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Enterprise role management is key in efficiently managing user access rights and enforcing access policies such as segregation of duties. Roles help companies group coarse- and fine-grained access rights (like access to and functionality within a financial accounts application) into groups, called enterprise roles. These enterprise roles map to job functions and are only allowed access rights that don't violate segregation of duties. For instance, a financial clerk role can't contain fine-grained access rights that allow someone in the role to access the accounts receivable and accounts payable parts of the financial application. The processes and tools necessary for effective role management consist of role mining and design (automatic discovery and management of roles based on existing access rights and entitlements data), role recertification (a process performed typically every six months when a business role custodian certifies what access rights should belong to a role), and access recertification (a process performed typically every 3-6 months to ensure all user access is understood and was granted in an audited way).

You systems administrator knows more about you than you think.

More than one-third of information technology professionals abuse administrative passwords to access confidential data such as colleagues' salary details or board-meeting minutes, according to a survey. Data security company Cyber-Ark surveyed more than 400 senior IT professionals in the United States and Britain, and found that 35 percent admitted to snooping, while 74 percent said they could access information that was not relevant to their role. In a similar survey 12 months ago, 33 percent of IT professionals admitted to snooping. "Employee snooping on sensitive information continues unabated," Udi Mokady, CEO of Cyber-Ark, said in a statement. Cyber-Ark said the most common areas respondents indicated they access are HR records, followed by customer databases, M&A plans, layoff lists and lastly, marketing information. "While seemingly innocuous, (unmanaged privileged) accounts provide workers with the 'keys to the kingdom,' allowing them to access critically sensitive information," Mokady said. When IT professionals were asked what kind of data they would take with them if fired, the survey found a jump compared with a year ago in the number of respondents who said they would take proprietary data and information that is critical to maintaining competitive advantage and corporate security. The survey found a six-fold increase in staff who would take financial reports or merger and acquisition plans, and a four-fold increase in those who would take CEO passwords and research and development plans.

As I mentioned two weeks ago, a recent survey indicates that more than half of large companies have limited knowledge of which systems or applications their employees have access to. This marks a system access problem, and a growing risk during a period of frequent and large layoffs. If a company needs to turn off access manually (which is often the case), it may miss several user accounts that they don't realize exist. This leaves the door open for past employees, and others, to access important data, including financial information and customer information. To learn more about these open-door system risks, I asked Courion vice president Kurt Johnson about his firm's research.

Times are tough, and we all continue to hear about the heightened risk of the insider threat. Granted, unauthorized insider access to data has always been a concern. But the concern is increased now because of the tremendous changes that we are seeing in the economy. The term "disgruntled employee" now has a whole new meaning because there are more and more folks concerned about 'What if my job disappears? What kind of information can I keep? What kind of information can I have access to?' As one who's dealt with the insider threat, I have some questions of my own: What do you really mean by an insider? In our borderless world, the terms "insider" and "outsider" overlap. "Insiders" are not just employees and staff, but also service providers, business partners, consultants, contractors -- any number of parties who may work for companies we deal with. What do we really mean by an authorized versus an unauthorized insider? If you take a look at the Societe Generale situation, allegedly a fraud was committed by an authorized user with privileges he was not supposed to have. How? Well, the horribly overused cliché is that if you work with a company long enough, eventually you will have access to everything, and no one will know it. Bottom line: As people change jobs within a company, we are not good at updating their roles and responsibilities. If you look at all the efforts that have been spent on identity and access management products, the biggest challenge is trying to understand: What are the roles and responsibilities you are trying to apply to people? How do you develop these roles and responsibilities and how do group them? How do you really deal with people who have to change roles and responsibilities? How do you add and delete roles and responsibilities as people change jobs?

"Two L.A. traffic engineers who pleaded guilty to hacking into the city's signal system and slowing traffic at key intersections as part of a labor protest have been sentenced to two years' probation. Authorities said that Gabriel Murillo, 40, and Kartik Patel, 37, hacked into the system in 2006 despite the city's efforts to block access during a labor action. Fearful that the strikers could wreak havoc, the city temporarily blocked all engineers from access to the computer that controls traffic signals. But authorities said Patel and Murillo found a way in and picked their targets with care -- intersections they knew would cause significant backups because they were close to freeways and major destinations. The engineers programmed the signals so that red lights for several days starting Aug. 21, 2006 would be extremely long on the most congested approaches to the intersections, causing gridlock. Cars backed up at Los Angeles International Airport, at a key intersection in Studio City, at access onto the clogged Glendale Freeway and throughout the streets of Little Tokyo and the L.A. Civic Center area, sources told The Times at the time. No accidents occurred as a result. As part of their plea deal, the engineers agreed to pay $6,250 in restitution and completed 240 hours of community service."

