Gary McKinnon Extradition

Gary McKinnon is in the news again after the Home Secretary, Alan Johnson refused to block the intended extradition to the United States. I was invited to comment on Radio Five Live on Friday morning, to raise points on the security and technical specifics of the case.

It is clear Gary has plenty of public support in the UK, from people who believe he shouldn’t be extradited to the United States, mainly on human rights grounds. Gary’s lawyers stated he is happy to pled guilty to the crimes in a UK court, therefore he appears to be guilty of these crimes, but his lawyer feel justice just won’t be served if he was sent to a US court.

I have actually meet Gary a couple of years back, however my comments on Radio Five Live were made from totally impartial and an Information Security expert’s point of view. Here is a summary of what I said.

The main point to understand is, what was the motivation of Gary McKinnon’s “hacking” attack? It clearly wasn’t for fraud, as he wasn’t trying to steal any financial information, and there appears to be no accusation of Gary stealing information to sell on for profit. This is the first point to understand, as people who are motivated to hack systems to steal for personal profit, do need the book throwing at them.

The next question, did Gary set out to damage systems maliciously? Well if you listen to his lawyers, they will tell you Gary’s motive wasn’t to break and damage systems, but to acquire knowledge, mainly about UFO’s and their power source. However the US authorities say Gary’s intension was to break and damage their systems and point to messages left on their systems, such as this one below, which I understand has been verified as being left by Gary, by his lawyers.

“US foreign policy is akin to government-sponsored terrorism these days? It was not a mistake that there was a huge security stand-down on September 11 last year...I am SOLO. I will continue to disrupt at the highest levels.”

For me these are all important questions to ask and answers to understand, as there is a big difference between a fraudster using hacking techniques to steal financial information, a malicious hacker out to deliberately out to deface and break systems, and a curious hacker trying to satisfy a “What If”. Confusingly Gary is portrayed as the later, but he also tends to be branded and tarnished with same brush as these other types of hackers. I feel this is because the general media and the public do not understand the significance of the different types hacking which are occurring today.

I believe there is negligence on US system owners part. For example if I were to park a shinny new BMW in an undesirable part of town, left the car unlocked with the keys in the ignition, wouldn’t I be negligent and be at fault if the car was stolen? Would an insurance company pay out? In the same way everyone knows the Internet is a dangerous place, and for any organisation to place “sensitive” servers directly on the internet without even the basics of best practice in IT security of the day, and then has these said servers hacked, in my view that organisation has only themselves to blame. If Gary didn’t get there first someone else or perhaps even malicious application would of breached these systems eventually. The majority of Information Security professionals I know tend to share this point of view on information security, however a lawyer wouldn’t, and perhaps the people who didn’t properly secure their systems in the first place won’t exactly be blaming themselves either. But I’m definitely with the insurance company on this point.

Gary is summarised by most media as being some sort of Super Hacker, actually in my experience and knowledge of the actual “hacking” which is alleged to have occurred in this case, I have to say Gary is far from being a super hack or even an accomplished hacker. It looks like Gary didn’t really have to work very hard to access these systems, such was the alleged lack of basic security on them, and at the end of the day he got caught. Even an average grade hacker knows how to be anonymous on the internet, and how to cover their tracks properly, only the inexperienced and the not so clever hackers actually get caught. So in my view Gary is far from being a “Super Hacker".

My final point on the Radio, which will not be popular with pro-Gary campaigners, but is a word of caution. We need to give some thought to the legal precedences which could be set here. There is a problem in bringing real serious cyber criminals to justice, because hackers tend to operate across international borders. I know our US extradition treaty isn’t the best as it currently stands, but if this extradition were to be blocked, I fear the next time the we arrest a credit card fraudster operating out of the UK (which has happened recently), that the fraudster’s legal team would use this case to prevent extradition. Similar legal precedents have been used to stop the extraditon of a foreign nationals back to their country of origin, despite them committing allsorts of heinous crimes are way much more serious than breaking a few servers.

There is much more I could have said on this subject, such as looking at the way US authorities have appeared to have put in place an over the top sentencing for this crime, which doesn’t have appear reflect the actual crime. It is ridiculous that this particular type offence seems to be carrying a greater punishment than murder in terms of prison sentence time. I understand Gary's hacking at worse caused a 24 hour outage, with no member of public (or military) armed as a result, and as I said it could be argued the system owners were partially to blame as well. I don’t believe any information of value was stolen, only system “software” damage is alleged to have occurred, which is estimated to be around $700,000 by the US authorities, which many would say is kind of high for rebooting and restoring less than 100 systems. The punishment for the actual offence must fit the crime, and if it did then extradition of Gary to face justice in a US Court might not be the problem it currently is.

How Secure is your UK Online Banking?

