Insecurity

Road system in physical world is designed for safe (secure) use - sign board, speed limit, road shoulder, proper lane separation. There is occasion insecurity taking place.  There are many contributing factors such as: Adverse weather (low visibility, slippy road, hurricane) Malfunctioned equipment (vehicle) Collateral damage due to other road accidents Body condition of driver, under medical or drug influence Inexperienced or negligence drivers Similar principles apply in cyber world Untrained user or human error Failure to handle exception situation properly Unpatched system components exposing to known vulnerabilities Attack from peers nodes of connected system There is one more contributing factor: if security hasn't been integrated into design and deployment of the target system, it won't be secure....
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The Race

It's about attack and defense in the cyber space. In early days, breaking login is via password brute force attack to try every combination. Then, password settings are imposed to enforce password complexity, password history, password age, account lock out etc. Rainbow table comes into the scene.  All password combinations are pre-computed into its equivalent hash to match the collected irreversible hash.  Break-in is then fast. Salt and pepper are then added to the password hash as counter-measure to rainbow table. Pass-the-hash will defeat the salts as the authenticated credential is cached in memory.  By installing persistent backdoor and listen to admin login, grab the hash then traverse via the network. So, the race continues.  And no matter how advance the cyber protections are deployed, a negligent user with unattended login session will render all these useless. Therefore, educating user for proper discipline and usage in the cyber space is the number one defense....
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Cyber Citizen

We are really living in the cyber era.  From early childhood, kids will touch on device, get connected or even act in the cyber world. Like physical world, the parents (or school) must educate the good practices in the cyber world, just like to understand and observe the road protocols.  The aim is to avoid getting hurt by careless road users - whether the careless road users are others or self....
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Access Control #2

Access control is intended to allow only authorized subject to reach the protected resources. A comprehensive assessment including penetration test (network and physical), or Red Team Testing, is necessary to evaluate the effectiveness of the control and identify weaknesses like: Misconfiguration System defaults Normal operations run via high system privileges Unpatched systems or components Inherent back door Staff lack of awareness Phishing victim Unattended equipment Unattended login session Insecure entry points (both network and physical) via brute force ...
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Neighborhood

As if in physical world, mutual support and care are important to maintain safety in the cyber world. Unlike physical world, we might not "see" our neighbors nor their houses.  But the merit is that even if we are far away physically, we can still take care of our cyber neighbors. Things like these we can do: Notifying our cyber neighbor when that cyber identity is likely compromised and launch phishing attack Sharing near-miss cyber incident to alert others from falling into the same scam Not forwarding threat info received from untrusted sources in creating unnecessary network traffic or panic ...
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Mistaken Identity

This is to attack trust based on some one you know. In physical world, this is harder as you will recognize the person by appearance unless via impersonation like those in "Mission Impossible". In cyber world, email and social network ID are easier for spoofing, not-to-mention compromised identity are on sales in the dark web. Therefore, Part-1: protect your cyber identity.  Even if you consider such cyber identity doesn't harm yourself, it could cause collateral damage to those who know you Part-2: now, you are cautious about your cyber identity.  Establish preparedness to manage the situation when you suspect your cyber identity is compromised for malicious intention Part-3: from a 3rd party perspective, when you receive "unusual" request(s) from cyber identity for those you know or appeared as legitimate, validate their request(s) via other trusted communication channels (like phone call, or official web link) ...
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The Human Factor

Email becomes part of our life in both cyber and physical worlds.  We execute actions in physical world based on email context in cyber world. Email is an example of mixed information classification because the sensitivity is content driven.  Therefore, applying protection per the highest sensitivity requirement will be the one-size-fits-all solution.  Typical email technical controls are S/MIME, TLS, RMS, 2FA etc. No matter how secure the protections are applied, a negligent but legitimate business user will defeat them all. Educate the consequence of improper usage will uplift the human awareness, and becoming the first line of defense....
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Masquerade #2 – Mouse Over

Mouse over on the hyperlink will show you the intended web address to reach. Traditionally, this is used to understand what web site will be visited. However, this “defense” mindset has to be changed. The displayed link should not be trusted because it can be masqueraded. All the demo URL should be non-reachable as there are no such Domain Names registered.  To limit malicious people registering my demo URL to launch real attack, the .gov gTLD is chosen. It is no harm to click below but not in other unknown sources. Click me. Are you reaching the expected "www.trusted-site.gov" as seen via mouse over?...
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Control #3

Controls are necessary to reduce likelihood of risks.  But excessive controls shall have adverse effects: Degrade productivity Push back from user Circumvent control Risk assessment is required to design optimal and effective controls.  Change (behavior) management and user awareness need to be well established too.  Essentially, Why is the control required What is this meant in daily works (WIIFM for the user) What is the consequence of violation (both organization and the offender) ...
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Shadow IT

Gartner defines Shadow IT as IT devices, software and services outside the ownership or control of (IT) organizations. Given that information processing facilities or information containers are no longer centralized, the shadow IT is a common phenomenon.  Each one of us has a cellular phone that is indeed a powerful information processing facility and large storage device in the pocket. The extensive connectivity and cloud computing via access anywhere and any platform model further accelerate this situation.  Cyber risks are incurred to different degrees.  Various protection technologies are surfaced in the market: Mobile Device Management, end point lock down, cloud-based proxy, Data Leakage Protection, disk encryption and so forth; but they are never bullet proof. Organization needs to think about enablement (as well as empowerment) rather than prohibitive thru streamlined approach.  Policy formulation, usage guidance, risk management, user awareness and enforcement via disciplinary process are required to minimize the impacts....
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