dam

Voters mareking ballots at voting station

Election security is not a technology problem. It is how naive we are

Lou Covey

When it comes to election security, the technology we use to vote and count those votes is not the problem. The problem is how naive we are.

Election security has been at the forefront of daily news cycles for more a decade. The concerns about illicit use of technology to input and count the votes turned out to be largely overblown. Every U.S. state other than the Commonwealth of Louisiana, uses paper ballots, matching the practice of every other western democracy. Lawsuits have bankrupted people and organizations claiming the technology was changing votes. Those that have complained the loudest about election interference are now facing prosecution for the crimes.

Now the tech focus is on the use of artificial Intelligence to create deepfake video and audio. A recent pitch from Surfshark,

Membership Required

You must be a member to access this content.

View Membership Levels

Already a member? Log in here
Read more...
black Android smartphone

The future of online document signing

Szilveszter Szebeni

In an increasingly tech-savvy world, businesses are redefining the very core of transactions – the signature. With the rise of remote work and global digital transactions, the need for secure and efficient document processing has elevated electronic signatures into a near business-critical fundamental.

Free Membership Required

You must be a Free member to access this content.

Join Now

Already a member? Log in here
Read more...
Black Kite research report covet

Mining data is daunting but crucial

Lou Covey

The cybersecurity industry seems addicted to research but isn’t all that good at it. Mining the massive amount of data produced is daunting but crucial to everyone.

Surveys and studies are an important part of marketing form the cybersecurity industry. Cyber Protection magazine receives a lot of them. We read them all. In the two months before the RSA Conference, more than one a day came into our inbox. However, they are not a great source of independent data and insight.

Ignoring the cherry-picked data highlighting a particular company’s product or service, there are a few nuggets that, taken together, produce some interesting insights. Out of 60+ reports, we took a pass on any that were repetitive, were suspect methodologically, or effectively plagiarized from another source. We chose to look at seven with a solid methodology, representation of industry-wide concerns, and originality. The reports came from Dynatrace, Black Kite, SlashNext, Metomic, Originality AI, Logicgate, and Sophos. We found three common themes: The impact of AI on security, government regulation compliance, and understanding of security concerns on the C-suites and board levels.

Understanding security issues.

Almost every study has a common complaint. CISOs say application security is a blind spot at the CEO and board levels. They say increasing the visibility of their CEO and board into application security risk is urgently needed to enable more informed decisions to strengthen defenses.

However, Dynatrace’s study said CISOs fail to provide the C-suite and board members with clear insight into their organization’s application security risk posture. “This leaves executives blind to the potential effect of vulnerabilities and makes it difficult to make informed decisions to protect the organization from operational, financial, and reputational damage.”

Recent news shows the study may have a point. Marriott Hotels admitted that a 2018 breach was the result of inadequate encryption of customer data. In 2018 the company claimed their data was protected by 128-bit AES encryption when customer identity was only protected by an outdated hashing protocol. One can imagine the discussion between the CEO and the IT department:

CEO: is our data encrypted?
IT manager: Yeah, sort of.
CEO: OK, good enough

If the CEO doesn’t understand the difference between a hash and AES encryption, that’s a problem.

And there many be evidence that ignorance is widespread. Apricorn reported that the number of encrypted devices in surveyed companies had dropped from 80 percent to 20 percent between 2022 and 2023. Some of that could be attributed to work-from-home (WFH) growth in companies. It is also likely that companies over-reported what was encrypted simply because they did not understand what “encryption” meant. Once they learned the meaning, adjustments were made.

That lack of a foundational security technology could be a reason for the devastating growth in ransomware in the past two years.

Membership Required

You must be a member to access this content.

View Membership Levels

Already a member? Log in here
Read more...
Hacker taking control of Marriott Hotel customer data

Third-party security is almost impossible

Lou Covey

There are many themes arising for the RSA Conference next week including tools and services to protect against originating with unsecured third parties in the supply chain. That is a crucial issue in every industry especially with almost every company doing business with a supplier in the cloud. But the scope of the problem is almost impossible to resolve. The reasons are myriad.

With every Fortune 1000 business and government agency doing business with tens of thousands of third-party suppliers, the odds of finding one chink in the security protocols are very good for the criminals and state actors looking to do damage.

Social engineering can easily bypass the strongest technical defenses. It only takes a single lapse in digital hygiene to open the door to man-in-the-middle attacks, invite malware injections, and launch credential stuffing. It is also the favorite strategy of ransomware gangs.

Ransomware grabs headlines and remains highly lucrative for ransomware gangs. When compared to other forms of cybercrime, however, ransomware is really a minor issue. There are more than 33 million small businesses (under $100 million in revenue) operating in the United States alone representing 99 percent of all businesses. However, according to a study produced by the Black Kite Research and Intelligence Team, less than 5000 of them experienced a successful ransomware attack in the last 12 months...

Membership Required

You must be a member to access this content.

View Membership Levels

Already a member? Log in here
Read more...
Google logo cariacture warms himself by the wortmth of a pile of burning newspapers

Commentary: Getting the point of Google News v. the media

Lou Covey

Cyber Protection Magazine posted a long article about Google’s decision to start de-listing California-based newspapers. We strove to be as objective as possible and present both sides of the argument, but we did say that the opponents were missing the point, hoping that the point would be obvious in the discussion. Here, however, we want to shed objectivity and make the point clear.

Google’s move, generously described, is a preemptive response to California’s Journalism Preservation Act (AB 886) that has yet to pass the Senate. The act will require Google to sit down and negotiate with California publishers over the fair price of publishing content from those media sites.

Note that the bill is not mandating a price. It is mandating a negotiation. That changes the nature of the discussion.

Membership Required

You must be a member to access this content.

View Membership Levels

Already a member? Log in here
Read more...

IAM in a shifting environment

Apu Pavithran

The fourth annual Identity Management Day (April 9) brought the opportunity to assess and evaluate the shifting environment plaguing Identity and Access Management (IAM).

Identity plays a pivotal role in all facets of business functions. Overseeing identity and access presents challenges in determining who should have access to what.
This process requires a contextual understanding of the roles and duties of numerous individuals within an organization, ranging from system owners and supervisors to IT, security, and compliance personnel. Managing access between all these stakeholders and decision-makers while mitigating human error, minimizing excessive permissions, and preventing inappropriate access configurations presents a formidable task.

As workforces evolve, managing access privileges becomes even more complex, raising the risk of insider threats and unauthorized access. Understanding identity management is crucial across all business activities, especially with the rise of hybrid and remote work setups.

A strong IAM strategy requires enterprises to maintain a centralized and consistent view of all devices, resources, data, and users, along with timely provisioning of access to different users. When any of these elements are insufficiently operated, both the level of cybersecurity and the quality of user experience are jeopardized.

Read more...