A Culture of Security - The Best Infection! (repost)

   This week we're relaunching our Security Awareness campaign at work.  In honor of that, I thought we should re-sample a past post on this subject.  Enjoy!

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   I was recently reading an interesting article at SearchSecurity entitled Staff infection: IT security education is contagious.  The article notes that security is the responsibility of every individual and that for an organization to have even a semblance of security, there has to be both buy-in and shared action by the members of the organization.

   The article, very correctly, mentions:

Even in today’s world, the general IT worker tends to view security as a barrier and a pain. It is implemented by someone else, and it makes their job harder to perform.

   This is one of the key problems caused by many security programs.  The information security industry often causes problems for itself by being difficult and inflexible.  Security is often viewed as a barrier.  Security is the group that adds extra requirements, delays projects and increases costs.  And with all of that, Security can't guarantee prevention, nor even provide a reliable probability of, an incident or breach.

Call Me

  I recently received some awesome news via email.  And it was totally unexpected.  Check it out:

   Now I can retire in style!  :-)

   Needless to say, this is a phishing email.  We've talked about phishing many times in the past.  And we keep talking about it.

   So why does phishing still work?  There are two primary reasons:

1. No cost/low barrier to entry.  It is effectively free to send out potentially millions of phishing or spam emails.  Attackers can easily relay email through open mail relay servers, but there are other ways to send spam and phishing emails.  Open mail relays are systems that send email but don't require any kind of identification.  Here's some more technical info on open relays.
2. Exploiting the human factor.  People are busy and we all receive too much email.  It's not always easy to take the time to figure out if an email is OK or not.  Attackers leverage this by sending plausible-looking email, though there are plenty of poorly-created messages as well (like the one above that I received).

   As I mentioned in a previous column, rather than looking examining an email for evidence of phishing, we can approach all email as if it's hostile and then look for indications that it's OK.

   If you'd like to have some fun... try these spot the phishing online quizzes!

   I won't be contacting the "friend" to sent me the above email.  And I did not win.

   Have you seen any interesting phishing emails you'd like to share?

A Culture of Security - The Best Infection!

   I was recently reading an interesting article at SearchSecurity entitled Staff infection: IT security education is contagious.  The article notes that security is the responsibility of every individual and that for an organization to have even a semblance of security, there has to be both buy-in and shared action by the members of the organization.

   The article, very correctly, mentions:

Even in today’s world, the general IT worker tends to view security as a barrier and a pain. It is implemented by someone else, and it makes their job harder to perform.

   This is one of the key problems caused by many security programs.  The information security industry often causes problems for itself by being difficult and inflexible.  Security is often viewed as a barrier.  Security is the group that adds extra requirements, delays projects and increases costs.  And with all of that, Security can't guarantee prevention, nor even provide a reliable probability of, an incident or breach.