Posts from ‘Data Breach’
Looking back at 2011, we saw more and more employees using consumer-grade (and often personally owned) file sharing technologies such as USB drives, smartphones, personal email accounts, and file sharing websites to move sensitive company information. We’ve learned that employees will “do what they need to do” to be productive and get their job done… And if IT doesn’t provide them with the right tools, they will find their own.
2011 was also a record-breaking year for data breaches. Coincidence? Perhaps. But there is no denying the fact that the increased use of non-sanctioned technology in the workplace has created a security loophole in many organizations. It will become increasingly important for organizations to mitigate this risk to avoid a failed security or compliance audit or worse, a data breach.
Ipswitch can help your organization meet the security, usability and visibility requirements for file sharing. For example, our Ad hoc Transfer module for MOVEit DMZ enables organization to enforce consistent policies and processes around person‐to‐person file transfers ‐ email encryption, attachment offloading, secure messaging, eDiscovery, and more. It not only gives companies unparalleled governance, but it also allows end users to send information, with anyone, in a fast, easy, secure, visible, and well managed way.
We will be talking a lot more about the topic of people person-to-person file sharing in 2012, so stay tuned….
This morning I was asked if I recommended using transport encryption or file encryption to protect company files and data.
My answer: “Use both of them, together!”
For starters, here’s a real quick summary of both encryption types:
- Transport encryption (“data-in-transit”) protects the file as it travels over protocols such as FTPS (SSL), SFTP (SSH) and HTTPS. Leading solutions use encryption strengths up to 256-bit.
- File encryption (“data-at-rest”) encrypts an individual file so that if it ever ended up in someone else’s possession, they couldn’t open it or see the contents. PGP is commonly used to encrypt files.
I believe that using both together provides a double-layer of protection. The transport protects the files as they are moving…. And the PGP protects the file itself, especially important after it’s been moved and is sitting on a server, laptop, USB drive, smartphone or anywhere else.
Here’s an analogy: Think of transport encryption as an armored truck that’s transporting money from say a retail store to a bank. 99.999% of the time that armored Brinks truck will securely transport your delivery without any incident. But adding a second layer of protection – say you put the money in a safe before putting it in the truck – reduces the chance of compromise exponentially, both during and after transport.
One last piece of advice: Ensure that your organization has stopped using the FTP protocol for transferring any type of confidential, private or sensitive information. Although it’s an amazing accomplishment that FTP is still functional after 40 years, please please please realize that FTP is does not provide any encryption or guaranteed delivery – not to mention that tactically deployed FTP servers scattered throughout your organization lack the visibility, management and enforcement capabilities that modern Managed File Transfer solutions deploy.
Hey SEC, it’s Frank Kenney at Ipswitch. I don’t mean to rock the boat but I had a few quick questions regarding your recent announcement that you are requiring companies to notify their customers of a breach or risk of breach.
- What’s a “breach”? Does it mean the bad guys came in and took the data? Or maybe the data was left unencrypted? Or perhaps an executive lost his or her BlackBerry? Wikipedia talks about breaches of confidence, breaches of contract and breaches of faith. Is it all or none of the above?
- What does “notify” mean? Email? Snail mail? SMS? Press release? Facebook status update? Tweet? We just don’t know. And when do they need to send that out? When it happens (or it happened?) When it was discovered? When it was fixed? This is key and I say this because the breaches that happened were reported months after they actually happened. So when?
- And by “customers”, do you mean people who pay for my services? What if my services are free like social networks? Does free = exempt? What if I give you my email and contact info, does that make me a customer?
- What in the world is “risk of breach” and why shouldn’t I just fix it instead of telling my customers?
If you don’t mind I’d like to give the public in general my 2 cents…
The real story is this: we should all take these breaches seriously because at some point they will impact us individually. We must make it crystal clear to our service providers, our Internet providers and in some cases our employers that there needs to be policies and enforcement around the proper use and retention of our private information. We must also make clear that these same providers must put processes in place to better communicate and resolve any future data breaches. In much the same way we now see consumers making purchase decisions based on the carbon footprint of their suppliers/providers, the same approach will be taken when it comes to private confidential information. We at Ipswitch believe putting a secure managed file transfer solution in place will allow these suppliers to stem breaches by giving them visibility into how data is being accessed and for what purpose BEFORE these breaches happen.