The UK maybe still in the midst of a recession, but these times are proving anything but a recession for cybercriminals, as UK Online Banking fraud is sky rocketing at the moment. The ‘Financial Fraud Action’ showing a 55% increase for the first half of 2009, while the ‘UK Payments Administration’ figures reports a 44% year on year rise. Through my own research and underground monitoring of UK cybercriminal activity, I am seeing increasing numbers of stolen UK online bank account access details being put up for sale, and increasing numbers of keylogger malware being deployed, which are specifically targeting the theft of UK online bank access credentials covertly.

Despite these increases in criminal activity and years of warnings, UK banks still aren’t doing enough to protect their customers from the dangers of the internet. Many UK banks are still yet to provide their customers with a security best practice Two-Factor authentication access to their online banking, so are making it all too easy for cybercriminals to steal UK bank account access details. Two-Factor authentication involves using an individual hardware token which is possessed by each individual online account holder. This hardware token displays a constantly changing number on an LCD screen (see picture below), which is typed in along side the customer’s identity (name) and password to provide access to the online bank account. Using a hardware token such as this would prevent the majority of online banking theft today, as without the physical possession of the 2nd factor hardware token, you cannot gain access into the online bank account.

Many UK banks still resort to the security dated “knowledge based” authentication along side a person’s password. “Knowledge based” authentication is about asking the account holder a question which only that individual is likely to know the answer to. For example typical knowledge based questions are: What is your mother’s first name? What is the first school you attended? What is the name of your favourite pet? The problem is this type of personal information is no longer private in the information age, and can be found in all manner of places on the internet, both legitimately and illegitimately. So fraudsters who steal bank account details often do a bit of simple research to build up a knowledge profile about their target, so they can get pass the knowledge based questions as well. This information gathering can be done in just minutes from a computer keyboard, anywhere in the world, a wealth of personal details on target can be quickly found by using websites such as Google, Facebook and various public record websites like the electoral role directory 192.com. I have seen UK cyber-fraudsters selling complete profiles of UK individuals along with their online bank account username and password, including one which stated the victim’s favourite pet’s name!

Two-Factor authentication will not completely solve online banking fraud, but if deployed by UK banks, would go some distance in bringing down the number of UK online bank accounts being compromised. My own research shows the majority of UK bank theft is actually done from criminals based abroad, who generally regard the UK as easy pickings and a soft target. The slow take up of Two-Factor authentication by UK banks just goes to re-enforce the UK’s perception as being a soft target by cybercriminals around the world.

Why don’t all UK banks deploy Two-Factor authentication?

Their excuse is cost. Although the actual cost of deploying Two-Factor authentication is relatively small (£3 to £6 per customer), UK banks do not want to spend in the current climate and are more than happy taking the hit on cyber fraud, which is regarded as a more acceptable cost than shelling out on security prevention, no matter the inconvenience and stress this type of fraud places on it’s victims. There is a thought, given a choice customers would be happy to pay a one off £5 fee, paying for their hardware token to gain security benefits it provides.

Seriously, why do UK Banks continue to shoot themselves in the foot by not providing Two-Factor authentication to their customers?
Ok, here is the real food for thought on the cost argument. Most UK banks actually want their customers to use online banking for reviewing bank statements, than sending paper statements to their customers in the post. Surely the cost of having a customer use online banking and being provided with a hardware token for security is much cheaper than posting 12 statements a year. I say this as I know people who are put off by using online banking because they don’t feel confident in the security, personally I think using a hardware token would give them that a security assurance. Providing a Two-Factor token could actually turn out to be a real cost saving! And let’s not forget the carbon saving by not printing those paper bank statements and shipping them around the country too.

What can you do to protect your online bank account?
IT Security Expert advice
1. If your bank does not provide Two-Factor authentication (token/key), consider switching to a bank which does.

2. Password Protection
a. Ensure your bank account password is a unique password to you. Using the same password with other websites such as Social Networking websites, Message Boards, Webmail and Job Recruitment Websites must be avoided at all costs. The bad guys hack these types of websites to specifically lift individual username and passwords for the purpose for trying against their online banking websites.
b. Change your password at least once a year, once a quarter is what I personally recommend.
c. Ensure your password is strong. By strong I mean use upper, lower case letters, at least one number, but most of all include at least one “special character”. By “special characters” I mean @, ”, $, %. However I know of one recently taken over Yorkshire based bank which actually prevents you from using special characters in your password!

3. Email Security
a. We all know about phishing Emails now, but it’s still a major problem and a favourite attack by deployed by cybercriminals to harvest online bank details. Phishing Emails are becoming more realistic and more specifically targeted. Unfortunately this attack still works, people are still suckered in by these Emails. So no matter how genuine an Email looks, never click on the links, a bank will (should) never request your accounts details or ask for you to login for any reason via an Email. Remember a phishing Email always prays on the emotion of greed (you won something) or fear (your account has been compromised, change your details).
b. Never send your bank details by Email, no matter what legitimate company or person requests it, be strong and always resist, just say no!

