State of Cybercrime

While I thought we could ride on our recent successes for just a bit longer, attackers are back in full swing, filling my twitter feed with latest jaw dropping security news. As I waded in worry, I stumbled upon an interesting Benjamin Franklin quote, “Distrust and caution are the parents of security.” Should distrust and caution be the parents of security? Who or what should the parents of securi...

With ransomware and data breaches driving headlines, it can feel like security pros are always one step behind. However, I recently found a few stories that I thought were worth celebrating. Not everyone on the Inside Out Security Show panel – Cindy Ng, Mike Buckbee, Kilian Englert, and Kris Keyser – thought the stories were good news. Nonetheless, I think that over time, as technologies mature, t...

Adam Tanner is the author of "Our Bodies, Our Data", which tells the story of a hidden dark market in drug prescription and other medical data. Adam explains how the sale of "anonymized" data is a multi-billion dollar business not covered by HIPPA rules. In this first part of our interview, we learn from Adam how the medical data brokers got started and why it's legal. Transcri...

We continue our discussion with Dr. Ann Cavoukian . She is currently Executive Director of Ryerson University’s Privacy and Big Data Institute and is best known for her leadership in the development of  Privacy by Design (PbD) . In this segment, Cavoukian tells us that once you’ve involved your customers in the decision making process, “You won’t believe the buy-in you will get under those conditi...

Next month, the world will be talking security at the annual RSA Conference , which will be held in San Francisco on February 13th to the 17th. When it comes to discussing security matters, experts often tell us to take stock of our risks or to complete a risk assessment. However, perhaps before understanding where we might be vulnerable, it might be more important to consider exactly what threats...

I recently had the chance to speak with former Ontario Information and Privacy Commissioner Dr. Ann Cavoukian about big data and privacy. Dr. Cavoukian is currently Executive Director of Ryerson University’s Privacy and Big Data Institute and is best known for her leadership in the development of Privacy by Design (PbD). What’s more, she came up with PbD language that made its way into the GDPR, w...

Over the past few weeks, we started seeing a few new security trends that we think haven’t yet had their defining moment and will likely see more of next year. We reflected on the predictions we made last year and shared our annual cybersecurity predictions for 2017. Meanwhile the Inside Out Security Show panel – Kilian Englert, Forrest Temple and Mike Buckbee - also speculated on a few things of...

I recently came across a tweet that was shared during the Infosecurity Maganzine Conference in Boston, “Security is a benefit, but not always a feature.” Why? You can spend a lot of money and still be hacked or not spend a dime and not be hacked. How did the Inside Out Security Show panel react? Here's what Mike Buckbee, Kilian Englert and Alan Cizenski had to say: Buckbee: It’s all tradeoffs. It’...

Based in Norway, Per Thorsheim is an independent security adviser for governments as well as organizations worldwide. He is also the founder of PasswordsCon.org , an annual conference that’s all about passwords, PIN codes, and authentication. Launched in 2010, the conference invites security professionals & academic researchers to better understand and improve security. In part one of our disc...

Last month, there was a thought-provoking article on programmers who were asked to do unethical work on the job. We often talk about balancing security with precaution and paranoia, but I wondered about the balance of ethics and execution. As always, I was curious to hear the reactions from the Inside Out Security Show panel – Mike Buckbee, Kris Keyser, and Mike Thompson. Here’s what they had to s...

Based in Norway, Per Thorsheim is an independent security adviser for organizations and government. He is also the founder of PasswordsCon.org , a conference that’s all about passwords, PIN codes, and authentication. Launched in 2010, the conference is a gathering security professionals & academic researchers worldwide to better understand and improve security worldwide. In part one of our con...

Like many in IT, you can probably commiserate with this week’s Inside Out Security Show panel – Cindy Ng, Mike Buckbee and Alan Cizenski – on elaborating when someone asks you, “What Do You Do for a Living?” Whether you’re a programmer or a sysadmin, the scope of your role is often multi-faceted and complex. In this episode, we talk about various roles and responsibilities of those in IT - differe...

On election day, I stumbled upon an article that described presidential candidates’ newfound ability to influence voters with big data. Not health, financial or sensitive data, but data from loyalty cards, gym memberships etc. Rather than a financial exchange as the end goal, the purpose of using big data to influence end users would be for a vote on November 4th. What a fascinating use of data! I...

