Thanks in large part to the Attrition.org data loss database, there’s recently been some great work on analyzing breaches. I’ve used it myself to produce some slick looking presentation graphs and call attention to the ever-growing data breach epidemic.

But there’s one problem. Not a little problem, but a big honking leviathan lurking in the deep with a malevolent gleam in its black eyes.

Breach notification statistics don’t tell us anything, at all, about fraud or the real state of data breaches.

The statistics we’re all using are culled from breach notifications- the public declarations made by organizations (or the press) after an incident occurs. All a notification says is that information was lost, stolen, or simply misplaced. Notifications are a tool to warn individuals that their information was exposed, and perhaps they should take some extra precautions to protect themselves. At least that’s what the regulations say, but the truth is they are mostly a tool to shame companies into following better security practices, while giving exposed customers an excuse to sue them.

But notifications don’t tell us a damn thing about how much fraud is out there, and which exposures result in losses.

(Okay- the one exception is that any notification results in losses for a business that goes through the process).

In other words, we don’t know which of the myriad of exposures we read about daily in the press result in damages to those whose records were lost. They are also self reported; and I know for a fact there are incidents where companies did not disclose because they didn’t think they’d get caught.

For example, based on the statistics nearly a third of all breach notifications are the result of lost laptops, computers, and portable media (around 85 million records, out of around 316 million total lost records). About 51 million of those records were the result of two incidents (the VA in the US, and HMRC in the UK). The resulting fraud?

Unknown. No idea. Zip. Nada. In all those cases, I don’t know of a single one where we can tie the fraud to the lost data.

In some cases we really can track back the fraud. TJX is a great example, and the losses may be in the many tens of millions of dollars. ChoicePoint is another example, with 800 cases of identity theft resulting from 163,000 violated records (a number that’s probably really around 500,000, but ChoicePoint limited the scope of their investigation).

What we need are fraud statistics, not self-reported breach notification statistics. We do the best with what we have, but according to the notification stats we should all be encrypting laptops before we secure our web applications, yet the few fraud statistics available support the contrary conclusion.

In other words, we do not have the metrics we need to make informed risk management decisions.

This also creates a self-fulfilling negative feedback loop. Notifications result in measurable losses to businesses, driving security spending to prevent incidents that cause notifications, which may not represent prioritized security/loss risks.

When you read these things, especially on the slides shoved down your throat by desperate vendors (it’s usually slide 2 or 3), ask yourself if each one is an exposure, or actual fraud.

Well, we finally know how Pfizer lost all those employee records. An employee installed P2P file sharing software on her laptop, and probably shared her entire drive. Oops. I bet I know one person that’s eating alone in the corporate lunchroom.

We originally talked about this a few weeks ago.

I’d like to remind people of my Top 5 Steps to Prevent Information Loss and Data Leaks. Securing endpoints is number 5.

I hate having to clamp down on employees with harsh policies, but limiting P2P on corporate systems is in the category of “reasonable things”.

(thanks to Alex Hutton for the pointer)

TD Ameritrade issued a press release Friday with another nugget of information in it.

TD AMERITRADE Holding Corporation (NASDAQ:AMTD) has discovered and eliminated unauthorized code from its systems that allowed access to an internal database. The discovery was made as the result of an internal investigation of stock-related SPAM.

Making conclusions off press releases and news articles is a fool’s exercise, but I’m a fool and I like to exercise. This tidbit could indicate malware, possibly from an endpoint. The focus on SPAM also seems to support more of a malware than SQL Injection.

Either way, don’t forget to check out our survey and make your own best, uninformed, guess.

On the bright side, it looks like they are handling the situation aggressively, notifying early, and so far the focus is on email addresses, not financial info.

The BCS Championship is in Phoenix tonight (that’s the college football championship game for our overseas and raging-geek readers) and Ohio State seems to have brought around 60,000 of their fans into town.

A couple of buddies of mine from Colorado are in town for the game and we spent the weekend out and about. Last night we were heading into one of the bigger Buckeye bar-parties in town and I was totally stunned when it came time to give the bouncer our IDs.

As everyone walked up he grabbed driver’s licenses and ran the mag stripes through a handheld scanner. Being both moderately sober and the security paranoid I am the conversation went like this:

Me: So, are you just checking for fakes or storing any of the info?