The U.S. Department of Justice's indictment of Albert Gonzalez on Monday seems to have all the elements of a Hollywood crime drama: A hacker gains access to millions of credit and debit card numbers and has the power to take down a nation. Too bad for Tinseltown, the attack itself was about as sexy and a pile of routers. According to the indictment, Gonzalez, 28, gained a foothold into the systems of credit card processors such as Heartland Payment Systems ( HPY - news - people ) and retailers like OfficeMax ( OMX - news - people ), Barnes & Noble ( BKS - news - people ) and TJX Cos. ( TJX - news - people ) using an amateur hacking technique called "wardriving," which uses wireless access points to find vulnerable networks from which to launch attacks. Once connected to those private networks, Gonzalez used a well-known technique called "SQL injection" to trick Web applications into forking over private information that gave him deeper access into networks. Even though it sounds complicated, techies liken this kind of hack to simply turning the front doorknob to get into a house.

The Kaiser Permanente hospital in Bellflower has been hit with a $187,500 fine for failing for a second time to prevent unauthorized access to confidential patient information, state pubic health officials said today. [Updated at 3 p.m.: A spokesman for the hospital said the fine was part of the ongoing investigation into employees improperly accessing the medical records of Nadya Suleman and her children. Disciplinary action has been taken against the employees, said Jim Anderson, a hospital spokesman. All the incidents occurred in January; a previous post said they had occurred in April and May.] State officials said Kaiser Permanente Bellflower Medical Center compromised the privacy of four patients when eight employees improperly accessed records. This is the second penalty against the hospital, officials said. The hospital was fined $250,000 in May for failing to keep employees from snooping in the medical records of Nadya Suleman, the woman who set off a media frenzy after giving birth to octuplets in January. The fine was the first penalty imposed and largest allowed under a new state law enacted last year after the widely publicized violations of privacy at UCLA Medical Center involving Farrah Fawcett, Britney Spears, California First Lady Maria Shriver and other celebrities. "We are very concerned with violations of patient confidentiality and their potential harm to the residents of California," said Dr. Mark Horton, director of the California Department of Public Health. "Medical privacy is a fundamental right and a critical component of quality medical care in California."

A New Jersey credit-card processor disclosed a data breach that analysts said may rank among the biggest ever reported. Heartland Payment Systems Inc. said Tuesday that cyber criminals compromised its computer network, gaining access to customer information associated with the 100 million card transactions it handles each month. The company said it couldn't estimate how many customer records may have been improperly accessed, but said the data compromised include the information on a card's magnetic strip -- card number, expiration date and some internal bank codes -- that could be used to duplicate a card. Heartland, of Princeton, N.J., processes transactions for more than 250,000 businesses nationwide, including restaurants and smaller retailers. Avivah Litan, an analyst at research company Gartner, called it the largest card-data breach ever, based on her conversations with industry executives. Previously, the largest known breach occurred when around 45 million card numbers were stolen from retail company TJX Cos. in 2005 and 2006. Robert Baldwin, Heartland's president and chief financial officer, said it was too early to say how many records were accessed and that calling it the largest-ever breach would be "speculative." Representatives of Visa Inc. and MasterCard Inc. alerted Heartland to a pattern of fraudulent transactions on accounts the processor handled sometime last fall, Mr. Baldwin said. But an internal investigation and audits failed to detect a security breach. Last week, however, a forensic investigator discovered evidence of the breach. Mr. Baldwin said Heartland was targeted with malicious software that was "light-years more sophisticated" than malevolent programs commonly downloaded from the Internet.

"Fomer UCLA Healthcare System researcher Huping Zhou has pleaded guilty to violating parts of the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act and could be one of the first people in the country convicted under the law, federal authorities announced Friday. After learning he was to be let go, the 48-year-old is alleged to have accessed the UCLA patient records system 323 times during the three-week period, mostly to check out the files of celebrities, according to the U.S. Attorney's Office. The names of the targeted stars have not been revealed. Federal authorities say Zhou admitted to accessing the records -- cruising files that were not necessary to view as part of his job -- under a plea agreement. He'll face a judge for sentencing March 22. It's not clear what kind of punishment the U.S. Attorney's Office will recommend in exchange for his cooperation."