4. Ensure your Operating System is patched up to date, and you have Anti-Virus and Anti-Spyware applications running at all times, and make sure they are kept up to date. The bad guys like to deploy key logging malware onto unsuspecting user PCs, who then have not idea their key strokes are being recorded and sent on to fraudsters, key strokes including those bank account access details, namely the username and password.

5. Check your bank statements regularly. UK banks are getting better at detecting bank fraud but it’s far from perfect. Therefore it’s important you take responsibility and check through your statements regularly looking for fraudulent transactions. Pay particular attention to internet transactions and transfers out.

TalkTalk’s WiFi Hacking No No!

Last week Internet Service Provider (ISP) TalkTalk pulled a hacking publicity stunt, which they aimed to demonstrate why they should be absolved of all responsibility for the portion of their customers who illegally file shared pirated material. TalkTalk visited a street in North London, and hacked into poorly secured residential wireless networks. Accessing insecurely configured residential WiFi is old news and is illegal, TalkTalk’s point in doing this was to show that anyone could be using residential wireless access points for file sharing illegal material, again nothing new in that either.  http://blog.itsecurityexpert.co.uk/2008/11/reason-to-secure-your-home-wifi.html

However the double standards here, is the prime reason why the majority of home wireless networks in the UK aren’t secured to a sufficient degree in the first place, is because ISPs have been providing their customers with wireless access points (routers) in an insecure fashion for years.

As far back as 2001 WiFi WEP security has been known to be broken, however in 2007 when I assessed new home Wifi Router provision by ISPs in the UK, I found the majority of ISPs were still providing home Wireless Access Points with WEP security by default. Of course the vast majority of their customers aren’t savvy enough to properly secure their home Wi-Fi with WPA2 encryption, in fact most customers when asked tended to trust their ISP to provide them with an appropriately secure home WiFi network.

Any school boy with a “Facebook” level of computer knowledge can break into a WEP protected WiFi home networks in just minutes. WEP is not encryption, and it should never be referred to as “Secure WiFi” as some ISP’s had been describing it in recent years. TalkTalk tended to not provide their customer with Wireless networking, however this led to many of their customers to go out and buy their own wireless access point as a result, many of which haven't properly secure their WiFi or even use worst, deployed it without any security in place at all . Interesting how TalkTalk charge £99 to configure their customer’s WiFi Router to WPA2, in my view they should be doing this for free, as TalkTalk’s competitors have moved to providing their customers with WiFi networks with WPA2 enabled by default for zero cost.

I think TalkTalk should face up to their responsibilities as an ISP, and stop TalkTalk customerswho share illegal content, which isn’t always pirated movies and computer games, but can be the more unsavourily stuff on the Internet. I don’t think it's right for TalkTalk to go around hacking real world environments which are already well known to be vulnerable for self publicity, even with the resident’s permission. I think the ethics of this is highly questionable because TalkTalk’s message wasn’t about advising citizens and their customers on how to secure their home WiFi networks, but about TalkTalk not wanting to spend the money in policing their customer’s internet activity.

Finally illegal file sharing is never in the interest of TalkTalk’s honest and legitimate customers, who are likely to suffer slower internet speeds as a result of the illegal internet bandwidth hogging by the few.

How the Payment Card Industry could stop Card Fraud

If the payment card industry, the card schemes such as Visa and MasterCard, and merchants really desired to dramatically reduce payment card fraud, it can be simply done.

Today, by far the biggest problem with payment card security (credit and debit cards), is the little black magnetic stripe on the back. This magnetic stripe holds the full card details unprotected. This information is referred to as “track 2 data” within the payment card industry. The problem is this magnetic stripe track 2 data can be easily read with a "cheap to buy" magnetic stripe reader (see picture above), allowing fraudsters to “skim” card details quickly in a variety of ways, for instance placing covert magnetic stripe readers on ATMs (see picture below).

Track 2 data is also held in plain text on some payment devices and payment processing applications which store this information. Once track 2 data falls into the hands of card fraudsters, they simply create clone cards by replicating the magnetic stripe, and then use the cloned card in the same way as the original card holder uses the original card, of course only at those places which accept magnetic stripe swiping. Making card payment using the magnetic stripe reading is increasingly rare in Europe, however elsewhere in the world it is still used, and sometimes even without a signature.

