Saturday, October 29, 2011

Massachusetts Health Services breach

A recent health care breach has been documented. Massachusetts has recently passed a state law forcing health care facilities to report personal information breaches. While this may not be a preventative step it can help others realize when security measures inside bigger establishments are not working. It will force security vendors to be more careful about installations and audits of their technologies in the business.

Unfortunately as of the writing of this post, Massachusetts is a leader in the country for this law, but writing your congress person can help establish the value of this in other states.

The reason for this particular breach was based around losing track of a physical hard drive. This means a device inside of a laptop was not removed, or the hard drive was removed and not locked up or where the hard drive / computer storage facility was not properly secure with physical key monitoring and tracking.

As much as it is a concern about what 'virtual doors' hackers are using, it is possibly more important to have a detailed physical security measures for all hard drive storage and old computer destruction. Probably the most assured way to avoid stolen data from old hard drives is to destroy the hard drive data, or the device completely.   
For more ideas and considerations for enterprise hard drive handling, contact Menlo Technical Consulting today for an upgrade to secure corporate data.

Friday, October 28, 2011

Rules to Protect your Kids and Family (from Eset's Newsletter)

Here is a great general list of eight rules from eset.com - as part of their Cyber Security Awareness month. They have a tremendous news blog at eset.com discussing all kinds of recent Internet and personal privacy issues.
This list is important as a general rules list for families and individuals,  to help protect identity and online scams.

CyberTips: How to protect your kids onlineUse of social media in all age groups almost seems ubiquitous.  Advising children and teens in both the cyber world and the real world is  a difficult issue to navigate.

Here are some tips you should consider to keep your children safer on social media sites (and some of them might help you as well):
  • Let your kids know that you trust them, but that you (and they) can’t always trust others online.
  • Be sure they understand that the reason Facebook is free is because Facebook sells their data to others.
  • Remind them to review their Facebook and other social media accounts' privacy settings, at least monthly.
  • Get a Facebook account yourself and ask your children to “friend” you.
  • Get them to change the settings in their smartphone to remove location data from pictures.
  • Be sure they know that pictures taken by friends and posted on social media are out of their control and can be embarrassing, if not worse.
  • Encourage them to keep their whereabouts private (don’t “check in” to a location).
  • Remind them that “online is forever.” What seems cool today can ruin a relationship or a job opportunity in the future.


The only addition that Menlo Technology encourages is to design two different identities for social websites. Each identity should have an incorrect spelling of a last name like Smiith or possibly SmithFB and completely different birthday and year of birth. To not forget these profile changes, using the same incorrect spelling and date of birth will make it easy to use on a regular basis. 
For more news of current topics and news about the Internet, check out our other blog as well at http://menlotechnical.wordpress.com

Monday, October 10, 2011

National Cyber Security Awareness Month



Not necessarily the most interesting topic, it is worth mentioning ~ this is
National Cyber Security Awareness Month

While many people are concerned about their family noticing what they write and do over the Internet, it is more important to figure out how to avoid hackers and unsavory characters from stealing your identity.
The StaySafeOnline.org website has offed up quick reference sheets to help explain what kids and parents can do to be safe while using the Internet.
Here are SOME of the quick links directly to their PDF files for the general public:
1) Online gaming tips for kids
2) Online gaming tips for parents
3) Internet safety and security for college students
4) Mobile safety tips
5) Social Media safety tips

Also posted on the Wordpress blog (Menlo Technical Blog I)

Sunday, October 9, 2011

Symantec SPAM Guessing


According to the Symantec security blog, there s a new tactic of harvesting / guessing email addresses from every domain name. They have programs that run through all possible first names against public domains (basically almost all domains), and check to see if they get a refusal or if they are accepted and delivered. More importantly Symantec is claiming Small Businesses are being specifically targeted for private information, since they are more careless about their information and security protection practices.
Here is what the blog says:
In fact, cybercriminal see SMBs as a prime target. Back in July, we talked about how some types of attacks more frequently target SMBs.  We keep finding examples of why SMBs can’t let down their guard when it comes to security.  Recently, we’ve seen targeted spam attacks become a problem for small businesses.
For example, spammers are increasingly using a traditional technique called a ‘dictionary attacks’ against SMBs.  This trick uses dictionaries of first names and last names combined with a target domain. Spammers generate millions of potentially valid email addresses for a single domain. Spammers might try the following name and/or word variations:

john@companyname.com
jsmith@companyname.com
johnsmith@companyname.com
sales@companyname.com
info@companyname.com

An attack like this can be a problem for a large enterprise – even those with anti-spam technology in place – because the servers are still forced to accept the email connection, even if they are going to reject it because the user doesn’t exist.  But imagine how this can impact an SMB with a server designed for 250 or fewer users.
The entire article can be viewed here.

Saturday, October 8, 2011

GMail, Google Calendar and Google Docs Offline

As more clients find purpose and use in Google Apps, we are often asked about functionality while away from Internet access. Google recently announced Google Offline, which gives that exact feature to some of their products.

Simply install Google Chrome on your Mac or Windows machine and download the Offline App from the Chrome store for free.