Bouncer: Both, it’s mostly for our database statistics.

Me: Like how many people came in?

Bouncer: Just your name, date of birth, and driver’s license number.

Me: Ah. Umm… Okay. Any chance you can skip it and just give my ID a visual check?

At that point he, looking like I was some Unabomber-like freak, checked my ID the old fashioned way and let me in. Of course, while watching him I noticed that he was so intent on scanning IDs into his little machine that he sort of, you know, didn’t check the faces of people handing them over. That might explain the one 20 year old girl running around stealing drinks, grabbing any guy within reach in a manner that’s rarely free, and putting the Vegas showgirls to shame.

I can’t really think of any good reason a bar named Mickey’s Hangover needs that info. And in the process they reduced their security by relying on a machine to find fakes, and forgetting to see if the ID handed over even slightly resembled the patron at the door.

Seriously folks- I don’t think I’m overly paranoid, but it’s hard to justify letting a random bar keep my vital stats just to buy an overpriced beer.

To be honest, this is just a signing statement and, from what little constitutional law I know, kind of illegal. Basically, when Bush signed a law into effect that prohibited warrantless reading of citizens email, he added a statement that said the feds can still read email without a warrant. Wacky, huh?

Bush asserted the new authority Dec. 20 after signing legislation that overhauls some postal regulations. He then issued a “signing statement” that declared his right to open mail under emergency conditions, contrary to existing law and contradicting the bill he had just signed, according to experts who have reviewed it.

Still, it’s fun to get all hot under to collar about it, and if they we start hearing about opened mail, we’ll know that we don’t live in a democracy.

Anyway, original article here.

For those that don’t know, VeriChips are implantable RFID tags “for people”. That way you can be tagged and tracked like cattle or Gillette razors.

Convenient, I guess.

Anyway, here’s a great article on the Make blog on cloning VeriChips. So much for using these to separate identical twins. I see this as one of those “good news/bad news” kind of things.

The good news is the bad guys don’t have to chop your arm off to steal your identity.

The bad news is VeriChips totally blow.

Or is that the good news? I’m easily confused.

I now know that $40 and a quick web search will let any doofus figure out most of my former addresses, neighbors, home values, roommates, birthday, etc.

But what’s really out there on me? Like any egotistical analyst I run the occasional masturbatory Google search on myself, but I suspect there’s far more out there than I realize. I also think there’s value in seeing what a total stranger can find on me. Thus we officially open the Securosis “Invade My Privacy Challenge”.
Here are the rules:

1. Use any legal Internet tool at your disposal to dig up whatever dirt you can find. No pretexting or other illegal activities!
2. If it’s sensitive (including anything someone could use for identity theft), email me at rmogull@securosis.com.
3. If it’s interesting or embarrassing, feel free to post it as a comment.
4. For sensitive entries, you can also post a comment telling what you found, but not the details.
5. You must cite all sources- this is full disclosure, you know. Entries without the source will be eliminated.
6. For-pay sources are allowed if you’re willing to cover the cost yourself.
7. Close friends and others with inside knowledge are ineligible. Will and Scott are especially ineligible.
8. The contest ends in two weeks (October 13), or when all my details are compromised.

The top prize, based on the value of the information found, is a hardcover copy of Verner Vinge’s Rainbows End, the most mind-blowing book I’ve read lately. If you find my SSN there will be a bonus prize that’s worth your effort (I’ll post it once I figure it out).

Yes, I know what I’m inviting here. But better to know what’s out there than live with my head in the sand. I promise you there’s plenty to embarrass me with, and a few interesting tidbits like my employee number.

I’ll probably regret this…

I read an interesting article by Brian Krebs over at the Washington Post on ID theft. Brian did a little hunting on some underground IRC channels and witnessed a large amount of stolen personal data being exchanged, then went out and talked with around two dozen victims.

One of his more interesting tidbits was that a bunch of the credit card numbers were being used to purchase background checks from Internet sites like USSearch.com. These sites purport themselves as “people finders” for such seemingly innocent needs as collections, finding that old college friend, making sure your nanny doesn’t have a criminal record, or tracking down all the places where your ex-wife might be hiding.

