Give and Take

By cliangNo Comments
Cybersecurity and convenience are always contradictory.  The Touch ID is a convenient means to unlock the device and deemed secure because fingerprints are supposed unique. But if we give further thoughts, there are several pitfalls. The Touch ID only protects the data-at-rest scenario. It can't secure your data if your phone is unlocked (data-in-use) nor you submitting sensitive data across the network (data-in-motion). Frequent use of Touch ID will make you tend to forget the text base password, affecting availability in situation you need to provide password Text base password is secure over biometric in a special case: if you are under duress, attacker can force you to unlock your device from your biometric attributes ... even if you are dead; but text base password cannot be extracted from a dead person's mental memory. An example is the locked iPhone from the Boston bomber that evolved into court case to debate national security vs data privacy. This is a matter of expectation...
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Expect the Unexpected

By cliang1 Comment
The network anomalies detection suddenly becomes a popular topic in cyber protection market.  This is to expect something unexpected then manage it, i.e. deviation from normal. At a glance it appears as an amazing technology: no more signature based detection, no need to update detection definition, deploy and forget solution. But if you think deeper, the technology needs a time period to learn your environment as baseline.  Any deviations from this baseline will be treated as the "unexpected". The challenges are: How do you know if current network traffic is normal but not already compromised How much time is sufficient to establish the baseline in order to reduce false negatives or false positives to acceptable trusted level? How about traffic that disappears from baseline, is the technology able to report? Seasonal network traffic will further add complication Is the technology that vendor claims only able to handle specific scenarios? Does the vendor need extensive time to learn your environment? Last but not least,...
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