RSA security breach the new age of "Ueber breaches"

RSA a trusted name in the security industry had a major security breach. Just like a giant can die from a virus that is a billion times smaller RSA got taught a lesson about human weaknesses.

According to articles in the press a worker at RSA decided to retrieve an email from the spam folder which contained an Excel attachment. The individual opened up the Excel spreadsheet to just have an embedded flash file execute, running an exploit against Adobe's flash player, which in the recent past had several vulnerabilities with "zero-day" exploits being available. This allowed the attackers to install a backdoor and work their way through RSA's systems and network.

Security experts are now convinced that RSA had the "seeds" of their security tokens exposed. So far RSA has neither denied nor confirmed this scenario. The seeds allow an attacker to calculate the security code that RSA's hardware tokens display and use for two factor authentication.

The magnitude of this security breach is yet to be understood since the token business is one of the key business that RSA has. Thousands of customers around the globe have been using RSA's solution.

Such an "Ueber Breach" is the first one of its kind but for sure not the last one. In our information reach society, where companies are competing to gather more and more information about individuals, we will see more and more of such security breaches. The cloud technology being another factor that potentially will accelerate the rate of security breaches of that magnitude.

Read RSA's press release

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Epsilon security breaches

I received at least four notifications from various companies that have my personal information, notifying me that my email address and potentially other information had been exposed to an unauthorized third party as a result of a security breach at their marketing partner, Epsilon. All being the same format and verbiage. Telling me that Epsilon legal was potentially the source for the text.

This breach might have some people ask themselves: So why would someone steal email addresses? This breach seem to be just the first step in a much larger scheme. Back in 2008 PWC's job web site was breached, stealing thousands of email addresses and passwords. Initially nobody could understand why someone would go after such a site till cases of Paypal attacks surfaced and got connected to the PWC case. The individuals that had gained access to the emails and passwords were using them to access sites like Paypal, exploiting the fact that we all like to re-use passwords.

Read the official Epsilon press release

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Impact of Egypt's awakining on IT outsourcing

Egypt had the reputation to be a country with a well educated youth but a GDP that was one of the worst worldwide. Now that things are changing we will very likely see that increasing (I would wish that for the people in Egypt very much!). But what does that mean for you and your outsourcing efforts? Egypt is just another country following in the footsteps of countries like India were cost of living went up, salaries followed and eventually the cost of outsourcing went up too. The changes in Egypt might at the same time increase friction between various layers of the population: The new IT elite which is getting higher salaries and others that feel left behind. Time will tell if this friction will result in more unrest or if the country manages to find a social approach that ensures the stability of the country. Social economic and human factors are often underestimated in IT and particular in IT security resulting in significant risks to the business.

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Egypt crisis and Outsourcing companies

Some people see Egypt as the new India when it comes to IT outsourcing. What most people do not know is the fact that a lot of the IT support from Indian outsourcing companies already comes from countries like Egypt. A country with a well educated young generation that speaks English. It might be that your IT outsourcing is not directly affected, since being hosted in India, but the IT expert in India might have trouble getting his workstation supported from the help desk sitting in Egypt.

It is just another lesson learnt of how outsourcing creates risks that are not well understood, particular when it comes to the chain of dependencies that a global economy creates. With the introduction of the cloud the picture even gets fuzzier.

Read more: Outsourcing firms logging out of Egypt

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Updates: Mobile apps & Cloud based services

Mobile apps spying on you - It seems that there are two class action lawsuits that have been filled against Apple. Apple having tight control over apps that get posted on the iPhone app store has set itself up for this. Control also means responsibility and consumer feel cheated if they discover that Apple allows applications to spy on them.

Cloud based services and the risks - The latest victim of its cloud technology seem to be Skype, which had major outages right around the Christmas time. The service blames older clients to be the source for the outage. Those clients shutdown/crashed when receiving certain offline messages that arrived delayed. This just shows that cloud technology creates super complex systems that are not yet well understood and difficult to test for all scenarios.

Read more:
Two lawsuits target Apple, app makers over privacy concerns
Skype's mega-FAIL: exec cops to cause

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Cloud based services and the risks

The cloud is here, and it is here to stay...

Having worked in the outsourcing business for some time it is quite entertaining to see how the marketing folks sell you the same old car over and over again, just by changing the sales pitch. What I am trying to say is that the cloud is just a collection of technologies that already existed before, being sold as part of a regular outsourcing deal: Virtualization, data centers in cheap labor countries, and network capacity are nothing new. But what are the risks?

Many of the cloud solutions had outages according to various websites tracking these outages. Leaving sometimes customer with a total loss of data (E.g. T-Mobile's Sidekick outage).

Other times your privacy of your personal or business data is at risk (E.g. Health care records stolen).

Reading through the fine print (see screenshot) of some of those cloud based services, you will notice that you just provided them with the permission to circumvent the local law. Agreeing to have your data stored "somewhere", where the laws of the country your reside in, might or might not protect your data.

Read more:
Cloud Privacy report - World Privacy Forum
Top-10 cloud outages in 2010

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Mobile apps spying on phone users

Do you like listening to Pandora? According to a a study conducted by Wallstreet Journal you better be prepared to offer some of your private details. The Pandora application on iPhone, according to the article, sends information about you to at least eight (8!) tracking services that gather information. This is not unusual according to the article. Most of the 101 apps tested showed evidence that they provide information ranging from a unique phone ID up to location information, age, Zip code and gender to tracking companies. The article also mentions that iPhone apps seem to be worse than their siblings on Google's Android platform.

Apple claims to review all applications before being allowed in the iPhone app store. This has caused a false sense of privacy with users. All of the apps reviewed by WSJ were available in Apple's app store.

Blackberry applications were not reviewed but the model RIM (maker of Blackberry) introduced in it's Blackberries a different security model. Access to certain information can be blocked. The user needs to deny the application the "trusted application" status and allow just access to individual information.

Read the WSJ article here: iPhone and Android Apps breach privacy

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