As George Hulme recently wrote, the vision of Senator Richard Blumenthal’s data breach legislation is simple enough: Protect individuals’ personally identifiable information from data theft, and penalize firms that don’t adequately secure their customers’ information.
Clearly, there’s a need for organizations to better secure confidential and private customer information. It seems that a week rarely passes without a new high-profile data breach in the news. In fact, 2011 is trending to be the worst-ever year for data breaches. And that is despite many U.S. states introducing legislation that expands the scope of state laws, sets stricter requirements related to notification of data breaches involving personal information, and increases penalties for those responsible for breaches.
The need to protect customer data is unanimously shared by honest people worldwide…. The issue is HOW to effectively govern and enforce the various data protection requirements and laws?
I agree with Senator Blumenthal’s concept of establishing “appropriate minimum security plans”…. But color me skeptical on the government’s ability to appropriately monitor and enforce those plans, especially after witnessing the mighty struggles at effectively governing the dozens of state laws already on the books.
My skepticism is shared by many, including Mark Rasch, director of cybersecurity and privacy consulting at Computer Sciences Corporation: “The devil is in the details with these laws. We’ve had regulations, from Gramm-Leach-Bliley to HIPAA, that purport to help protect consumer data. Companies are already victims in these attacks, so why are we penalizing them after a breach? I think that’s because it’s easier to issue fines than it is to track down the criminals and go after them.”
In my opinion, business leaders need to prioritize their own internal efforts to properly protect sensitive information rather than wait on the government to catch up. First order of business is to identify where confidential files and data live in your organization and ensure visibility of that info (after all, how can you protect what you don’t know about?). Fortunately, there are technology solutions available to help organizations better manage and govern their critical files and data as they are being moved and consumed both internally and with business partners and across people, systems and various business applications.
August 2011: Yale University announced that 43,000 social security numbers posted to an insecure FTP server have been available to Google search engine users for the past 10-months.
May 2011: Southern California Medical-Legal Consultants (SCMLC) disclosed that the medical records of 300,000 injured workers were available online to the public through Google search.
For Yale, it seems that the file containing the names and social security numbers was stored in a FTP server which was used for open source work – That means that ANYONE could access the information without even being asked for a username/password. Although IT Director Len Peters said “there is no indication that the information has been exploited”, that sounds to me an awful lot like “nobody has told us that their information was breached but we don’t have the visibility or audit trail to know for sure.”
For SCMLC, an internal server exposed documents containing health information (including names and social security numbers) of California residents who applied for workers’ compensation benefits. The files were neither encrypted nor password-protected. According to Joel Hecht, President of SCMLC, “We take data security and privacy very seriously, unfortunately, our internal security policies and procedures were not followed.” In theory he’s saying the right things and his company may (or may not) have the proper tools and systems in place, but the key here is they lacked the proper management and enforcement of access controls and security policies. Now there are a gazillion reasons wanting to keep health information confidential, and in this case that list would include workers compensation information being read by possible future employers and impacting hiring decisions.
Ipswitch’s Frank Kenney sums things up nicely in a recent article on the increasing security risks of web-searchable databases:
“In many cases organizations don’t know that they’re wide open. The databases that exist today have ultimately been designed to allow the easiest access from a multitude of devices and places. In many people’s minds they think that there is a measure of safety for the data sitting underneath the application because the application is secure. But your database is sitting out there and it came configured out of the box to be connected to the Internet.”
So take this opportunity to identify what Web-facing databases you have and really dig into the information they contain. If you are exposing any sensitive or confidential information, take measures to properly manage that data, control access to it, set up security policies and of course ensure visibility into all files being uploaded or downloaded from the server.
