Government


Threats From Third Party Vendors Demand Vigilance

by B.K. DeLongWikileaks’ decision this week to post the first of five million emails from Texas-based strategic intelligence firm Stratfor shone a spotlight on what experts say is a serious and growing problem: lax data, network and physical security at third party vendors and service providers.  But organizations that think they can wash their hands of the security mess caused by business partners and contractors may be in for a rude awakening.


SAN FRANCISCO–The growing stream of attacks in recent years against government agencies, critical infrastructure, utilities and other vital networks has led to an increasingly heated debate around the concept of active defense and targeting the people and groups behind those attacks. That debate has been going on behind closed doors in Washington for years, but it spilled out into the public during a forum on the ethics and legality of active defense at the RSA Conference here Tuesday.

Right on cue this week, the anarchic hacking collective Anonymous stepped up and grabbed the story line away from the lions of the IT security industry.With the annual RSA Conference set to begin, the whistle blowing site Wikileaks released the first of some five million e-mail messages stolen from the security intelligence firm Stratfor. Ever sensitive to the fickle attention of the media, Anonymous inserted itself into the story, claiming responsibility for leaking the data and pointing a finger of blame at Stratfor and its media, private and public sector customers, which Anonymous accuses of spying and other dark offenses.

When Ralph Langner, an independent security researcher, presented his analysis of specialized code used by the Stuxnet worm to an audience of his peers at the S4 Conference in Miami last month, it was a chance to get down in the weeks with one of the world’s top experts on Stuxnet and threats to industrial control system.

Internet service providers (ISP) acting on behalf of the Iranian government have recently begun blocking encrypted internet services that rely on the secure sockets layer (SSL) protocol, curbing the use of virtual private networks (VPN), a number of email providers, and other communication tools ahead of next week’s parliamentary elections.

A total SSL blockage would prevent the use of any online service whose address begins with ‘https,’ thus cutting off internet users in Iran from one of the Web’s most widely used and trusted encryption connections.