InfoSecurity Europe 2010

Once again InfoSecurity Europe was an interesting place to visit. Lots of good sessions and interesting people to talk to. Most of the usual protagonists were there and the organisers have increased the educational part of the exhibition as well, which is good.

I thought I would put down a few things that I thought were noteworthy from the exhibition. I've already blogged about the GrIDsure anti-phishing sender verification and the new 3M mobile phone privacy filters, but there were a few other things I want to mention.

The first one is Panda Security's new Panda Cloud Internet Protection. This is a cloud-based service that provides consistent security and access policies to all machines within an organisation. The key thing is that it will protect mobile machines that are outside the corporate network with the same policies as those within the network. Protecting corporate machines when mobile is a big concern and a good way to reduce malware or hacking problems on the main network.

The usual problem is that mobile devices connect to public, unsecured (or badly secured) networks and either pick up some malware that they bring back with them, or they connect back remotely and open a soft doorway into the corporate network. By securing machines with this cloud service, it should stop them from being a soft target and weak link in your security chain. If you already do something similar by allowing VPN access into the corporate network and allowing them to create connections out, you are using additional bandwidth for this traffic and having to open a VPN connection, which isn't always wise.

Another topic talked about (mainly by Sophos) was the security, or lack thereof, when using social media. Graham Cluley gave a really good talk on the subject on the Sophos stand including the use of SPAM avatars on sites such as Twitter. The attack is centred around the fact that anti-SPAM filtering finds it hard to scan the content of images, e.g. by doing Optical Character Recognition (OCR). So, people have been putting written messages in their ID picture to get past any filtering. You can find out more from his blog.

The final mention has to go to Ian Mann from ECSC. He, once again, talked about several Social Engineering techniques to get past security. He stated that he always likes to see security guards when trying to gain unauthorised access, as it usually makes the system much less secure. He gave a talk in one of the main theatres as well as several talks on the ECSC stand, all of which were interesting. He has written a book called Hacking the Human, which is worth a read if you want to find out more.

Beyond that, most of the usual suspects were there and many things were as before with incremental changes and updates. There didn't seem to be a central theme or message from all the vendors or industry in general. Everyone seemed to be concentrating on their own topics and products. One new addition to the exhibition was the University Pavilion. I think this could be put to good use to show people what's coming over the horizon or how these technologies that the vendors are pushing actually work.

Security Questions for your Cloud Services Provider

Comodo Vision Video Blog

Cloud Services or Cloud Computing are getting a lot of attention in IT circles, promising cost-effectiveness, flexibility, and time-to-market advantages over traditional alternatives. However, they also increase your security risk by expanding your security perimeter to include that of your service provider. This video blog poses some key questions to ask your Cloud services/Cloud Computing provider regarding data security as well as advice to reduce the risk to your business introduced by Cloud Computing.

See my third video blog for Comodo Vision here.

InfoSecurity Europe 2009

Well, a couple of weeks ago I went to InfoSecurity Europe 2009 at Earl's Court, as I do every year. If you've never been, but are at all interested in network and information security or are looking for vendors, then I highly recommend visiting. To my surprise, and for the first time I can remember, Microsoft wasn't there. Apart from that, however, all the usual players were there and, to be honest, it was all much the same as before. There was no new emerging technology or hot topic, just new developments of old technologies. A couple of years ago we had the hot topic of 'social engineering' and 'securing the user'; ok, we all knew that the users were our weak link and phrases like "we spend all our time securing the first 2000 miles and forget about the last 2 feet", and "our network would be totally secure, reliable and fully functional if we didn't let users login", have always been commonplace, but there were new mass threats, new education programmes and new tools at the disposal of net admins to deal with them.

However, this year was different; nothing really sprang out. OK, cloud computing and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) has expanded and matured, but other than that we see the same products and services as before. What amazes me is how some vendors and speakers can get it so wrong and don't appear to understand the actual level of security offered or operating environment in which their products will be used. I'm not going to list actual vendors here, but how can an encryption solution for mobile users that doesn't encrypt the data at rest be viable? Encrypting network traffic is commendable, but not the only safeguard required. What if they now lose their laptop, mobile or pen drive? A secure USB pen drive vendor admitted, when questioned, that files were decrypted into the C:\Temp folder while in use, then deleted after encrypting for storage on the drive again. They couldn't tell me if this was a secure delete or a simple removal of the pointer in the file allocation table as normal. Regardless of the deletion process, however, how many applications can read and write to that folder? What's to stop me from writing a very small bit of code to monitor that folder every few seconds and take copies? This might be secure enough if it is on a corporate machine, but why not just store the file on it then and not bother with the drive?

Similarly, email security is always a problematic area, with almost no solution fitting the technology properly. The big advantage of email, and the reason we all use it, is that it is independent of firmware - i.e. it doesn't matter what hardware, OS or email app we use, it still works. Unfortunately, security was never built in to email, so every email is like sending an electronic postcard. However, I would argue that a solution that only allows you to send encrypted email within your organisation is of limited value. What about all your customers and partners? There are also still solutions that store your files on their servers and send a link to the recipient. Why trust your files to them? I asked several vendors how they deal with password transfer, only to be told that they don't. "It's up to the user how they tell the recipient what the password is," was a common reply. We know users are unreliable, why leave it to them? I had to transfer some confidential files to someone via email recently (the only transport method they would accept), only to be told that they didn't want the hassle of decrypting it, so could I send them in plaintext. Having got over that hurdle, they wouldn't give me a mobile phone number so that I could transfer the passphrase via a call or SMS (as people seem to need them written down), asking me to email it to them. I know there are technologies out there to solve these problems, but they aren't without any problems.

This is turning into a bit of a rant and I'm getting off topic, so back to InfoSec. I was pleased to see that there were some voices of caution out there about the wholesale adoption of virtualisation without considering the security implications. One that springs to mind is Steve Moyle who has produced 10 points to consider implementing on his blog here. Virtualisation is a good technology for a number of reasons, but it does bring in new security threats and it must be implemented with these in mind and secured accordingly. I do also think that cloud computing and SaaS could be very important to SMEs (Small to Medium-sized Enterprises) who don't have the in-house expertise or large budget. They can still have large enterprise-level configurability and security, without the overheads. Finally, people seem to be taking information governance and user education seriously rather than just paying lip-service to them. In all, the show was encouraging, but many vendors are not quite there yet, which only goes to highlight that the majority of organisations are not taking the new threat-landscape seriously enough and countermeasures must be lacking.