Posts relating to keeping computers and networks secure against (mostly) attacks over networks. If you want to know about how to respond when such attacks succeed, or nearly so, try “Incident Response”
The steady growth in the use of encrypted communications seems likely to increase next year given recent announcements on both web browsers and servers. That’s good news for security people worried that their users may be sending sensitive information such as passwords and credit card numbers over the Internet. However it may also require an […]
Although it’s now almost three years since the European Commission published their proposed General Data Protection Regulation, it seems unlikely that a final text will be agreed even in 2015. That means we’ll be stuck for at least another year with the 1995 Directive, whose inability to deal with the world of 2015 is becoming […]
I had been planning to write up a summary of my thoughts on Bring Your Own Device, but I’m pleased to discover that the UK Government has pretty much done it for me. Their draft guidance, just published for comment, suggests an approach along the following lines: Start by reviewing which information should not be […]
A recent discussion got me thinking about what might be the right number of passwords. There are plenty of references that still say you should have a different password for every service, and breaches such as Adobe’s last year show why. If you use the same password on two different websites and one of those […]
The recent invention of the phrase “Bring Your Own Device” seems to have got educational organisations agonising about something we’ve been doing routinely, indeed relying on, for at least 15 years. Whenever you send a member of staff home with some work to do but no laptop to do it on, or provide a webmail […]
Martin McKeay’s presentation at Networkshop warned us of the risk of spiralling “security debt”. Testing for, and exploiting, well-known vulnerabilities in networked systems now requires little or no technical expertise as point-and-click testing tools are freely available. The best known of these led Josh Corman to propose “HDMoore’s law“, that the capabilities of the Metasploit […]
A strong common (and unplanned, honest!) theme emerged from the information security session at Networkshop yesterday: that information security, or information risk, is ultimately the responsibility of individual users. Only they can decide which documents it is safe to read on a train, which phone calls they can make in a public place. The role […]
Presenting at the Jisc’s Safer Internet Day event got me thinking a bit more about the shared interests between owners and organisations in a BYOD scheme, and the opportunity that might present. For many years I’ve liked the idea of helping users be safe in their personal Internet lives (where motivation should be a matter […]
I’ve had a few discussions recently where people talked about the ‘new risk’ of Bring Your Own Device (BYOD), but then mentioned risks – loss/theft of device, use in public place, etc. – that already exist on organisation-managed mobile devices. Turning that around, it struck me that one way to develop a BYOD policy might […]
Bug bounty schemes have always been controversial. In the early days of the Internet someone who found a bug in software was expected to inform the author and help fix it, as a matter of social responsibility. Suggesting that those researching vulnerabilities be paid for their time and effort seemed rather grubby. Unfortunately not everyone […]