A former Fannie Mae IT contractor has been indicted for planting a virus that would have nuked the mortgage agency's computers, caused millions of dollars in damages and even shut down operations. How'd this happen? The contractor was terminated, but his server privileges were not. Rajendrasinh Makwana was indicted on Tuesday in the U.S. District Court for Maryland (press report, complaint and indictment PDFs). From early 2006 to Oct. 24, Makwana was a contractor for Fannie Mae. According to the indictment, Makwana allegedly targeted Fannie Mae's network after he was terminated. The goal was to "cause damage to Fannie Mae's computer network by entering malicious code that was intended to execute on January 31, 2009." And given Fannie Mae-along with Freddie Mac-was nationalized in an effort to stabilize the mortgate market Makwana could caused a good bit of havoc. Makwana worked at Fannie Mae's data center in Urbana, MD as a Unix engineer as a contractor with a firm called OmniTech. He had root access to all Fannie Mae servers. The tale of Makwana malware bomb plot is a warning shot to all security teams and IT departments. Given the level of layoffs we've seen lately the ranks of disgruntled former employees is likely to grow. Is there any company NOT lopping off a big chunk of its workforce? And some of these workers may even have Makwana's access privileges and knowledge of the corporate network.

"If you live in Texas, your medical records are definitely up for sale by the state. If you live anywhere else in the United States, they probably are for sale there, too. Medical health records provide key information to researchers, who have lobbied hard to keep them accessible, despite government concerns about the privacy of patient data. The controversy dates back to 1996, when Congress passed the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) to protect patients. "Researchers have very broad access rights to health care records under HIPAA," says Pam Dixon, director of a non-profit called the World Privacy Forum "The rules are pretty loose, and there are a lot of ways to get around them." That's especially true since the act wasn't designed to cover common scenarios today: records stored online in a vast, hackable cloud. In the rush to digitize all electronic health records, Dixon says not everyone is taking the proper steps to de-personalize the data and protect patients."

"Important personal information, such as social security numbers, names and zip codes, of many Notre Dame employees was exposed to the Internet after the University accidentally placed the information in a publicly accessible location. The data breach affected about 24,000 employees, including some students who work for the University, Gordon Wishon, associate vice president of information technology and the University's chief information officer, said. The personal information that was exposed will no longer be accessible because the University immediately removed it from the Internet and secured it, he said. "

Individuals have been at risk of having their personal information stolen and used to commit identity-related crimes long before the emergence of the Internet. What the Information Age has changed, however, is the method by which identity thieves can access and exploit the personal information of others. One method in particular leaves hundreds of thousands, and in some cases tens of millions, of individuals at risk for identity theft: large scale data breaches by skilled hackers. In this method, criminals remotely access the computer systems of government agencies, universities, merchants, financial institutions, credit card companies, and data processors, and steal large volumes of personal information on individuals. Such large scale data breaches have revolutionized the identity theft landscape as it relates to fraud on existing accounts through the use of compromised credit and debit card account information. Large scale data breaches would be of no more concern than small scale identity thefts if criminals were unable to quickly and widely distribute the stolen information for subsequent fraudulent use (assuming, of course, that the breach would be quickly detected). Such wide-scale global distribution of stolen information has been made possible for criminals with the advent of criminal websites, known as "carding forums," dedicated to the sale of stolen personal and financial information. These websites allow criminals to quickly sell the fruits of their ill-gotten gains to thousands of eager fraudsters

