Brian Krebs answers questions

IDCardForBlogBrian Krebs did an AMA on Reddit today answering a bunch of questions people had for him. I suggest taking a browse through his answers.
A few quotes stood out for me.
Q: Why do you think organizations seem to prefer “learning these lessons the hard way”? It doesn’t seem to be an information gap, as most IT executives say security is important and most individual contributors share risks upward with specific steps that can be taken to remediate risks. Given the huge costs for some breaches, why do you think more organizations don’t take the easy, preventative approach?

Security in general is a hard sell. It does nothing to contribute to the bottom line, and it very often gets in the way of productivity, or stands in the way of business getting done in the way that the business has always done it. Aside from the up-front investments required, it’s even more difficult to justify sustained expenditures on security, because it’s hard to put a price on a thing not happening (that thing being a breach or incident). Full Answer

Q: We saw what happened to big-box retail last year. What’s the next big vertical to be hit?

[…] my sense is that insurance firms and healthcare providers of all sizes will be the big target, if they’re not already; they have financial and identity data, and they are ripe targets for extortion (the pay-us-or-we’ll-leak-all-your-patient-data type extortion). Full answer

Q: Android Pay, Apple Pay, and any other emerging NFC payment technologies – Do you see these as friend or foe to financial institutions?

I think mobile payments is almost a distraction from the real issue: which is how are financial institutions maturing their ability to onboard new customers beyond requiring them to regurgitate static identifiers (name, dob, ssn, address, previous address, etc) — information, by the way, which is all for sale in the underground. If you’re an FI and you’re not going beyond that stuff, all these emerging payment technologies aren’t going to help much with your fraud losses; if anything, they will compound them. Full Answer

Q: What do you think about risk vs. prevention? Has everyone “already been breached” as some analysts say?

Good cybersecurity is not about eliminating risks, but rather about managing them to an acceptable degree. There are trade-offs between security and usability, for example, or between security and privacy to a degree. I don’t believe that everyone has already been breached — not to the degree they’ve had material losses. But give it time, sure. Full Answer

Q: What about “hacktivists”?

I have a grudging respect for a lot of people involved in traditional cybercrime activities; they may have predictable and highly suspect justifications for their actions, but a lot of these guys truly are pros and have really dedicated themselves to their profession. But that’s never stopped me from outing someone who has sloppy operational security. Full Answer

Go check out the whole thing.

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May 2014: The month in email

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Laura finished a multi-year project with M3AAWG, the Messaging, Malware and Mobile Anti-Abuse Working Group (look for the results to be published later this year) and continued working with clients on interesting delivery challenges and program opportunities. Steve focused on development on the next version release of Abacus, our flagship abuse desk tool, which will also be available later this year.
And as always, we had things to say about email.
The World of Spam and Email Best Practices
We started the month with a bit of a meta-discussion on senders’ fears of being labeled spammers, and reiterated what we always say: sending mail that some people don’t want doesn’t make you evil, but it is an opportunity to revisit your email programs and see if there are opportunities to better align your goals with the needs of people on your email lists. We outlined how we’ve seen people come around to this position after hitting spamtraps. That said, sometimes it is just evil. And it’s still much the same evil it’s been for over a decade.
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Gmail, Gmail, Gmail
Our friends over at Litmus estimate Gmail market share at 12%, which seems pretty consistent with the percentage of blog posts we devote to the topic, yes? We had a discussion of Campaign Monitor’s great Gmail interview, and offered some thoughts on why we continue to encourage clients to focus on engagement and relevance in developing their email programs. We also wrote a post about how Gmail uses filters, which is important for senders to understand as they create campaigns.
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He also wrote a detailed explanation of how TLS encryption works with SMTP to protect email in transit, and followed that with additional information on message security throughout the life of the message. This is a great set of posts to explore if you’re thinking about security and want to understand potential vulnerabilities.
DKIM
Steve also wrote a series of posts about working with DKIM (DomainKeys Identified Mail), the specification for signing messages to identify and claim responsibility for messages. He started with a detailed explanation of DKIM Replay Attacks, which happens when valid email is forwarded or otherwise compromised by spammers, phishers or attackers. Though the DKIM signature persists (by design) through a forward, the DKIM specification restricts an attacker’s ability to modify the message itself. Steve’s post describes how senders can optimize their systems to further restrict these attacks. Another way that attackers attempt to get around DKIM restrictions is by injecting additional headers into the message, which can hijack a legitimately signed message. If you’re concerned about these sort of attacks (and we believe you should be), it’s worth learning more about DKIM Key Rotation to help manage this. (Also of note: we have some free DKIM management tools available in the WiseTools section of our site.)
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