In the next part of our discussion , data privacy attorney Sheila FitzPatrick get into the weeds and talks to us about her work in setting up Binding Corporate Rules (BCR) for multinational companies. These are actually the toughest rules of the road for data privacy and security. What are BCRs? They allow companies to internally transfer EU personal data to any of their locations in the world. Th...

Earlier this month at the awesome O’Reilly Security Conference, I learned from world-leading security pros about the most serious threats facing IT. Hmm, sounds like that would make a great topic to discuss with the Inside Out Security Show panel – Cindy Ng, Kilian Englert, Kris Keyser, and Peter TerSteeg. Let’s go meta. According to expert Becky Bace, you can generalize security challenges as a c...

In this episode of the Inside Out Security Show panel – Cindy Ng, Mike Buckbee and Mike Thompson – shared their thoughts on the latest botnet attack . “This botnet attack that happened recently that brought down the DNS services. That’s probably unfortunately the first of many,” warns Mike Thompson. His concerns also launched the group into discussing the challenges of balancing innovation alongsi...

Since October was Cyber Security Awareness month, we decided to look at what’s holding back our efforts to make security—to coin a phrase—“great again”. In this episode of the Inside Out Security Show panel – Cindy Ng, Kilian Englert, Kris Keyser, and Mike Buckbee – shared their thoughts on insider threats as discussed on a recent Charlie Rose show , the brilliant but evil use of steganography (th...

We have more Ken Munro in this second part of our podcast. In this segment, Ken tells us how he probes wireless networks for weaknesses and some of the tools he uses. One takeaway for me is that the PSKs or passwords for WiFi networks should be quite complex, probably at least 12 characters. The hackers can crack hashes of low-entropy WiFi keys, which they can scoop up with wireless scanners. Ken...

Our inspiration for this week's show was Michelle Obama's popular catchphrase, "When they go low, you go high." Don't worry, our next episode will also have a fun Republican catchphrase. In this episode, we discussed how low the security of our favorite things have gone - in music, email, and the internet of things(IoT). Music. There are a lot of music lovers that use Spotify on their de...

If you want to understand the ways of a pen tester, Ken Munro is a good person to listen to. An info security veteran for over 15 years and founder of UK-based Pen Test Partners , his work in hacking into consumer devices — particularly coffee makers — has earned lots of respect from vendors. He’s also been featured on the BBC News . You quickly learn from Ken that pen testers, besides having amaz...

Since security pertains to everyone, in this episode of the IOSS we challenged ourselves to tie security back to Kevin Bacon. You might have to give us a few passes, but the connection is still strong. Keira Knightley: Earlier this year, a man applied for credit account at Best Buy using Keira Knightley’s driver’s license information. If they didn’t catch him, it would have affected her FICO score...

In this second  podcast , Bennett continues where he left off last time. Borden describes his work on developing algorithms to find insider threats based on analyzing content and metadata. Transcript Cindy: Hi, everyone. Welcome to our Inside Out Security Podcast. Andy and I are very excited to have Bennett Borden. He plays many roles. He is an attorney, a data scientist, and also a partner at Dri...

When it comes to ransomware, we can’t stop talking about it. There’s a wonderful phrase for our syndrome, “the attraction of repulsion,” meaning that something is so awful you can’t stop watching and/or talking about it. How awful has ransomware been?  According to the FBI, in the first three months of 2016, ransomware attacks cost their victims a total of $209 million. And it doesn’t stop there....

Once we heard Bennett Borden, a partner at the Washington law firm of DrinkerBiddle, speak at the CDO Summit about data science, privacy, and metadata, we knew we had to reengage him to continue the conversation. His  bio  is quite interesting: in addition to being a litigator, he’s also a data scientist. He’s a sought after speaker on legal tech issues. Bennett has  written  law journal articles ...

In this second podcast, Mr. Wendell continues where he left off last time . He explains the skills you’ll need in order to be an effective Chief Data Officer and we learn more about MIT’s International Society of Chief Data Officers. Transcript Skills a CDO Need: Information Technology, Mathematics, Change Management Inside Out Security: You've given many examples how the CDO has a relationship wi...