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Banks and financial firms are placing more emphasis on internal threats to cut the flow of data leakage as a result of employee mistakes or workers disgruntled with layoffs and downsizing during the economic crisis, according to a recent survey. The report, "Protecting What Matters: The Sixth Annual Global Security Survey," is based on a Deloitte survey of 250 CISOs in the financial-services industry. It found that 36% of respondents believe the internal threat represents the greatest risk to organizations, compared to 13% who said external threats are the biggest concern. Mark Steinhoff, head of Deloitte's financial services security and privacy practices, said an organization's biggest mistake would be to let its guard down. While the number of security breaches may have declined over the last year, cybercriminals are not rationing back their efforts. "The number of breaches that are occurring are really at the hands of insiders and organizations are understanding that there is a real threat of malicious attacks and exposure of personal information by insiders," Steinhoff said. The failing economy may be driving the increased concern over insider threats, Steinoff said. "The climate we're in today causes concerns about disgruntled employees," he said. "We are seeing the layoffs and other forms of downsizing. Frankly with limited budget and less than satisfied employees, it really raises the parameter on that threat." Human error is the leading cause of information systems failure, and is likely to be the main cause of security attacks in the near future, according to 86% of those surveyed. To protect against employee mistakes that lead to a breach, financial firms should focus on risk rather than compliance to protect themselves, Steinhoff said. "[Organizations] need to look at what they want to protect and look at various types of threats internally and evaluate who has access to the data and who has access to which system, and approach it from that persp

One of the more interesting panel discussions at the IDC Cloud Computing Forum on Feb 18th in San Francisco was about managing the complexities of security, privacy and compliance in the Cloud. The simple answer according to panelists Carolyn Lawson, CIO of California Public Utilities Commission, and Michael Mucha, CISO of Stanford Hospital and Clinics is "it ain't easy!" "Both of us, in government and in health, are on the front-lines," Lawson proclaimed. "Article 1 of the California Constitution guarantees an individual's right to privacy and if I violate that I've violated a public trust. That's a level of responsibility that most computer security people don't have to face. If I violate that trust I can end up in jail or hauled before the legislature," she said. "Of course, these days with the turmoil in the legislature, she joked, "the former may be preferable to the later." Stanford's Mucha said that his security infrastructure was built on a two-tiered approach using identity management and enterprise access control. Mucha said that the movement to computerize heath records nationwide was moving along in fits and starts, as shown by proposed systems likeMicrosoft (NSDQ: MSFT)'s Health Vault and Google (NSDQ: GOOG)'s Personal Health Record. "The key problem is who is going to pay for the computerized of health records. It's not as much of a problem at Stanford as it is at a lot of smaller hospitals, but it's still a huge problem." Mucha said that from his perspective security service providers in the cloud and elsewhere are dealing with a shrinking security parameter or fence, which is progressing from filing cabinets, to devices, to files, and finally to the individual, who under the latest Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) privacy rules has certain rights, including rights to access and amend their health information and to obtain a record of when and why their Protected Health Information (PHI) record has bee

Republican politicians on Thursday called for a sweeping new federal law that would require all Internet providers and operators of millions of Wi-Fi access points, even hotels, local coffee shops, and home users, to keep records about users for two years to aid police investigations. The legislation, which echoes a measure proposed by one of their Democratic colleagues three years ago, would impose unprecedented data retention requirements on a broad swath of Internet access providers and is certain to draw fire from businesses and privacy advocates. "While the Internet has generated many positive changes in the way we communicate and do business, its limitless nature offers anonymity that has opened the door to criminals looking to harm innocent children," U.S. Sen. John Cornyn, a Texas Republican, said at a press conference on Thursday. "Keeping our children safe requires cooperation on the local, state, federal, and family level." Joining Cornyn was Texas Rep. Lamar Smith, the senior Republican on the House Judiciary Committee, and Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott, who said such a measure would let "law enforcement stay ahead of the criminals."

A consumer reporting agency that failed to properly screen prospective customers and, as a result, sold at least 318 credit reports to identity thieves, has agreed to settle Federal Trade Commission charges that it violated federal law. Under the settlement, the company and its principal must ensure that they provide credit reports only to legitimate businesses for lawful purposes, use a comprehensive information security program, and obtain independent audits every other year for 20 years. The settlement also imposes a $500,000 penalty but suspends payment due to the defendants' inability to pay. According to the FTC, the defendants use sensitive financial data from other consumer reporting agencies to create reports that landlords use to assess potential renters. These reports contain consumers' names, Social Security numbers, birth dates, bank and credit card account numbers, credit histories, and other personal information. The Commission alleges that the company failed to properly screen new customers. The company allegedly requested only publicly-available information from applicants seeking credit reports, and it did not request supporting documentation to establish that an applicant was actually a landlord renting property. As a result, identity thieves posing as property owners were given an account with unlimited online access to credit reports, and the account was used to access at least 318 reports containing sensitive personal information. The FTC charged the defendants with violating the Fair Credit Reporting Act (FCRA) by furnishing credit reports to persons who did not have a permissible purpose to obtain them, and by failing to maintain reasonable procedures to prevent such impermissible disclosures and to verify their customers' identities and how they intended to use the information. The agency also charged them with violating the FTC Act by failing to employ reasonable and appropriate security measures to protect sensitive consumer inform

