Speaking of Security – The RSA Blog and Podcast

Gone are the days when it was thought that size of the company matters to the cybercriminals. The latest PwC Information Security Breaches Survey 2013 shows that there has been a significant rise in the number of small businesses that were attacked by an unauthorized outsider in the last year – up by 22%. Interestingly large organizations only went up by 5%. The cybercriminal has moved on to stealing intellectual property or corporate secrets as that’s where the real money is and small companies become easy targets as many do not have the resources or budgets to fully protect their information.

It’s time to understand the differences between corporate secrets and custodial data.

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ATMs enable us to get our cash on demand, for those of us who still use cash, and have come a long way since the first machines in the 1960s which dispersed a set amount of funds and sent back the bank card at a later date.

Convenient to consumers, yes – but to fraudsters, ATMs are seen as a way to get their hands on currency that isn’t theirs and unlike an online transaction can be harder to trace. As a cash-out point for many scams, fraudulent crimes and cyber-attacks the ATM has seen its fair share of unfriendly withdrawals.

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The level and sophistication of advanced threats is a constantly moving target pitting the advantages of smart and patient attackers against security teams that often times can’t possibly know what to look for when an attacker employs specialized techniques and tools designed to cloak their movements. What happens when an attacker doesn’t have to rely on malware to infiltrate their target or when an attacker is able to successfully blend in like a legitimate insider? In this edition of the Speaking of Security Podcast, Tom Chmielarski, Practice Lead in RSA’s Advanced Cyber Defense Services shares some of the attack techniques he’s seen used in real breach cases, along with best practices used in the detection and defense of these advanced attacks.

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Welcome to my second in a series of blogs based on what I term “The Groove Theory of GRC.” As you may or may not know (or infer from this series), I have been a musician for much of my life. Starting in grade school playing in the school band, I have enjoyed the gift of making music over many years. While I am no longer a “gigging” musician, I still pick up my craft and noodle at home often. One aspect of making music that I have enjoyed is the debate between musicality and performance. Is a great musician guaranteed to be a great performer? Are all great musical performers talented musicians?

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In light of the recent events I’ve reflected on how valuable electronic health records (EHR) and health information exchange (HIE) participation can be in a time of crisis to immediately access critical life saving data on impacted victims. EHRs not only allow for first responders to quickly access victims’ healthcare information, but also allows for more accurate ambulatory, ER and clinical decision making in life or death situations.

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By Limor S. Kessem, Cybercrime and Online Fraud Communications Specialist, RSA Although the title of this blog may call to mind the first line of quite a number of old jokes, it appears that hacktivists, phishers and the everyday Internet user have enough in common to raise concerns of financial fraud, especially in light of [...]

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Like most technologies, Identity and Access Management (IAM) has been challenged by new business and IT trends that are causing serious disruptions in how we approach information security. The exponential growth of digital identities coupled with the increasing use of software as a service and mobile and cloud platforms have made the traditional perimeter all but disappear. As a result, legacy IAM tools that have been a security mainstay for decades are simply failing to keep up.

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In his #EMCworld keynote on Tuesday morning, Joe Tucci used the phrase “the sea of trust” to capture the pervasive role that security has to have in the success of the “third platform” of mobile, cloud and big data. It’s a great metaphor, reflecting not only the pervasiveness that security has to have, but also the dynamism and power that it needs to embrace.

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Organizations which deploy RSA Authentication Manager (SecurID) for enforcing two-factor authentication frequently think of their RSA SecurID solution only as an additional security control to enforce strong authentication to resources. However, by analyzing the wealth of log data that is generated by RSA Authentication Manager, organizations can gain valuable intelligence that can be useful to detect attacks and perhaps even predict new attacks.

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After having conducted a number of such Breach Readiness Assessments over the past year or so with customers in a variety of industry sectors – including, aerospace, financial, telecommunications device manufacturers, and health care technology – we’ve compiled a list of the Top 10 gaps that we’ve observed during these engagements. The following list is roughly ordered in frequency of occurrence (gaps at the top were seen at more customers than those further down the list), but all were observed at numerous customers.

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