Using a magnetic stripe to store card data on our plastic is an out dated technology, in Europe where "Chip and Pin" has now been widely adopted, using a chip to read the card data instead of the magnetic stripe increases security. The chip is difficult to clone and holds card information encrypted, so making it difficult for the bad guys to “swipe skim” the card data, and it is extremely difficult to create a clone working "chip" on a card. The issue is there are places like the United States where they haven’t adopted the securer chip technology and are intent on continuing to use the insecure magnetic stripe for the foreseeable future, meaning all payment cards around the world still need to keep the magnetic stripe on the back to be used globally accepted. As a result UK payment cards which still have their magnetic stripe track 2 data stolen, are still being cloned but used in places like the Thailand, where card magnetic stripe swiping is still the way to pay.

One of the arguments for the non-full adoption of chip technology in places like the US, is merchants don’t want to front the cost of replacing their card readers, well that doesn’t wash with me, most merchants in Europe managed to adopt chip reading technology fairly rapidly without any major hassles, and in general merchants continue to replace their card readers over a period of time anyway. So I don’t see why a “phased in” approach wouldn’t be acceptable on a world wide basis. During my recent trips to the United States I have encountered a general shift in the type of payment card readers to touch screen card devices, but they are still using magnetic stripe swiping to read the card. But this demonstrates there is always a continued evolution of card reading devices being deployed by merchants.

I don't want to even muddy the water by talking about the extra security using a PIN with the chip to provide two factor authentication at the cash register, that’s great for increasing security too, but my main point is about using a chip to read the card instead of a magnetic stripe.

I believe removing the magnetic stripe from all payment cards and card processing terminals would result in a drastic reduction in card fraud, which specifically targets “card holder present” transactions. A “card holder present” transaction is where the card holder and payment card are both physically present when making payment, for instance making a payment at the cash register.

What about card holder not present transactions? These transactions are where it is impossible to tell whether the cardholder is present and in actual possession of card when making a payment, for instance an internet transaction or a telephone payments, where it is impossible for the merchant or payment processor to know whether the buyer is typing his card details in from the actual card or it's a frauder using skimmed card information. Sure the 3 digit security code helps with this, but the bad guys have ways around this.

In the UK following the introduction of Chip and Pin in 2005, there was a dramatic shift in the types of payment card fraud, in that the card fraud dramatically swung to “card holder not present” fraud, mainly internet transactions opposed to fraud at the cash register, mainly because cloning cards and their magnetic stripe became a waste of time for the fraudsters, as merchants moved to using chip only payment transaction processing.

There is an answer to securing “card holder not present” transactions which is simple and just requires an update in the card technology used. This technology has been available for quite a while now and involves the addition of a digital authentication system to the actual payment card.

I have seen many proto-types of this technology, such as the EMUE card (featured in the pictures), which displays a uniquely generated LCD number on the card, which is then typed in by card holder when making a “card holder no present” transaction, such as an internet payment. The system checks the number is valid and if it is, this proves the card is actually present as the payment is made. In addition there is a PIN entry on the card which is used to create the generated number, proving the actual card holder is also present. This type of card effectively would turn all “card holder not present” transactions into “card holder present” transactions. This card is not more bulker than a normal card, so still works in ATMs.

If the payment card industry took these steps, not only would this dramatically reduce card fraud by vast amounts in my view, but it would remove the security burden of protecting card holder data. Payment processors and merchants must  comply with the 260 security requirements of the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS), I question whether PCI DSS would even be required to oversee the protection of card holder data if the measures I have talked about was globally adopted, because the bad guys wouldn’t be able to commit much fraud with payment card information anymore, meaning card holder data would no longer require to be protected.

I don’t believe I’m saying anything radical here, or indeed anything new, as always any thoughts and comments on this is always appreciated. I can say I have raised these points with leaders in the global payment card industry, as yet no one has given me good reason why this wouldn’t work. The excuse I tend to be given is the fraud rates aren’t at a sufficient rate to bring about these sorts of changes in security. Some might say the payment industry are happy taking the fraud hit, and passing on the fraud costs on to merchants and ultimately consumers through PCI DSS related costs and fines, while the inconvenience to customers who actually get hit with fraudulent transactions on their credit card and bank statements, mainly due to no fault of their own, is of little conscience.

Information Security is often a game of cat and mouse, with the good guys introducing security measures and bad guys finding ways around the security measures, then the good guy’s introduction new security measures and so on. The question is, has the payment card industry stopped playing the security game of cat and mouse? The answer is within the magnetic stripe on the back of your payment card.

Secure Encrypted Data Backup on a Budget Tutorial

FOREWORD: It's a bit tricky doing proper document formating and decent screenshots within this blog format, so I have also created separate PDF document for this post/tutorial, which can be downloaded/viewed here - http://itsecurityexpert.co.uk/downloads/ITSE_Secure_Encrypted_Data_Backup_on_a_Budget.pdf

One of the most neglected areas of home computing and indeed with many small businesses, is data backup, and properly securing data backup.