Then, while on a plane without Internet access or even before turning on a battery draining WiFi card in a laptop or mobile tablet, prepare emails in Google Offline and access your calendar and documents (documents have not been made editable offline, but they are working on this to get make it available ASAP).
When completed with your emails, reattach to an Internet WiFi hotspot (that is WPA/WPA2 protected!!) and send your emails.
According to the GMail team's recent announcement:

Google Calendar and Google Docs let you seamlessly transition between on- and offline modes. When you’re offline in Google Calendar, you can view events from your calendars and RSVP to appointments. With Google Docs you can view documents and spreadsheets when you don’t have a connection. Offline editing isn’t ready yet, but we know it’s important to many of you, and we’re working hard to make it a reality. To get started using Google Calendar or Google Docs offline, just click the gear icon at the top right corner of the web app and select the option for offline access. 

 This again shows how forward thinking Google is with their cloud technologies. For those mobile professionals looking for this technology built into their mobile devices, consider the laptop replacement called the chromebook. It comes in both wi-fi and 3G releases

Waitress Steals Credit Cards of Bad Tippers

A recent case in New Port Richey, FL where a waitress had a portable magnetic card scanner and passed customer credit cards through it for people who didn't tip her enough, or made her work too hard - in her own opinion.  Once the card was scanned on the device, it was processed and the card was recreated and used in local stores.
According to the linked article written by Marcie Geffner:

...That's a cautionary tale for restaurant diners and a good reminder to practice safe credit card habits:
  • Try to use credit and debit cards only at reputable merchants.
  • If in doubt, pay cash.
  • Watch out for red flags, such as a credit card that's taken out of your sight for a too-long period of time.
  • Monitor your credit card statement for fraudulent transactions.
  • Report any unauthorized use of a credit card to the card issuer as soon as possible.
Follow her on Twitter: @marciegeff

The waitress didn't create the credit cards directly, but was a link in the process of passing on  the cards through the syndicate. If this is happening in one location, you can be sure it is happening in others around the country.

Thursday, October 6, 2011

Employee Purchasing in the Enterprise - survey results

Companies that have grown too quickly and lack IT device purchasing policies, or reduced workforce within in the IT divisions have been prone to allowing employees make their own purchasing decisions, or worse yet (for security reasons) use their own home devices to access corporate servers and email. This directly impacts the Intellectual Property security within that organization.
Recent article "Tablets Gain Ground"by Lauren Brousell in CIO magazine discussed survey results the statistics based around these issues. 

CIO Magazine has recently taken surveys and compiled data from about 260 CIO level respondents for current purchasing and corporate access trends within businesses:
1) 36 percent allow employees to access corporate email on personal devices
2) 23 percent allow access to corporate applications
3) 6 percent  allow workers to buy their own devices (it is not clear if they were requiring their employees to stay within purchasing guidelines.)

The conclusion is employees who purchase their own devices (laptops, mobile phones and tablets) are given limited access to corporate networks, if any. Mostly the employees are given access to the Internet from within the buildings, but also forced to sign employee policy riders that put responsibility and liability on the individuals - that could lead to termination.

Tuesday, October 4, 2011

Microsoft Security Essentials Uninstalls Google Chrome


According to a recent Wired article, Microsoft Security Essentials  recently identifying Google Chrome Browser as a Trojan.  This issue has been identified by both Microsoft and Google, and they are working on an update.
Microsoft’s Security Essentials anti-malware tool has mistakenly identified Google Chrome as a password-pilfering Trojan — and actually removed the browser from many users’ machines — but a fix for this rather amusing false positive is now available.
Here is the Wired article...

UPDATE 3/15/2012: This has since been repaired. Typically events like this are not uncommon; security software removing real software from other vendors. 


Monday, October 3, 2011

Firefox 7 Update - How to restore the address bar to show the full address
From Lifehacker:
... reader David has a simple solution.
1. In Firefox's URL bar, type in: about:config and agree to the pop-up message.
2. Search for: browser.urlbar.trimURLs.
3. Double-click or right-click and select "toggle" to change the value to false.
Now you'll get the full HTTPS or HTTP in the URL so you won't be confused on whether you're viewing a secure site.

Sunday, October 2, 2011

How Sophisticated is a 2008 Computer Trojan?

On December 17, 2007 a Symantec security researcher Liam O Murchu discovered a Trojan that is called  Silent Banker. While McAfee names the same Trojan Spy-Agent.cm, it is the same beast. According to the Symantec website, the Trojan horse program was identified perform the following functions:
...records keystrokes, captures screen images, and steals confidential financial information to send to the remote attacker.

Since this discovery it was reviewed again in October 2008 and had grown very sophisticated since it was discovered. According to this review, the software digs deeper into the affected computers, by using rootkit technologies which once installed, sits under the Windows operating system - which means it is even harder to detect by anti-virus software. This Trojan horse has regular communication with its authors, and maintains the website pages for over 400 financial institutions around the world, including the major US firms. When an infected machine his directed to a bank like Chase, the user is immediately redirected to a fake version of the Chase site, with a replica version of the bank's webpage. From there, it skims the user name and password (even for the highly acclaimed two factor authentication bank sites). This infection continues to update itself and send user name and password information back to the Trojan authors and can exist on computers until the machine is completely reformatted and reinstalled.