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The following is an excerpt from the book The Truth About Identity Theft. In this section of Chapter 11: Social Engineering (.pdf), author Jim Stickley explains how easy it really is to hack a password. People often ask me how hard it is to hack a password. In reality, it is rare that I ever need to hack someone's password. Though there are numerous ways to gain passwords on a network and hundreds, if not thousands, of tools available to crack encrypted passwords, in the end I have found that it is far easier to simply ask for them. A perfect example of this type of attack was a medium-sized bank that I was testing recently. The bank's concern was related to the new virtual private network (VPN) capabilities it had rolled out to a number of its staff. The VPN allowed staff to connect directly to their secured network while at home or on the road. There is no doubt that a VPN can increase productivity, but there are some pretty major risks that can come with that convenience. The bank explained that the VPN was tied into its Active Directory server. For people who are not technical, basically this just means that when employees log in via the VPN, they use the same credentials they use to log on to their computer at the office. So I went back to my office, sat down, and picked up the phone. The first call I made was to find out the name of an employee in the IT department. I called the company's main line to the bank, pressed 0, and asked to speak with someone in the IT department. I was asked what I was calling about, so I told the employee I was receiving emails from that bank that seemed malicious. I could have used a number of excuses, but I have found that if you tie in an unhappy customer with a potential security issue, your call gets further up the food chain. In this case, I reached a man who I will call Bill Smith. I made up a story about the email, and after a few minutes, he was able to explain to me that I had called the wrong bank and it was actuall

The first sign that something was wrong seemed harmless: A new Dell credit card arrived in my mail one afternoon. More landed in the mailbox the next day. Macy's. Bloomingdale's. Crate and Barrel. Radio Shack. Then later: Visa Sony, Toys R Us and Lowe's cards turned up. I didn't request any of these cards. My first call to Dell revealed what I suspected. Someone had applied for a credit card using my name. I felt violated and vulnerable. Then, it hit me: I've become a statistic, a victim of identity theft. A thief had taken my name, my credit and my identity and managed to spend more than $8,000 (money that, I'm grateful, I didn't have to pay). I still don't know who the culprit was or how it happened. All I know is that if this happened to me - a Sun Sentinel consumer affairs and watchdog reporter - it can happen to anybody. Thieves move quickly Identity theft is the fastest growing crime in the United States, according to the Federal Trade Commission, which enforces identity theft laws. Experts estimate 10 million Americans become victims of identity fraud each year. Last year, businesses lost $56.6 billion to ID theft, the commission said. I've spent hours on the phone talking to fraud investigators, credit bureaus and bank staff as I've tried to sort out the mess that is now mine to clean up. I was exhausted every time a call ended. Individual investigations, conducted by fraud departments for each of the credit card companies that issued accounts in my name, took months to complete before concluding I was a victim of ID fraud. But there is a bright side to this story. I thought I knew how to protect myself. But what I've learned through this experience has taught me that you can never be too careful. I also learned some hard lessons along the way about how best to safeguard my personal information in the future - and respond, if my identity is targeted again.

Emily Riley of Forrester Research presented a lot of data during her keynote presentation at today's OMMA Behavioral Conference but one point she made seemed rather salient to me: many of those marketers and data firms involved in behavioral targeting seem to skip over social media as a source of information. They might look at the data surrounding the usage of those sites but they seem to rarely do any actually monitoring, let alone interacting there. It reminded me of an experience I had with my wife. We once lived in a building where we didn't have much interaction with our neighbors, very little beyond an occasional wave in the hallway. We could, however see their mail mixed with ours and our landlord's. My wife began to notice that the landlord and our neighbor were starting to get similar envelopes from law firms. I, being the incurious mail sorter I am, didn't really think much of it. She, on the other hand, was convinced that one of them must be suing the other and was able to spin out some fairly detailed scenarios based on other clues from the hallway, the presence of exterminators one day, the thickness of paint on the front door etc. One day I encountered our neighbor in the hallway and did my customary wave. "Oh by the way," He said, "We're moving out next week." Oh really? He then regaled me with the entire story which involved a variety of things including an exterminator, paint thickness, and law firms. My wife and I were both able to glean essentially the same information. However if I had approached him and said, without any warning, "I bet you and our landlord are having one heckuva legal squabble," he probably would have punched me in the nose. I also believe that the ease with which I was able to get the whole story out of him suggests that had we interacted more it would have been I scooping my wife and not the other way around. These two approaches to gathering information are akin to the difference between following