What personal value do you place on the data files stored on your PC right now?
How would your business cope if all the business data held on that single PC was lost?

Backing up puts all your data, including sensitive files, in one easier to access single place, how do you ensure it is protected from prying eyes.

These days most people have built up quite sizeable collections of digital camera pictures and videos spanning many years on their PCs, which they regard as irreplaceable. And then there is those word processing documents and spreadsheets which some people just can't do without, yet these files contain personal and even finically sensitive information which needs to be protected when backed up to outside the PC.

In this tutorial/post, I am going to explain how to cheaply and securely backup sensitive data held on a PC.

Pre-Tutorial Requirements

1.Equipment
First buy a USB hard disk drive with a storage capacity large enough to cater for your needs. You can pick up a 500 GB USB hard drive from eBuyer for around £60 to £70, which should be more than enough to cater for most home PC users and small business data backup requirements. If you have just a small amount of data to securely backup and a tighter budget, you can use a USB thumb drive instead, which can cost anything from £5 to £40 depending on their storage capacity, heck you might even have a spare one lying around which was given to you for free at that trade show.

2. Download TrueCrypt http://www.truecrypt.org/downloads.php
TrueCrypt is a completely free application, but I urge you to do the right thing and donate, even if it's a just a little bit to guys behind creating and supporting this great application. For further information about TrueCrypt see my post http://blog.itsecurityexpert.co.uk/2009/02/truecrypt-best-open-source-security-app.html

3. Backup Planning
On the USB backup drive, we will create a Secure Encrypted Area to backup sensitive files, which will automatically become available when the drive is plugged into the PC. In addition we will keep an unsecured area on the same USB drive, to store non-sensitive files.

So first you must decide on how much of the USB drive’s storage capacity you will need to backup personal and sensitive data files. You need to think about whether you just want to securely backup just your word processing and spreadsheet documents, which tend not to take up a lot storage space, or securely store your entire directory of your digital camera pictures and videos, which tend to require large amounts of storage.

The larger the secured area, the longer it takes to setup. There isn’t a great performance hit in accessing the information from the secured (encrypted) area once data is stored.

What should be kept non-secured on the backup drive? Well consider anything you are happy to place on the internet, such as downloaded freeware applications, which tend to be large in size and therefore should be ear-marked to be stored in the unprotected area on the USB drive.

Tutorial
In this tutorial, I will assume the contents of “My Documents”, and a very large collection of personal digital camera images and videos need to be securely backed up. After assessing these storage requirements, I am going with a 400Gb secure area (partition) on my 500Gb USB drive, leaving around 100Gb of space for unsecured data storage.

If you have not done so, so install TrueCrypt, just follow the installation wizard. Note I have used TrueCrypt version 6.1a on a Microsoft Windows system for this tutorial

Creating the Secure Storage area on the USB Drive

2.1 Launch TrueCrypt

2.2 From the “Volumes” drop down menu, select “Create New Volume…”

2.3 Select “Create an encrypted file container” (as per default) and click next

2.4 Select “Create a Standard Volume” (as per default) and click next

2.5 Click “Select File…” in the Window that opens select your USB drive.

2.6 Next right click and select “Create New Folder” on the USB drive, and then name the folder “SecureArea”

2.7 Next select the "SecureArea" folder, and within this folder you will be requested to "create a filename", call it “secured” (or pretty much any name you might prefer)

2.8 Next is the Encryption and Hashing algorithms options

I find the most efficient encryption algorithm to choose is “Two Fish”, in terms of security you cannot go wrong with any of the algorithms offered by TrueCrypt, so you may as well take my advice and select Two Fish

2.9 Again you can't really go wrong with the hashing algorithms offered, I don't want to get too technical within this tutorial which is aimed at non-security folk, so go with the default. (I'm happy to talk about encryption and hashing in detail in a separate post if anyone wants me to)

2.10 Next select the size, for me I will be going with a Secure Area of 400Gb.

It's important ensure you leave at least a couple of megabytes of free space for the unsecured area of the USB drive, as this is needed for the automated mounting of the secured area when the USB drive is plugged into the PC.

2.11 Next enter a pass phrase (password - ensure this something you can remember!

If the pass phrase is less than 20 characters in length, TrueCrypt will warn you. My recommendation is to go for a pass phrase with a mixture of uppercase, lowercase, numbers and special characters (e.g. @,#,!) and be at least 12 characters in length. If you are paranoid about government cracking your personal data with their super-computers, go with 20+ characters!!!

2.12 Unless you have individual files above 4Gb in size which need to be securely stored, which is generally rare for home users, select the default of “No” and click next.

2.13 Volume Format, move the mouse around the screen, accept the defaults and click “Format”

2.14 Depending predominately on the secured area storage size, it can take anything from a few minutes to several hours for TrueCrypt to finish creating the Secured Area.

