I recently crafted a piece for Huffington Post, What’s a data breach, in which I defined the vagaries of the different types of causes of a data breach. While I list the different types, I welcome opinion on others, and urge you to read the Huffington Post piece for specific examples which ended in a data breach. Stolen …
SMISH smash, don’t let your accounts take a Phish bath
What’s SMISH? SMISH is Short Message Service (SMS) Phish or in the lexicon of the day, Text Message Phishing. What’s phishing? Phishing is a criminal action where you are engaged by a third-party with the specific goal of you providing private and sensitive information for nefarious purposes. The difference between SMISH (SMS Phish) and Email Phish (Phish) is only the avenue by which you are engaged by the criminal.
How does it work?
Mobile – Daily risks mitigated
If you don’t maintain the health of your device then you should expect that your device will at some point in the future become compromised in some way, shape or form.
What type of compromises may occur? How often? What can you do?
Let’s answer these in order…
Book Review: Off the Street
A few weeks ago I had the pleasure of meeting Detective Christopher Baughman of the Las Vegas Police Department in person and chatting with him about his book, “Off the Street.” (to be released September 2011). You see Detective Baughman is the lead for the Las Vegas PD’s Pandering Investigation Team, part of Las Vegas Vice, and his book details the team’s first case. His mild manner belays his internal fire to protect those who are unable to protect themselves. Our discussion ranged from technologies described in his book, to human trafficking situation in Las Vegas where literally hundreds of vulnerable children and adults are manipulated into the sex trade. I also asked his permission to share the review pre-publication, to which he agreed. Read more…
Online Safety: Are bots in your twitter following?
Yesterday I had a an interesting sequence of events happen within my Twitter footprint that I had not seen previously. I had 11+ new followers, all who had over 100, some over 1000 followers. These new followers all arrived in my follower list in sequence over the course of the early morning. Each of these *individuals* had sent between 2-10 tweets, none of which were original content – all of them being RT (re-tweets) of pieces from trusted sources such as Mashable.
The Twitter handle/name had the format of “given name” + “3 to 5 random characters”. Click on the Figure-1 o the left to see all of these names which arrived in my follower list and you’ll understand the naming convention. Every single one of these names is a “bot” generated name.
read more…
Is your teen EXPOSED? Sexting is a crime.
Exposed is a 10 minute drama about a 15 year old girl called Dee, who makes a very common mistake of sending via (SMS – text messaging) five photos of herself to her boyfriend, nude photos. This is called “Sexting”
Do You Know Where Your Data Is?
The following appeared in the Canadian online magazine Security Matters: Location Based Services: Do you know where your data is? Do you know where your data is? By Christopher Burgess Everywhere you look, retailers and other entities are offering to collect your data using one of the many location-based services available to collate your whereabouts and analyze your behavior. Are …
Crimeware – a book review by Christopher
Five stars to Jakobsson & Ramzan for a most useful guide to understanding the underbelly of the internet. The strength exhibited by this book lies within the all-star lineup of contributors and the thorough dissection of the numerous forms of crimeware. Their book is a must read for anyone who has responsibility or an interest in protecting Personal Identifying Information (PII), Private Consumer Information (PCI) or Intellectual Property (IP).
2008 – Presentations by Christopher Burgess
In 2008, the publication of Secrets Stolen, Fortunes Lost, proved to be the entree to a great many speaking engagements. Once again, I was invited to NATO’s information assurance conference, and to the AFIO annual intelligence symposium. All in all 2008, saw a diverse and exiciting schedule of events, all of which served to continue to increase the awareness of …
2007 – Presentations by Christopher Burgess
In 2007 I learned much about the concept of “Thought Leadership” and was pleased to have been invited by both public and private entities to speak to their organizations and personnel. Visting Purdue University, Massachusetts for the E-Government Summit, and NATO for their Information Assurance conference, and supporting the HTCIA, ASIS, WRG and AGMA and getting to meet their constituents. I thoroughly enjoyed visiting the many …