Cloud services are now vulnerable to malicious use, a security company has suggested, after a techie worked out how Amazon's EC2 service could be used as a BitTorrent file harvester and host. Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) is a web service software developers can use to access computing, compilation and software trialling power on a dynamic basis, without having to install the resources locally. Now a developer, Brett O'Connor, has come up with a step-by-step method for using the same service to host an open source BitTorrent application called TorrentFlux. Getting this up and running on Amazon would require some technical know-how, but would be within the reach of a moderately experienced user, right down to following O'Connor's command line low-down on how to install the public TorrentFlux app straight to Amazon's EC2 rather than a user's local machine. Finding an alternative way of using BitTorrent matters to hardcore file sharers because ISPs and admins alike are increasingly keen to block such bandwidth-eating traffic on home and business links, and O'Connor's EC2 guide was clearly written to that end - using the Amazon service would make such blocking unlikely. "I created a web-based, open-source Bittorrent 'machine' that liberated my network and leveraged Amazon's instead," says O'Connor. He then quips "I can access it from anywhere, uploading Torrent files from wherever, and manage them from my iPhone." However, security company GSS claims the guide shows the scope for possible abuse, using EC2 to host or 'seed' non-legitimate BitTorrent file distribution. "This means, says Hobson, that hackers and other interested parties can simply use a prepaid (and anonymous) debit card to pay the $75 a month fee to Amazon and harvest BitTorrent applications at high speed with little or no chance of detection," said David Hobson of GSS. "The danger here is that companies may find their staff FTPing files from Amazon EC2 - a completely legitimate domain -

Hackers broke into the Federal Aviation Administration's computer system last week, accessing the names and national identification numbers of 45,000 employees and retirees, a union leader says. Tom Waters, president of American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees Local 3290, said FAA officials briefed union leaders Monday about the security breach. FAA spokeswoman Laura Brown confirmed the agency's computers were hacked last week. Story continues below ↓advertisement | your ad here Waters said union leaders were told hackers gained access to two files. One file had the names and Social Security numbers of 45,000 employees and retirees on the FAA's rolls as of February 2006. Social Security is the U.S. government-directed pension system, and in the absence of a national identity card, other people's social security numbers can be used to steal identities for illicit purposes. Waters said the other file contained medical information that was encrypted. "These government systems should be the best in the world, and apparently they are able to be compromised," said Waters, an FAA contracts attorney. "Our information technology systems people need to take a long hard look at themselves and their capabilities. This is malpractice in their world." FAA officials told union leaders the incident was the first of its kind at the agency. But Waters said his union complained about three or four years ago about an incident in which employees received anti-union mail that used names and addresses that appeared to be generated from FAA computer files.

In Deloitte's sixth annual Global Security Survey, people are the problem. "[P]eople continue to be an organization's greatest asset as well as its greatest worry," Adel Melek, global leader of security and privacy services at Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu, said in the report. "That has not changed from 2007. What has changed is the environment. The economic meltdown was not at its peak when respondents took this survey. If there was ever an environment more likely to facilitate an organization's people being distracted, nervous, fearful, or disgruntled, this is it. To state that security vigilance is even more important at a time like this is an understatement." On one level, that couldn't be more obvious: It's not as if anyone worries about squirrels hacking servers; security has always been about people. (Robots, the report says, are unlikely to replace the human workforce during the lifetime of anyone reading the report. Finally, some good employment news.) Yet despite the obviousness of the problem, the obvious solution -- complete denial of access -- doesn't work. People use computers and computers are more useful when connected and it just gets worse from there. That may explain why identity and access management remained top of mind for survey respondents. Deloitte's survey, drawn from major financial companies around the globe, focuses on governance, investment, risk, use of security technologies, quality of operations, and privacy. It includes some good news -- external breaches have declined sharply over the past year -- and troublesome news -- fewer companies say they have the commitment and funding to address regulatory compliance. In terms of risk, specifically information systems failure, people are identified as the most significant vulnerability. "Human error is overwhelmingly stated as the greatest weakness this year (86%), followed by technology (a distant 63%)," the report states. It attributes the rising risk to increased adoption of new techno