3. Automatically making available (mounting) the secure area (encrypted volume).

Once the Secure Area has been created, it is time make the secured area of the USB drive automatically become available upon pluging the USB storage device into the PC.

3.1 Within TrueCrypt, from the "Tools" pull down menu select “Traveler Disk Setup”

3.2.1 Navigate and select your USB drive (root)

3.2.2 Uncheck “Include TrueCrypt Volume Creation Wizard”

3.2.3 Click the Auto-mount TrueCrypt Volume

3.2.4 Navigate and select the TrueCrypt encrypted file. In this tutorial it is "\SecureArea\secured.tc"

3.2.5 Check “Open Explorer window for mounted volume”

3.2.6 Finally Hit “Create” - it should only take a few seconds to complete.

3.8 Once complete remove the USB drive, count to 5 and reconnect to USB drive. Your PC should automatically mount the unsecured area as a volume (drive letter) and mount a second volume as a secured (encrypted) volume (drive letter). TrueCrypt will ask for the correct phase phrase to be typed in correctly prior to the secured area becoming available.

If the automatic mounting of the USB drive volumes are not working, it indicates the PC has USB/CD autorun disabled, which is actually a good setting to have security wise, just google “enable CD autorun windows” for help.

And there you have it, a USB drive which upon plugging into the PC will connect with a Secure Encrypted Area (Volume) and a Non-Secure Area (Volume).

4. Finally backup your information to the appropriate storage areas of your USB drive.

You can do this manually by dragging and dropping files in Windows, or using an automated backup tool. Comodo Backup is one of my preferred backup tools. http://backup.comodo.com/

Once your backup has finished, I recommend storing the hard disk offsite. So give it to a relative or a friend or even a neighbour to store, it's not as though your neighbour will be able to access your personal information as it will be encrypted to industrial standards!

It is important to repeat your PC backup process at regular intervals These intervals will be dependant on your requirement and your personal attitude to risk of personal data loss. If it is a typical small business, I suggest on a weekly basis, for highly active home users I suggest backing up on a monthly basis, and for typical home users probably on a six monthly basis or after you store a significant amount of data in an single instance, such as dumping holiday snaps from your digital camera to your PC.

If you regard these recommend backup rates as not being enough, you are probably storing too much information onto a single PC. If this is the case I would recommend investing in a Network Area Storage (NAS) device. A NAS device starts from £80 upwards and offers much more data resilience and automated daily backup/mirroring options, this is a particularly important solution to adopt if you are operating a business which is reliant on computer systems and data. I have heard of small businesses going to the wall following a simple PC theft.

Who you gonna Trust to repair your PC or Laptop?

A Sky News investigation uncovered the shady dealings of some computer repair shops in London. An undercover reporter presented a laptop for repair at several computer repair shops, with the only problem being an easy to detect loose memory chip. However Sky had rigged their laptop to monitor how it was dealt with utilising keylogger software and they even had the laptop camera video the dodgy goings on.

One cheeky rogue trader charged the reporter £130, saying the laptop required a new motherboard, even though the original motherboard was absolutely fine, however more sinister and worrying was the invasion of customer privacy. Computer shop repair engineers were recorded rifling through marked private documents held on the laptop (folder was titled "private"), one scoundrel was captured actually stealing documents, removing them onto a USB memory stick, which included a text file labelled as holding passwords for Facebook, Hotmail, eBay and an online bank account. After lifting this information he went on to try to access the online bank account.

Unfortunately knowing the IT repair industry as I do, these kinds of abuse of trust is common place, IT repair staff, especially those with time on their hands are always likely to have a snoop, and within this subset of snoopers, there are those who will go that step further and actually do something devious with the information they find. I have even heard of computer shop chains employees doing the same type of snooping; just recall how Gary Glitter got caught for downloading illegal images.

Putting this Risk in Context
We all need to understand that sending your personal computer or laptop to a computer repair shop is on par with leaving a “stranger” alone in your home to carry out a domestic repair. If you aren’t happy trusting a stranger to do a domestic repair all alone in your home, why on earth would you trust a stranger to repair a problem with your personal computer all alone?

What should you do to Protect Yourself?
As with my “stranger in your home analogy”, you must insist on having your computer repaired while you are present, either have an engineer come to your home and repair it in front of you, or have it repaired while in your presence at the shop. Remember it’s not like having your car repaired at garage, as we have all kinds of personal and sensitive material digitally stored on their computers these days, I mean you really wouldn’t leave your car at the garage for repair, if your car contained your bank account books, your correspondences and r all your photo albums.

If you must give your PC or laptop to a third party for repair, if you are IT savvy I would either remove the hard disk or fully encrypt the hard disk. For the non-technical, I would advise approaching that family member or friend who is computer literate, just like with good lawyers or indeed good handymen, everyone should make a point of knowing a computer techie they can trust.