"It was fascinating to read your thoughts about our recent conversation in CSO (see The Many Challenges of Finding Work as a CISO/CSO"). And when I say "fascinating," I mean in the sense of watching Nascar: a lot of predictable left turns and some really embarrassing, squirm-inducing shots of the fans. I do like you, I think you're a nice guy, and so I wanted to give you some feedback about the interview process and what you're going to need to change to be successful. I don't think you're going to enjoy reading this. But maybe some of those hours that you're spending maintaining that "vast database" of yours could be better spent understanding why we hired someone who understands they're an engineer."

One of the most enlightening articles I have seen on the value of security to corporate America.

A quick rant from me to you, dear readers. Yesterday I received an unsolicited email from a woman who was pitching me a service - one totally irrelevant to my life. In her signature, in which she included what she considers her credentials, she had the statement, "More than 2,000 followers on Twitter." I gasped, somewhat in horror. I laughed, full of humor. Twitter is fun and a great networking tool and business opportunities can stem from Twitter. I won't reiterate all of the ways because there are tons of existing resources. Yet as big as Twitter has become it's still not massively adopted. Using such a tagline in your credentials does one of two things: 1) makes schooled Twitter users laugh and 2) makes those unfamiliar with Twitter roll their eyes. For instance, HubSpot, a really cool inbound marketing firm, runs Twitter Grader, a way that Twitter users grade the reach of their feeds and profiles based on HubSpot's super secret algorithms. It's a fun tool - but it only measures folks against about a million or so other users (I think that's because it can only grade you against other folks who have graded themselves). It's also not the end all, be all of measuring Twitter influence.

In my last post, Behavioral Targeting, I mentioned that I used a home-grown form of customer tracking when I worked on Wall Street. I explain a bit more about that in this post. I will describe more about the process in a second part to this post.
Early Adopters
The competition in the financial se

It's funny. Was it just a month ago that we were enjoying the holiday respite, wondering what 2009 would have in store for us? Mind you, I didn't have any delusions. After the breaches, news events and regulatory issues of 2008, I didn't think we were going to turn the calendar page and emerge in a new world of a healthy economy and soaring consumer confidence. But neither did I think, four weeks later, we'd already have our first major security breach of the year - Heartland Payment Systems (HPY) and that it would so dominate our industry's attention. I get it, though, why we're so enamored of this case. It speaks to our biggest fears, first of all, that unknown electronic assailants can sneak into our systems and pry away our customers' names and critical information. Then there's the unknown enormity - we truly don't know how big this breach was. And, finally, it hits home. For you, the banking institution, you're the one left replacing your customers' cards and explaining why. For me, the banking customer ... well, mine is one of the banks doing the explaining. Needless to say, we're monitoring accounts closely. So, we were among the first to break the Heartland story when it first broke last Tuesday, and we've continued to follow it closely. After the initial media surge, where we saw news outlets and solutions providers tripping over one another to opine over what they think happened to Heartland and what it all means, here is what I believe we've learned so far from the case: 1) The Damage Goes Far Beyond the Breach. Heartland execs absolutely did the right thing by stepping forward last week and saying "We were breached," but the company has suffered for it ever since. The market responded to the news by gutting the company's value from over $14 per share last Tuesday to a low of just under $8 this week. Reputationally, you just can't measure the damage - Heartland is now synonymous with "breach," and that's a tough tag to shake. Unable to answer quest