Yeah, not everyone uses these things to find former roommates who stiffed you $50 in long distance.

I decided to pony up and run a check on myself to see how bad these are. My conclusion? We need regulation. Badly. It’s yet another case where seemingly innocent pieces of public information have tremendous consequences when aggregated and correlated on the scale of the Information Age.

I set just one basic rule- what could I find on one site using nothing more than my name. Some sites let you search on SSN, but since that’s supposedly secret (probably not hard to find) I restricted myself to name only.

I ended up at PublicBackgroundChecks.com since it was slightly cheaper. All the services range from about $9.99 for a simple address lookup, to $60 for a background check including criminal records. I decided on the $40 ‘background check without criminal records check’ since I’ve had my record cleared enough to know I’m clean. It wasn’t worth the $20 to me just to see if my speeding tickets were on there.

It wasn’t all accurate, but it’s close enough to get my attention. Here are some highlights:

1. Probably 85% of the addresses I’ve ever lived at. It missed 3 from my first two years of college, but caught everything else.
2. Age and DOB
3. Parent’s names and addresses. My sister wasn’t listed as a relative for some reason.
4. Possible associates with their address history- based on concurrent address information. It caught my stepfather (deceased), 3 long-time roommates, and the entire family of one of my landlords.
5. Schools, mail drops, banks, and storage lockers near known addresses.
6. Property ownership and appraised value for my last two residences. I’m only on the mortgage for one of them, and there was another listing of the previous owner on that one, with no date range.
7. Historical phone numbers for current, last previous, childhood, and one random residence. I think the system struggles with date ranges and it didn’t find any of my real phone numbers except…
8. Internet domain registrations- including registrar info which included an old address. It nailed some old domains, but didn’t include Securosis.
9. Owners, about a dozen neighbors (with phone/address), and other residents (with phone numbers) for those addresses it provided details on. I still don’t know why it didn’t do this for every address.
10. A bunch of other (accurate) empty searches:

Overall it was fairly accurate, and probably 70% complete. It only identified two of my phone numbers, neither current, one about 17 years old. It’s more than enough information to track me down, and everything you’d need to start some identity fraud other than my SSN.

In times of old all this information was available, but scattered across the written files or proprietary databases of potentially hundreds of agencies and sources. Neighbors, associates, historical phone numbers, local banks and storage facilities weren’t the most available pieces of information without some legwork.

And then I think of all the other sources out there on me that I didn’t check- everything from Google, to credit checks (easy to obtain illegally), to the large data aggregators like ChoicePoint. One of these vendors once showed me their law enforcement tool for tracking individuals- imagine all the information I listed above, of higher accuracy, visually accessed in a real-time three dimensional browser. Within seconds you could track the personal relationships, based on public records, of anyone in the US with just a name and date of birth (also easy to find). Some data aggregators can correlate across financial, public, and criminal records.

Scott McNealy once infamously stated, “You have zero privacy anyway, get over it”. He’s half right. Nearly every shred of our privacy is gone to anyone with a web browser and less than $100, but that doesn’t mean we should accept it. Aside from the social implications the fraud implications alone demand some sort of action. While these records are public, and on their own fairly innocuous, once aggregated and correlated the value increases exponentially.

Don’t believe me- go pay your $40 and see for yourself.

Next step in my research- start tracking these companies down and see how many are just public fronts for a few of the big names. I don’t know the answer, but have my suspicions.

In a post titled “Access of Access + Audit” Dr. Anton Chuvakin discusses the importance of logging, well pretty much everything. When it comes to working in the enterprise environment I tend to agree- audit logs are some of the most useful security, troubleshooting, and performance management tools we have. Back when I was operational I had two kinds of bad log days- those hair pulling, neurotic-in-a-here’s-johnny-way days spent combing, manually, through massive logs, and (even worse) those really I’m-so-screwed days where we didn’t have the logs at all. Since, thanks to better search and analysis tools, those former days are much rarer, we can focus on the latter.

But here’s where my fractured personality splits like a tree hit by lightning- while I believe we should respect personal privacy at work, there’s no expectation of privacy, nor should there be. We’re paid to help our employer succeed, using their resources, and it’s their right to watch everything we’re doing. I advise my corporate clients to be respectful, but activity monitoring is an absolutely essential security tool.

