government’s federal technology agency has published a draft version of a voluntary framework it hopes will guide the private sector in reducing the risk of cyber attacks on critical infrastructure. The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) published a draft of its Preliminary Framework to Reduce Cyber Risks to Critical Infrastructure on Monday. The document provides a guide for critical infrastructure owners of different maturity levels to begin documenting and understanding their risk of cyber attack, and – eventually – to measure their performance in areas such as asset management, threat detection and incident response. The framework was called for by Executive Order 13636, signed by President Obama in February. In that order, NIST was charged with creating a framework for sharing cyber security threat information and information on successful approaches to reduce risks to critical infrastructure. The Framework is comprised of five major cybersecurity functions: Know […]

Don’t Call It A Hack Back: Crowdstrike Unveils Falcon Platform

June 19, 2013 Paul Roberts

Lots of aspiring technology start-ups dream of getting their product written up in The New York Times or Wall Street Journal when it launches. For Crowdstrike Inc. a two year-old security start-up based in Laguna Niguel, California, media attention from the papers of record hasn’t been an issue. This reporter counted twelve articles mentioning the company in The Times in the last year, and another two reports in The Journal. Much of that ink has been spilled on stories related to Crowdstrike research on sophisticated attacks, or the company’s all-star executive team, including former McAfee executives George Kurtz (CEO) and Dmitri Alperovitch (CTO), as well as former FBI cybersecurity chief Shawn Henry (Crowdstrike’s head of services), who left the Bureau in April, 2012 to join the company. For much of that time, Crowdstrike has been known mostly as a security services and intelligence firm, but the goal was always to […]

Fraud Analytics: You’re Doing It Wrong!

June 17, 2013 Paul Roberts

One of the most vexing problems in computer security today is distinguishing malicious from legitimate behavior on victim networks. Sophisticated cyber criminals and nation-backed hacking groups make a point of moving low and slow on compromised end points and networks, while victim organizations are (rightly) wary of disrupting legitimate business activity for the sake of spotting a breach. In this Security Ledger Podcast, Paul interviews Jason Sloderbeck, Director of Product Management at RSA, EMC’s security division. Jason talks about RSA’s Silvertail fraud analytics technology, and the organizational and technology issues that keep victims from spotting attacks. One of the big mistakes organizations make when they investigate attacks, Sloderbeck said, is focusing too narrowly on a point in time during a web session that is felt to be a good indicator of compromise – like when a user authenticates to a service or “checks out” on an e-commerce web site. “There’s a whole […]