Cybersecurity Expert

This week there has been plenty of concern following RSA’s announcement about their two-factor authentication solution, SecurID, which was subjected to a sophisticated cyber attack.  A lot of people are asking for my views on the risk in continuing to use RSA SecurID following this attack, so I am going to attempt to explain this risk in simple terms, but it won’t be easy. Facts What are the facts? Well we simply don’t know exactly what has been stolen from RSA at present, as RSA aren’t providing details beyond “the attack resulted in certain information being extracted from RSA's systems. Some of that information is specifically related to RSA's SecurID two-factor authentication products”. However in Information Security we always hope for the best but prepare for the worst, the worst case scenario is all of the RSA SecurID private keys (seeds) records along with corresponding serial numbers were stolen. http://www.rsa.com/node.aspx?id=3872 Stolen Seeds? Every RSA Secu...

Over the last couple of days many Play.com customers have received an Email, informing them their personal information has been breached, including me. This Email states “We are emailing all our customers to let you know that a company that handles part of our marketing communications has had a security breach. Unfortunately this has meant that some customer names and email addresses may have been compromised.” So personal details were stolen thanks to a security breach at Play.com’s third party service provider, namely a US based marketing company called SilverPop.  Play.com sent the warning Email in response to an increase in malicious Emails being targeted at Play.com customers, this was first noticed on 20th March 2011.  It is worth noting SilverPop, actually a US based Email marketing company, was breached in December last year; this was the point which the Play.com customer information was actually stolen, although Play.com nor SilverPop failed to realised the data was ...

From May this year (2011), the EU are set to introduce a new law to safeguard our privacy, but this law could mean the majority of websites you visit must 'explicitly request' your permission to use a cookie, this could mean a lot of needless pop-up boxes. EU Directive 2002/22/EC (See 66 ) st03674.en09.pdf  What is a Cookie? Most websites use a “cookie”, which is essentially a file holding a small amount of text within it, this file is locally stored on your PC. This simple text file (cookie) is actually really important for websites to operate efficiently, amongst things the cookie is used to identify you as an individual on the website. For instance the cookie is used to keep you logged into the website and to provide access to specific information meant only for you. By their nature cookies tend to provide the ability to track what you have done on any given website, which again is important for the website to work effectively, however this tracking can also be used ...