A very heated reaction has followed the interview I conducted yesterday with Robert Carr, CEO of Heartland Payment Systems. One reader even said the resulting Q&A made his "blood boil." Why the outrage? Because Carr did something a lot of people find unacceptable. He threw someone else under the proverbial bus for his company's failure to keep customer credit and debit card numbers out of evil hands. Specifically, he thrust an angry finger at the QSAs who came in to inspect the security controls Heartland had in place to meet the requirements of PCI security. In the article, [Heartland CEO on Data Breach: QSAs Let Us Down] Carr said, "The audits done by our QSAs (Qualified Security Assessors) were of no value whatsoever. To the extent that they were telling us we were secure beforehand, that we were PCI compliant, was a major problem. The QSAs in our shop didn't even know this was a common attack vector being used against other companies. We learned that 300 other companies had been attacked by the same malware. I thought, 'You've got to be kidding me.' That people would know the exact attack vector and not tell major players in the industry is unthinkable to me. I still can't reconcile that." That one comment brought down the house, and not in a favorable way. "I just read Bill Brenner's interview with Heartland Payment Systems' CEO Bob Carr and truthfully, my blood is boiling," Mike Rothman, SVP of strategy at eIQnetworks and chief blogger at Security Incite wrote in a counterpoint piece CSOonline ran today. "Basically, he's throwing his QSA under the bus for the massive data breach that happened under his watch. Basically, because the QSA didn't find anything, therefore he should be off the hook. I say that's a load of crap."

A few weeks ago, I was very relieved to find out I had passed the IAPP exam to be a "Certified Information Privacy Professional" or CIPP. I got this certificate and even a pin, which is more than I ever got for passing the bar exams of New York and California. So what exactly did I need to know to become a CIPP? To be certified in corporate privacy law, you're expected to know what's covered in the CIPP Body of Knowledge, primarily major U.S. privacy laws and regulations and "the legal requirements for the responsible transfer of sensitive personal data to/from the United States, the European Union and other jurisdictions." You're also expected to pass the Certification Foundation, required for all three certifications offered by IAPP. That covers basic privacy law, both in the U.S. and abroad, information security principles and practices, and "online privacy," which includes an overview of the technologies used by online companies to collect information and the particular issues to be considered in this context. So what do you think? Should you be able to pass an all-objective, 180 question, three-hour exam (counting the CIPP and Certification Foundation exams together) on the above topics and be able to call yourself a "privacy professional"?

To find out more about the survey, I asked Deloitte LLP chairman of the board Sharon Allen to provide some additional context. Given that my only risk-management concern early this week relates to thunderstorms off the coast of South Padre Island, I asked Sharon to step in as a guest blogger today. Here's what she sent me: When I was a high school student growing up in the small farming community of Kimberly, Idaho, little did I know that a song from that time could serve as an anthem for something happening in the workplace today. The Beatles' 1967 classic "Hello Goodbye" is a study in contrasts, as are the current attitudes about social media. Social media has arrived - and with it, employers and employees are singing very different songs about what constitutes appropriate social networking both on and off the job. Recently, I commissioned the third annual Deloitte LLP "Ethics & Workplace" survey. We polled 500 executives and 2,000 employees outside Deloitte. Our survey found that 60 percent of business executives believe they have a right to know how employees portray themselves and their organizations in online social networks. Perhaps because nearly three-fourths of the employees in our poll agreed that the use of social networks makes it easier to damage a company's reputation. However, more than half of employees polled say their social networking pages are not an employer's concern. That belief is especially true among younger workers, with nearly two-thirds of 18- to 34-year-old respondents stating that employers have no business monitoring their online activity.

Much of the privacy debate has focused on cookies and icons and not what really matters: the misuse or abuse of consumer data by third parties in the real world. I don't care whether I see behaviorally targeted ads so much as I don't want my health care or auto insurance to be impacted by sites I've visited and stuff I post online.

