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Top Stories

Third Party Vendor Source of Breach at Home Depot

November 7, 2014 Paul Roberts

Add Home Depot to the list of companies who have been victimized as a result of a third party contractor or supplier. The home improvement giant said in a statement on Thursday that the criminals that attacked the company’s network first gained access to the “perimeter” of Home Depot’s network. Target, the box store retailer, sketched out a similar scenario to describe the breach that resulted in the theft of 70 million credit cards numbers from its customers. In that case, a company that serviced HVAC systems in Target’s headquarters was reported as the source of the breach. Home Depot said that attackers were able to move within its network by elevating their level of network access and install what Home Depot described as “unique, custom-built malware” on self-checkout systems in the U.S. and Canada. The revelations about the circumstances of the breach came on a day when Home Depot […]

Supply Chain Risk Escapes Notice At Many Firms

November 6, 2014 Paul Roberts

Online attacks that come by way of suppliers and other third party business partners are one of the biggest threats that modern organizations face. But too few firms are giving supply chain security the attention it deserves, a panel of legal and information security experts told attendees at a cyber security forum in Boston on Wednesday. Companies need to protect their exposure through third parties better, according to the panel: beefing up auditing of internal- and partner assets and including contractual protections that will indemnify them in the event that a breach at a supplier or business partner exposes data that materially affects their firm. The panel, “Fortifying the Supply Chain,” was part of a day long event at The Federal Reserve in Boston and sponsored by the Advanced Cyber Security Center, a technology industry consortium. It brought together top legal and information security experts, including FireEye researcher Alex Lanstein and Jim Halpert, the […]

Metadata Matters: EFF To Argue Collection Violates Constitution

November 4, 2014 Paul Roberts

Lawyers from The Electronic Frontier Foundation will argue on Tuesday that the U.S. government’s bulk collection of phone records and other “metadata” is a violation of the Constitution’s protection against unlawful searches. In a blog post on Monday, EFF said that it plans to make oral arguments before the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals on Tuesday and will argue that the call records collected by the government constitute “intimate portraits of the lives of millions of Americans” that are protected under the Constitution’s Fourth Amendment. The EFF is presenting in the Klayman vs. Obama, a 2013 case filed by Larry Klayman, conservative activist, in the immediate aftermath of the publication of data leaked by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden. EFF and the ACLU filed an amicus brief in that case in August. The government’s argument is that the bulk collection of phone records is legal under a precedent called “third party doctrine,” which […]

Uncle Sam Taking a Back Seat in Cyber Defense | Bloomberg

October 29, 2014 Paul Roberts

Bloomberg has a story on the collaborative, private sector effort to thwart an industrial hacking campaign linked to Chinese intelligence. The effort, which involved firms like FireEye and iSight Partners “demonstrates for the first time a private-sector model that they believe can move faster than investigations by law enforcement agencies,” the report said. From the article: The take-down largely bypassed traditional law enforcement tools, relying instead on cooperation between companies that are normally fierce competitors. Coalition members — which include Microsoft Corp., Cisco Inc. and Symantec Corp. — say they can act faster than governments because they operate global Internet systems and have business relationships with tens of thousands of companies. Read more via China-Linked Hacking Foiled by Private-Sector Sleuthing – Businessweek.

Bad News About File Sharing Apps

October 28, 2014 Paul Roberts

Sensitive enterprise data may be leaving the safety of our corporate networks at a much faster clip than we believed – with web based file sharing services a major contributor to data flight. That’s the conclusion of a survey by the firm Elastica, which analyzed 100 million files shared on leading public cloud applications. According to the research, employees each stored an average of 2,037 files in the cloud. More concerning: fully 20 percent of the files that were “broadly shared” via file sharing services contained regulated data of one sort or another. The company put together a nice little infographic that highlights some of the larger findings. You can view it here. Read more via The Bad News About File Sharing Apps | Digital Guardian.