Recent Posts

Supply Chain Transparency Doesn’t Extend To Security

We live in an ever-more unstable world in which massive disruptions, whether natural or man-made, are a frequent occurrence. Companies that make everything from aircraft to mobile phones to cappuccino need to be nimble – sidestepping global calamities that might idle assembly lines or leave customers without their morning cup of coffee.  As in other areas, the benefits of technology advancements like cheap, cloud based computing, remote sensors and mobility are transforming the way that companies manage their vast, global network of suppliers. These days, supply chain transparency is all the rage – allowing companies to share information seamlessly and in realtime with their downstream business partners and suppliers. Firms like the start-ups Sourcemap, and LlamaSoft are offering “supply chain visualization” technology that leverages a familiar formula these days: mobility, social networking, crowd-sourced intelligence, and “Big Data” analytics. [There’s more to read about supply chain security on The Security Ledger.]  However, as […]

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Ephemeral, In-Memory Attack Used With New IE 0Day

It was just last week that we wrote about research from the security firm Triumfant that found evidence for the growing use of ephemeral “diskless” malware. That point was driven home over the weekend, with a report from the firm Fireeye that found a new Internet Explorer zero day vulnerability was being used in conjunction with a disk-less variant of the Hydraq (aka “McRAT”) Trojan horse program.   Fireeye first called attention to the existence of attacks exploiting new, “zero day” (or previously unknown) vulnerabilities in the Internet Explorer web browser on Friday. The company discovered the malicious activity on the web site of a “strategically important website” that was being used as a “watering hole” to attack visitors who were “interested in national and international security policy.” The company described two IE vulnerabilities: an information leakage hole and an IE out-of-bounds memory access vulnerability. The information leak affects Windows XP […]

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IT Pros: Internet Of Things Is A Governance Disaster

Not that we needed a survey to tell us this: but IT pros are seriously concerned about the risks posed by all the IP-enabled devices that are starting to connect to their corporate networks. That’s the conclusion of a survey of 2,013 members of ISACA, a worldwide association of information security professionals, which found almost unanimous agreement that the Internet of Things poses a governance problem for their networks, with increased security threats the most oft-cited governance issue raised by IoT adoption. The survey (PDF) also polled 4,000 consumers in the U.S., U.K., India and Mexico, finding that IT professionals were less sanguine than consumers about the transformative potential of the Internet of Things for enterprises. Just four in 10 agreed that the benefits of IoT adoption outweighed the risks, while half of the ISACA members polled felt that the benefits of IoT to consumers outweighed the risks. Around a quarter of […]

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For SANS Critical Controls: Authentication Missing In Action

Authentication is the gateway to privilege and authorization. Consider how many portions of your life, digital and otherwise, revolve around authentication. Whether you want to do Internet banking, tweet a friend, or buy a present, some sort of authentication likely occurred to allow you to do so.   But when it comes to one of the most widely used sources of advice for organizations to improve their security, authentication is absent. I’m speaking about The SANS Institute’s “20 Critical Security Controls.” This list represents a great public-private partnership effort with SANS, the Center for Internet Security, and Center for Strategic and International Studies all involved in its production and maintenance. The goal of the document is to help provide organized guidance and actionable improvements for organizations wanting to strengthen their security posture. Because of the separation of subject matter into individual control areas, the document is quite useful at conveying […]

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Identity Management’s Next Frontier: The Interstate

Factory-installed and even aftermarket identity management applications may soon be standard components on automobiles, as the federal government looks for ways to leverage automation and collision avoidance technology to make the country’s highways and roadways safer.   That’s the conclusion of a new report from the Government Accountability Office (GAO), which finds that vehicle to vehicle communications are poised to take off, but that significant security and privacy challenges must first be met, identity management top among them. The report, GAO 14-13 (PDF available here) takes the measure of what the GAO calls “Intelligent Transportation Systems,” including vehicle-to-vehicle (or V2V) technology. The GAO found that V2V technology that allows automobiles to communicate with each other in ways that can prevent accidents has advanced considerably in recent years. Automakers, working with the Department of Transportation, are testing the technology in real-world scenarios. However, the deployment of V2V technologies faces a number […]

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