The fuss over Facebook's attempt to modify the contract with its millions of users has died down for the moment, and I haven't noticed any of my friends closing their account or even significantly changing their behaviour in protest despite the widespread coverage. The problem started in early February when Facebook updated the section on its site which establishes the legal agreement with its users. Like most people who use it I didn't notice the change, and even though Facebook clearly knows who I am and how to contact me I didn't get a message or see a notification in my news feed about it. This is pretty common practice on the web, where long legal contracts are agreed with a click of a mouse and sites update them at will because they contain a clause saying that you accept the changes if you carry on using the site. Term paper Unlike laws passed by Parliament, which have to be properly promulgated to those affected, contracts can evidently be changed without any proper notice.

A New Zealand man has found confidential United States military files on an MP3 player he bought at an op shop in the US. Chris Ogle, 29, from Whangarei, bought the player from an Oklahoma thrift shop for $NZ18 ($A14.50), and found the files when he hooked it up to his computer, TV One News reported on Monday night. The 60 files on the player contained the names and personal details of American soldiers, including ones who served in Afghanistan and Iraq. There was also information about equipment deployed to bases and a mission briefing. "The more I look at it, the more I see and the less I think I should be," Ogle said. Victoria University strategic studies director Peter Cozens said one of the first rules of military endeavour was to not give the opposition information that could compromise your position. "This is just slack administrative procedures which are indeed a cause of embarrassment. It's the sort of thing which ought not really be in the public domain, he said. Ogle said the player never worked as a music player and he would hand it over to the US Defence Department if asked.

Reports on Tuesday of a New Zealand man who purchased a secondhand MP3 player containing the personal information of U.S. soldiers highlighted the federal government's continuing inability to protect private information on unauthorized, third-party storage devices. New Zealander Chris Ogle bought a used MP3 player in Oklahoma about a year ago, according to New Zealand's public television station, ONE News. A few weeks ago, when he plugged the player into his computer to download a song, Ogle found 60 military files stored on the device, which included names, addresses, and phone and Social Security numbers of U.S. soldiers. The files also contained what appears to be a mission briefing and lists of equipment deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan. Most of the files are dated 2005. ONE News reported that some of the phone numbers on the player are still active. "The more I look at it, the more I see and the less I think I should be," Ogle told ONE News. Ogle offered to return the MP3 player to U.S. officials if requested. Privacy experts say the breach is just the latest example of the federal government's inability to manage the security risk posed by removable storage devices. In November the Defense Department banned the use of removable storage devices after reports that hardware that can be inserted into a USB drive could infect the computer with viruses and worms. A Pentagon spokesman said the military is aware of the latest report form New Zealand, but does not know of any action the department has taken. Michael Maloof, chief technology officer for the information security firm TriGeo Network Security in Post Falls, Idaho, said individuals do not view devices like MP3 players as computers that can store large amounts of private data. "Myself and security experts have been saying for some time that phones and MP3 players are really mass storage devices," he said. The military should "ban all mass storage devices. It may make some people unhappy, but you see the

Why Google isn't ready to be an Enterprise vendor

At the Google (NSDQ: GOOG) I/O developer conference this week, Google Inc. will host more than 80 technical sessions on all of the Google apps and platforms we've come to know -- Android, Chrome, App Engine, Web Toolkit, AJAX and others. When reviewing the Google I/O Schedule this morning, I was disappointed by what could not be easily found. The conference will run this week, May 28 to 29, in San Francisco, and Google is expecting more than 2,000 attendees. Unfortunately, a long perusal of the schedule shows plenty of tracks with Search, Scale, and Performance in the title -- but only one track with Security. What about Privacy? Well, there's no tracks highlighting data privacy, either. There is a session that covers federated identity management, Practical Standards-based Security and Identity in the Enterprise. And it looks promising, but federated authentication and authorization is more about making sure applications and people can interact securely, not that an application, itself, is inherently secure.