A History of Battling Payment Fraud

On Wednesday I popped into The Manchester Museum, and as I strolled into the “Money" collection of exhibits, I was greeted by a bunch of friendly guys sat behind a desk. The desk had various old coins laid out and a sign stating “Please DO Touch”. After a couple of minutes of weighing up and flipping various 2,000+ year ancient Alexander the Great and Roman coins, naturally me being me I started chatting about the fraud aspects, when one of the guys produced a Chinese bank note from the 14th century, which was safely housed in a protective plastic cover. This particular note happens to be one of the oldest surviving banks notes in existence. Now the Chinese invented and started using paper money around 960 following a metal shortage, without copper, silver and gold they couldn’t meet the demand to make coins, although there is evidence of cruder forms of paper money being made by Chinese centuries earlier, but these weren't widely adopted. The construction of the Great Wall of China was financed by printing paper money, which has echoes of our approach to resolving the current financial crisis.

As you can see from the picture the Chinese bank note depicts stacks of coins to show its value. However what I thought was particularly fascinating is the warning; on the bank note it states anyone attempting to produce a copy of the note will be executed. So we can see with this ancient creation of a new payment method, came the understanding to protect it against fraudulent exploitation. Without the death penalty deterrent I doubt if the first bank notes would have ever taken off.

I think Marco Polo describes the Chinese bank note invention best in his book The Travels of Marco Polo (Il Milione).

“All these pieces of paper are issued with as much solemnity and authority as if they were of pure gold or silver; and on every piece a variety of officials, whose duty it, has to write their names, and to put their seals. And when all is duly prepared, the chief officer deputed by the Khan smears the Seal entrusted to him with vermilion, and impresses it on the paper, so that the form of the Seal remains printed upon it in red; the Money is then authentic. Anyone forging it would be punished with death”

Whatever the payment form, be it gold bullion bars, coins, bank notes or payment cards, thousands of years of history shows there has always been a non-stop game of cat and mouse between the payment method issuers and those who seek to take advantage, the fraudsters. I thought this game play was clearly evident when I observed a display of the various examples of bank notes used within the UK over the past few decades, where gradually over of the course of time, bank notes were printed on different harder to acquire types of paper, used more complex design patterns, then watermarks and then holograms.

Modern Bank notes has plenty of anti-counterfeit protection

Now payment cards have actually been around for many decades, but the mainstream usage of plastic payment cards, which we are continually becoming more reliant on instead of cash, really started to take hold from the mid 1980s. As with the evolution of bank notes, which increasingly used anti-counterfeit measures, we see the exact same principles in battling fraud with payment cards, and their originally unintended usage in the Internet payment arena.

However in recent times the lack of general public exposure of major card payment breaches, lack of policing of the Internet (catching the fraudsters) and indeed the lack of a strong deterrent (remember the death penalty?), has resulted in payment card fraud escalation. So the question is, are the card issuers becoming lazy in playing the cat and mouse fraud game? The publicly known statistics on card fraud show payment card fraudsters are continuing to thrive and are getting away with payment card fraud in ever increasing numbers, and history clearly shows us there is no end game in combating payment fraud.

118800 Mobile Phone Directory Search Privacy Concerns

"118800” is a new commercial Mobile Phone Directory Search venture, which charges absolutely anyone at all, £1 to obtain the mobile phone number of a UK citizen, searching by name and location. 118800 have amassed a database around 15 Million UK names, locations and mobile numbers for their directory, which was set to launch earlier in the week. I read a quote from an 118800 representative who stated the contact names and mobile phone numbers in their directory were harvested from the public domain, but what they really meant by public domain, was means they probably purchased the information from market research companies, online businesses and information brokers.

EDIT 12/06/09: Since I originally posted, a representative from 118800 has been in contact and provided further clarity on the 118800 directory search method. It seems my brief description of service was only partial, so may be misleading. I was unable to fully test the service at the time of posting, as the service was (still is) unavailable. I have decided to repost all of 118800 comments below within this post, both in the interest of fairness and to ensure the description of the service is correct and is not misleading.
"I'm from 118 800 and would like to correct the description of our service. We DO NOT give out mobile phone numbers to enquirers. We put people in touch with each other without disclosing any personal information. So if someone is trying to get hold of you through our service, you'll be called by us, told who is on the line for you and you can choose whether to be connected or not. The online service texts you with the enquirer's contact details so you can decide whether to contact them or not.

