Fraud

Podcast: Black Hat Preview With Trustwave’s Nick Percoco

Next week, the world’s attention will shift to Las Vegas for the annual Black Hat and DEFCON hacking conferences. What will be the big trends this year? We sat down last week with Nicholas Percoco of Trustwave’s Spider Labs to get his thoughts on the show. Nick is a regular at Black Hat and other events – both in the audience and on the stage. He said one of the big themes this year will be hacks on consumer electronics and home automation systems. As we reported, two Trustwave researchers have delved into the security of a wide range of “smart home” technologies, including home automation gateways and even a bluetooth enabled “smart toilet.” Percoco said that manufacturers of these devices need to pay more attention to security, and can’t assume that the people buying their devices are technically sophisticated enough to understand how to safely deploy or manage Internet […]

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Security Must-Do’s For Facebook Graph Search

Facebook finally pulled the covers off its much-anticipated (or dreaded) Graph Search feature on Monday, after about six months in beta. The new search feature greatly expands the kinds of information Facebook users can access on other users of the social network, making it easy, for example, to cross reference data stored in Facebook profiles. For example, users can easily call up a list of their “friends who live in Boston” and like the show “Arrested Development.” Fun! But, as has been noted, Graph Search is also a social engineer’s dream, because it lays bare lots of information – data – that Facebook users shared, casually, and without a thought of how it might be used in combination with other data they shared. For example, researchers have shown that they can use knowledge of a Facebook user’s “Likes” to “automatically and accurately predict a range of highly sensitive personal attributes including: […]

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Facebook Mum On Future Of Ghost User Accounts

Facebook acknowledged on Friday that a flaw in a feature that lets users download their own profile information exposed personal information on approximately six million users, including phone numbers and e-mail addresses that were not shared with the site, but is staying mum on the future of wide ranging information harvesting practices revealed by the bug. In a blog post, the social networking giant said the security hole was disclosed by an independent security researcher and forced the company to disable the Download Your Information (DYI) feature until it could be fixed. Despite the large number of people affected, Facebook said individual pieces of private data like an e-mail address or telephone number were only exposed to one or two other Facebook users. However, Facebook has not said whether it will cease using non-public data from users’ contacts to fill out dossiers on other Facebook users, a practice that has […]

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HBR: Internet Of Things Has ‘Profound’ Impact On Risk

The advent of a global network of Internet connected devices – sometimes referred to as the “Internet of Things” will bring about a “data democratization” that will upend traditional IT security models and pose considerable risks for organizations.   That’s the conclusion of two leading authorities on the so-called “Internet of Things” (IoT), Christopher J. Rezendes and W. David Stephenson, who write that its impact on businesses will be “profound,” and that cyber security will be one of the biggest challenges that organizations must address. In a guest post on the Harvard Business Review blog on Friday, Rezendes, the president of INEX Advisors, and Stephenson, an author and consultant specializing in the Internet of Things argue that  “the very principle that makes the IoT so powerful — the potential to share data instantly with everyone and everything (every authorized entity, that is) — creates a huge cybersecurity threat.” The authors predict […]

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

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 […]

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