Speaking of Security – The RSA Blog and Podcast

I have mostly written about mobile apps; specifically on apps becoming an integral part of our daily lives. This is a fact that can be proven by the increase in the number of apps available and downloaded via public app stores. So what else is happening in the information security world? We are bombarded with news articles each day. The key is to identify the combined impacts of these seemingly disparate trends ̶ or news and see the big picture and may be even predict the future.

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Great deals abound online for holiday shoppers during the hottest time of year where e-commerce merchants are looking to cash in on what is projected to be a US$1.25 billion spending spree just on Cyber Monday alone. Where the money goes, so do cybercriminals who are also looking to make illicit gains of their own using clever ruses such as phishing emails and web pages that promote discounts and offers that are too good to be true when in reality they are harvesting credit card numbers, stealing identities and anything else that can be turned into cash. Rueben Rodriguez from RSA’s Identity Data & Protection group joins the Speaking of Security podcast to talk about what consumers and online merchants need to look out for to avoid getting fooled by cybercriminals this holiday shopping season.

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We’ve all heard of Personally Identifiable Information or PII (social security number, drivers license number, birth dates) and Protected Health Information or PHI (medical diagnosis codes, medical history), but have you heard of Personal Password Information or PPI? No?

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The worldwide attention on the 2012 Olympic Summer Games has provoked interest from the fraudster underground to leverage the Games to launch myriad phishing and social media attacks on unwitting fans to spread malware and steal personal information. RSA’s Angel Grant talks about the different types of online scams to watch out for around the Olympic Games.

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As with the advent of Spyware and Adware, the world of Malware has grown in new directions. While viruses and worms abound and are becoming increasingly (even exponentially) more common, we are still dealing with the personal, social and corporate implications of “Greyware”…and it’s exploding in an entirely new area around the exciting and largely wide-open world of mobile devices and services.

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Dan Shugrue, Principal Product Marketing Manager for RSA’s Identity and Verification Unit discusses lessons learned from recent password breaches at several major internet and social networking sites from both the consumer and business perspective.

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The recent LinkedIn accounts compromise in which 6.5 million password hashes were published in the Russian hacker community grabbed a lot of media attention. In a hellish period of publicly known breaches that hit the front page news, with perimeter security defenses failing left and right in any possible vertical and geography, this incident stirs some deeper emotions than usual. It seems to be a bit more worrying. It’s personal. I bet that every reader here has a LinkedIn account (raise your hand of you don’t). Certainly every journalist reading this has one.

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Googling yourself is an important exercise in order to understand what others can find about you. I constantly stress that security will always come down to the individual – how it comes down to you. If you don’t know what others know, how can you protect yourself, your life, your job, your career?

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