Way to go Equifax

Earlier this month I wrote about how we can’t trust Equifax with our personal data. I’m not sure we can trust them with a cotton ball. Today, we discover Equifax has been sending consumers worried about their personal information leaking to the wrong site.

[O]n multiple occasions over the span of weeks, the company’s official Twitter account responded to customer inquiries by apparently directing them to a fake phishing site called www.securityequifax2017.com.
Luckily, the fake site — blocked or flagged by many Internet browsers, then taken down Wednesday afternoon — was set up by software engineer Nick Sweeting to educate people rather than steal their information. A banner on the top read: “Cybersecurity Incident & Important Consumer Information Which Is Totally Fake, Why Did Equifax Use A Domain That’s So Easily Impersonated By Phishing Sites?” NPR

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Happy New Year!

Well, we mostly survived 2016. A year ago I was making predictions about how 2016 would be the year of email security. I was thinking of things like TLS and authentication and access to the inbox. It wasn’t out of the question, Gmail said they’d be turning on p=reject sometime mid-year. They also were suggesting that they would be putting more value on messages that aligned, even in the absence of a DMARC signature. The first still hasn’t happened, and the second doesn’t appear to be in place, either.
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That doesn’t mean email security wasn’t a hot topic in 2016. In fact, the use of a private email server was a major topic during the US elections. We also had spear-phishing play a major role in the compromise of campaign systems. I didn’t talk much about that here when it happened, but news reports make it clear that Chairman Podesta and others were targeted for compromise. The NY Times has a more in depth article with broader context around the attacks and how emails were used to infiltrate a major political party.
The irony is with all the time spent talking about how insecure the private server was, that server wasn’t compromised. Instead, the compromise was at Gmail.
We all need to pay attention to our email and how we use it. It also means when we’re sending bulk and marketing email we need to consider the private and personal information we’re putting in messages. Do you send PII? Is there a way you don’t have to? What can we do to protect our brand and our users?
It’s not just bulk email we need to think about, either. Personal email can contain PII, or personal information. A common saying among some of my security friends is “never put in email anything you wouldn’t want to see on the front page of the Washington Post or NY Times.” That’s an easy thing to say, but the convenience of email makes it easy to share information that we may not want on the front page of either paper. Many of us aren’t actually targets of malicious activity so we don’t have to worry about being targeted the way elected and other officials are. But that doesn’t mean we are not at risk. It just means we’re at less risk than others.
Email is a frequent vector for malicious actors to access computers. Most, if not all of the major breeches in the last few years have started with a phishing attack of some sort. The attacks are planned out and sophisticated. This is not going to get better. The phishers are smart and plan the attacks.  We also need to be more personally aware of security given the current political climate. We need to take steps to protect ourselves more than we have in the past.
Security is more important than ever and we all need to protect ourselves.

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Email address as identity

A few months ago I was talking about different mailbox tools and mentioned email addresses are the keys to our online identity. They are, email addresses are the magic key that authenticates us and opens access to different accounts.
The bad guys know this too. The Justice department recently announced a plea deal related to compromised email accounts. The individual in question gained access to faculty, staff and student email accounts. They then used access to these accounts to access Facebook, iCloud, Google, LinkedIn and Yahoo accounts.
https://twitter.com/pwnallthethings/status/897930523120738304
https://twitter.com/pwnallthethings/status/897931383431061504
https://twitter.com/pwnallthethings/status/897932050111406081
Mediapost published an article this week referencing a survey performed at this year’s BlackHat conference.

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The Cyber and The Security

Cybersecurity has been on my mind lately. There is a lot of bad stuff going on, from giant dDOS attacks, to subscription bombing, to the ongoing low level harassment that some people have to deal with on a daily basis. I’ve written a lot about how I think marketers are going to have to step up and stop being a conduit for abuse. I do believe this. There are a lot of different issues to discuss but there are also many, many different stake holders in the issue of cybersecurity.
I’ve been on multiple calls with different groups over the last few weeks discussing the implications of the subscription attack and how it was carried out. The majority of my focus is email and how to protect senders from becoming a conduit for abuse. Other folks participating on the call are looking at what abuse is out there and how to stop it or minimize it.
One thing that came up on a recent call is that the bulk of dDOS traffic that took Brian Krebs’ website down was from various Internet of Things devices. Security cameras, DVD players, televisions, lightbulbs and other connected devices were part of the problem. It’s a huge issue, and one that cannot simply be mitigated by just ISPs and providers. But convincing individuals to secure their lightbulbs can be a challenge, we can’t even protect their computers completely. Convincing companies to stop providing default usernames and passwords or using the same keys for every device is another challenge.
These are big issues that we’re going to have to deal with.
Last night, with 100 million of my virtual friends and a small group of local ones, I watched the first Presidential debate. Part of the debate was about cyber security. To misquote Vice President Biden, “Cybersecurity is a big freaking deal.” We have nation states, and groups with the resources of nation states, conducting covert operations online. We have hacking, compromises, bonnets and other malicious activity occurring every, single day. And, the more complex the site and the more users it has the more likely it is to be compromised. Cybersecurity is a critical part of national security and our own individual security. We must take it seriously and we must address it.
Now, I’ll be honestI don’t think there is a solution to the problem. I think, though, that there are hundreds of things we can do as individuals, as companies, as nations, as volunteer organizations, as NGOs and as coalitions to solve different parts of the problem. We all need to think about what it is and who’s doing the bad stuff.
It’s common to think of hackers as lonely boys in basements who have too much time and too little to do. Back in the ancient days of the spam wars some folks referred to them as “chickenboners“: beer drinking rednecks who ate fried chicken and threw the bones on the floors of their trailers. The reality even then, though, was that many spammers ran businesses and made a lot of money. Admittedly, the descriptions of how the business was run are cringe inducing and full of illegal activity.
Now, much of the hacking is actually organized crime outside the US. This makes it hard to address successfully through legal channels.
It’s all very complicated. But I think we can agree security is a big deal. We are all part of the solution, by securing our sites and our personal devices. We’re also part of the solution by paying attention to the larger issues and events going on around us.
 
 
 
 

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