And, just like any other directory enquiry service, the enquirer needs to know your name & address. So it's very likely the first person to try to contact you using our service will be a friend or acquaintance who has lost your number or not got it on them." - 118 800

Most market research companies and online websites which collect our personal information, pretty much forcing individuals to input their mobile number these days. A minority of companies where this information is collected from, do a good job in warning their users that their information could be shared with a third party, however some companies use small print consent and opt out boxes which are disabled by default, knowing a percentage of people will neglect to read it properly, and some companies don’t even ask for consent, which is illegal under our regularly unenforced Data Protection Laws. So it is small wonder 118800 are able to go from zero to 15Million personal names, locations and mobile numbers in no time at all. Let's be clear on this, mobile service providers such as O2 and Vodafone are not providing your phone number to these guys, in fact I know they are just as annoyed at this practice.

Now it is true our government happily place our personal details on online searchable electrical roles, which can be fully searched for charge, and BT publish our names and home phone numbers in phone books which make them profit by way of advertising as well, but it doesn’t make this is right, we are now in the information age, information, especially personal information has value and companies handling our personal information are entrusted with it, they must protect it, not sell it or exploit it for profit.  With the BT phone book you can opt out and go ex-directory, in fact over a third of UK citizens concerned about this have already done so, but try searching the BT website for information about going “ex-directory”, you won’t find it. Just like Sky won’t let you cancel TV package subscriptions without phoning their call centre up, BT do the same “round the houses” tactic. Incidentally Sky happily let you add TV packages by the web and via the TV. Online audio book providing company Audible use same tactic, sign up for a free trial and enter your payments details online to subscribe, but to cancel, you have to phone them up, this from an internet based company too.

So coming back to the subject of the day, I don’t think its right that companies profit from our personal information, but at the same time they are providing a useful tool for identity thieves. An ID thief would be happy pay £1 to obtain a victims mobile phone number, while we are all aware of issues of voice mail hacking by private detectives, which is hitting the

Interestingly the 118800 website is currently down, perhaps due to complaints and negative media coverage, and they are going to the trouble to clearly describe the mobile directory search as a “Beta”. I suspect they are waiting until the heat dies down before re-launching the service.http://www.phonepayplus.org.uk/ which regulates premium rate and directory enquiry services. And if this sort of privacy exploitation really annoys you, send a letter to your MP. Remember complaining worked with web tracking advertising venture Phorm, such was the public outcry, this week after a year of evaluating BT and TalkTalk finally dropped their plans to use Phorm.

The Information Commissioners Office (ICO), charged with protecting our personal information in this information age, again shows its complete lack of teeth by basically giving this service and others similar services than will inevitably follow the green light.

So what can we do?

1. Complain -
Some might say you will be wasting your time complaining to the ICO, but is still well worth a shot; however I recommend complaining with PhonepayPlus

2. Remove your Mobile Number from the 118800 Directory

Now if everyone did this, their service would crumble, but either way it well worth ensuring the removal of your mobile number from the directory (it really shouldn't have to be this way) and here's how.

When the 118800 website comes back, click on the ex-directory button on the 118800 website or you can text the letter 'E' to 118800 (which is also currently down) from the mobile phone you want to be made ex-directory. 118800 will send you an SMS message confirming you've been taken off.  I have to give some kudos to 118800 for offering this clearly; certainly BT could learn a lesson here.

Secret Service tells UK Government not to Publicly Disclose Data Breaches

Are you wondering why there haven’t been any UK Government Department Information breaches making the news headlines in recent months? Has our government departments resolved their poor Information Security Management and poor security cultures? Has other topics such as swine flu and dodgey MP expenses claims kept government data breach headlines out of the press?  I would love to think UK Government Departments have cleaned up their Information Security Act, as I know serious efforts are being made, however we can't really be sure government have stemmed their poor information management tide, as I heard another reason which goes to explain why the once steady drip of media coverage of government departments data breaches has come to a halt.

I don’t want to name any names, but I heard a member of government committee working on the Digital Britain report say, government departments had been advised by a UK security service department to stop publicising data breaches, because it is letting our enemies know our weaknesses. If this is indeed true, I have to say I really don’t agree with this sweeping under the carpet approach, for one the cat is out already out of the bag regarding our government track record on security, tens of millions of records have been lost that we know about, so I think our enemies already know about our weaknesses!

I am a supporter of the public disclosure of data breaches where the public's personal information is involved, to the extend I would like to see UK laws passed to ensure all organisations, both within the private and the public sectors, disclose any data breaches where citizen personal information has been actually or potentially compromised. The reason we need such laws is I feel it is the only real way entire industries and individual organisations will be bothered enough to raise their information security to the required standards, and better secure all our personal information. I believe it should be a fundamental right that we are informed if (more like when) our government or indeed a private company, loses our personal information, placing us at increased risk of serious cybercrimes like identity theft, which is the UK’s fast growing crime. Only by holding government department heads and business senior directors to account for such breaches, will organisations truly recognise the importance of properly securing our personal information, which after all we have entrusted in their care.