But personal life is a whole different bowl of Cheerios and, despite a noted absence in the Constitution, I believe we have a right to privacy in our personal lives. Be it the right to be left alone, or the right to control how our information is collected and used, privacy is essential to freedom. {yes, I’m wearing a flag around my shoulders as I type this}

But Dr. Chuvakin seems to think a little different:

So, what is the connection between the above definition and my call for “no access without logging”? Logging is NOT a privacy risk; inappropriate use for collected data is. Before you object by invoking the infamous “guns don’t kill people; gaping holes in vital organs do” :-) I have to say that the above privacy definition is about access to information about people, not about the existence of said information. And, yes, Virginia, there IS a difference!

Similarly, nowadays many folks are appalled when they see stuff like this (”Fresh calls for ISP data retention laws. US attorney general cranks up the volume.”), but it actually - gasp! - seems reasonable to me, in light of the above. Admittedly, if your bandwidth is so huge that you cannot log and retain, you might be able avoid logging or at least avoid long term log retention, but that is a different story altogether.

We live in a digital age. One we don’t fully comprehend. One that requires new thinking in ways we haven’t even thought about yet.

One of the essential features of this age is a redefinition of scope and scale. Rules of the past break with the reach of networks and the volume of data we collect- data that can exist, effectively, forever.

So I propose “Mogull’s Rules of Privacy” (remember, I’m kind of egotistical):

1. All data, once stored, is never lost
2. Collected data is never private data
3. Everyone has a different definition of appropriate use

(corollary to 1: unless, of course, you need the data for a disaster recovery)

What do I mean? Once we record a digital track it’s nearly impossible to assure that said track is ever really deleted. There’s everything from backups to forensic analysis. Do we lose data every day? Of course. Back as a sysadmin I was really good at it. But when dealing with private data we have to assume it’s eternal. Now why is this data never private? Because everyone has a different definition of appropriate use.

Be it law enforcement, a disgruntled employee, or the head of marketing, someone, somewhere, will eventually come up with an “appropriate” reason to use the data.

Privacy is like virginity- you can’t get it back.

Yes, long-term logging can help in criminal investigations, but if we’re going to pretend we live in a free society, widespread logging or monitoring of innocent citizens is not acceptable. Since our digital lives are now our physical lives, digital communications should be as sacrosanct as the mail or phone calls.

I’m all for legal and aggressive monitoring, logging, and wiretapping of known criminals and those under reasonable suspicion, but the day we give in and start logging everyone, just in case, we should just dump all the voting machines, electronic or otherwise, in the Potomac and stop pretending we still believe in the Constitution.

Then again, maybe it’s too late.

To whom it may concern,

While, as a security professional, I take great care to protect all of my systems and data, I cannot guarantee that I am fully compliant with both the HIPAA security and privacy requirements. I have never undergone a HIPAA audit, nor any official HIPAA training or evaluations of any kind beyond those provided to first responders. For your information I do take extensive security precautions including:

1. Hardware and software firewalls on all systems and networks
2. Home directory encryption on my primary Mac
3. Antivirus/antispyware on all Windows systems
4. OS hardening and service minimization
5. Rapid deployment of all security updates

Despite these precautions I believe you should discontinue faxing medical records to my online fax system as I cannot guarantee I am handling said records within HIPAA guidelines. While I appreciate the amnio results and insurance records disputes (for multiple patients) they do not directly affect the patient care I administer as a former ski patroller and disaster medic. It is, however, good to know that should I manage to perform an amniocentesis on my pregnant patients in the middle of a ski slope you will be able to provide me with accurate and timely results.

By faxing my online system (which forwards to my work email) your medical records are subject to a number of possible security risks, including, but not limited to:

1. Interception on my corporate email server
2. Review by unauthorized persons
3. Loss due to lost backup tapes of said email system
4. Other standard security vulnerabilities

I do appreciate you value my medical opinion (since I’m only an EMT/washed-up paramedic) and my input on billing issues (for which I have no training). That said, you should probably remove me from your consultation list.

Sincerely,

Rich

((Doesn’t it make you feel just peachy that the entire healthcare industry still runs on fax for medical orders, results, and billing? And may have sent me your colonoscopy results?))