Nashville Technology Council

We hope that you all enjoyed the 10th Annual InfoSec conference this past week.  This year, InfoSec10 hosted over 458 IT security professionals at the Nashville Convention Center, making this year’s conference the largest InfoSec to date!

Nashville Technology Council Member Bruce McCully of Dynamic Edge wrote this insightful blog post about his discoveries while attending the InfoSec breakout sessions and panels.  What was the most valuable take away you got from InfoSec?  Let us know in the comments!

According to a 2009 Symantec Study, cyber crime is now the most profitable criminal activity– just ahead of drug trafficking.

What are they after? Access to your data. They want account numbers, social security numbers and personal information. Today, these threats come from all over the world. No longer is the average hacker a bored college techie. Now, there are warehouses of children in Russia that are paid cash per SSN harvested. They have the time and motivation to exploit any and all weaknesses in our networks.

The worst part is there is a weakness in every network that no firewall or virus software can eliminate. The people using it. The number one way criminals gain access to your network is by misleading a user into inviting them in. One wrong click and they have everything they need to rob you blind and destroy your business.

Here’s the scoop: the criminal does some research and crafts an email specifically directed at one of your employees. It says something about saving money on healthcare or another work related topic to peak their interest. There’s a link and a form that the user is asked to fill out. Here’s what’s new to this trick—the email appears to come from someone inside the office, usually their boss.

By clicking on the form, the user gives the criminal control of their computer. That night, the criminal uses access to the user’s machine to break into the company server. He then has free will to harvest and destroy your data as he pleases.

The best targets for these crimes are businesses that do not have a full time IT person. These businesses usually depend on a tech guy to come out and fix stuff when it breaks. The biggest problem here is that most of them don’t even know they’ve been hacked until it’s too late. A recent study found that last year 40% of small businesses were hacked. Half of them didn’t even know they were attacked.

What can you do? Train your people, blog about it, tell your mom, and make sure that you don’t click on anything that you are not expecting. If you’re ever suspicious, ask whoever supposedly sent you the e-mail if it’s legit. Just remember, the email is may not be from who it says it is.

I learned about this new threat 3 days ago when the Nashville Technology Counsel hosted Infosec. I haven’t told my mother yet, or trained my staff, but I did blog about it. Tell your friends folks. This threat is real.

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Sponsored by SHI

The panelists were from Nashville, Chattanooga, Texas, and New Jersey and represented both the business, legal, and technical side of eDiscovery.  They included Jonathan D. Rose, Bradley, Arant, Boult, Cummings, LLP; Clinton Sanko, Baker, Donelson, Bearman, Caldwell & Berkowitz, PC; Ken Due, Symantec; and Michael Rutty, IAM Field Enablement Specialist, CommVault.  Bryan Huddelston of Microsoft moderated the panel discussion.

According to Wikipedia, “Electronic discovery (or e-discovery) refers to discovery in civil litigation which deals with information in electronic format also referred to as Electronically Stored Information (ESI). Electronic information is different from paper information because of its intangible form, volume, transience and persistence.”

We were pleasantly surprised to know there is a flow process for this kind of sophisticated process called Electronic Discovery Reference Model and also an XML extension (EDRMXML).  XML stands for Extensible Markup Language to refresh your memory.  This allows the user to add code to documents to enhance standardized search, storage, and processing of documents.  In large corporations, this could help save millions of dollars in costly legal proceedings each year.  Ken Due from Symantec pointed to a study of $10 per click to review email as an average cost.

The industry of eDiscovery changed dramatically with new Federal Rules in 2006.  In essence it made C-Suite executives stakeholders in the legal process for document presentment.

The panelist received a few laughs and snickers with comments about how IT and Legal don’t always work together well.  The best quote of the night was from Clinton who described an image of a dog barking at night.  His wife reminded him that he should think “I need help” every time he hears the dog bark, not an annoying dog barking for no reason.

So from an ROI building perspective, when legal comes looking for documents, don’t think of them as just an annoying dog barking, but as an opportunity to help them and yourselves.  Like Disaster Recovery of this past decade, eDiscovery is an expensive process and not required on a day-to-day basis.  But when you need it, you need it now.  It is an opportunity for IT to align further with your company’s business objectives and create systems and process for document procurement for future law suit evidence.

So when the next law suit from a customer or an employee comes along, you have three options:
1. Pay
2. Fight
3. Wait it out.

In the meantime, why not proactively reach out to your in-house counsel and see if you can work more effectively together in crafting a strategy for eDiscovery.

The Nashville Tech Story (9/14/2009)

With the advancements that are taking place online and the constant growth of social media sites such as Twitter and Facebook, it is becoming more and more difficult to keep personal information secure.  Even if you do not own a Twitter or Facebook account, or if you have never used the Internet, your classified information is still at risk.

Ever wonder how much your sensitive personal information costs?

Symantec is planning to launch an Online Risk Calculator to help users determine how much their online information is worth on the black market.  A risk rating scale is included, which calculates the value based on demographics, online activity, and estimated value of online information.

The program begins by surveying the user about his/her gender, age and online assets and then asks for an estimated value of that information.  It will then question whether security software is used and how cautious you are when you work online.  This program is about gaining awareness to help users stop the loss of data before it takes place.

On the black market today, a criminal could gain access to your sensitive data for as little as $11.  Once the data has been compromised, it can cost large amounts of money and time to not only report the crime, but to fix your credit rating.

Helpful hint:

Use a security program with antivirus, firewall, and intrusion detection/prevention software and make sure to keep your OS and browsers up-to-date.

Want to learn more about Symantec and Data Loss Prevention practices?  Be sure to visit our InfoSec Conference on September 17th to hear Jennifer Ellard, Senior Product Marketing Manager of Symantec’s DLP Division speak.  More information can be found on the conference by clicking here.

The Nashville Tech Story (9/3/2009)

This is just another reason why people, in Nashville, should be flocking to the InfoSec Security conference, on September 17th, at the Nashville Convention Center.  Symantec recently released a news statement issuing a warning about a new malicious software pack that can hack into our VoIP conversations.

The new Trojan horse virus, Trojan.Peskyspy, has mainly targeted to the online VoIP tool, Skype.  Symantec, who will be speaking at our InfoSec conference on Data Loss Prevention, reported that Skype may have been targeted due to its large customer base.

The virus with the ability to travel through Windows APIs, intercepts audio streams and turns them into MP3 files, which is then sent over a remote channel to a remote electronic eavesdropper.  This is one in a list of many attacks hackers have executed on the social media world.

Most recently, Facebook experienced an attack that targeted the contact information of certain users.  If you were one of the many foolish Facebook users that posted your phone number online, your information was made public to all those in your “friends” account.  Currently, the experts at Symantec are not anticipating the malicious code will be used to launch a more significant attack.

Just a couple of helpful hints to avoid being attacked by a virus:

1.  Make sure you have the most up-to-date virus software for your computer.

2.  Don’t open any attachments from email addresses with which you are unfamiliar.

3.  Try to avoid downloading spyware to your computer such as Weatherbug.

To hear from the experts of Symantec, click here for more information on attending our upcoming InfoSec Security conference, on September 17th.