White House Seeks Fresh Info on Smart-Card Efforts
635909
De facto federal CIO Karen Evans sent a memo to her agency counterparts seeking an update on their plans for complying with a presidential directive to issue smart ID cards to all employees and contractors starting in October.
254112
After struggling for months to get Medicare beneficiaries to sign up for drug discount cards, the Bush administration said Wednesday that it would simply send the cards
203276
Democratic lawmakers are pressing the Bush administration to disclose the identity of more troubled nursing homes, saying earlier efforts to alert consumers did not go far enough.
720185
(InfoWorld) - As more details emerge about the recently disclosed security breach at TJX Companies, lawmakers in Massachusetts are considering new laws that would put the onus for paying for such breaches on retailers and merchants, rather than banks and credit unions, the Wall Street Journal reported Thursday. In Massachusetts, Attorney General Martha Coakley is hoping to force significant changes to the manner in which companies are allowed to collect, store, and protect sensitive consumer data. "[Coakley] is looking at a number of issues and working with the legislature to see what types of measures we can implement to better protect consumers," said Melissa Sherman, Coakley's press secretary. But security and privacy experts agree that new laws, in themselves, won't prevent a repeat of the data breach experienced by TJX, which continues to increase in scope. And that the hack of that retailer's network should provide a chilling lesson to businesses that are failing to adequately safeguard their sensitive information. As illustrated by the retailer's continued discovery of new incidents of IT systems intrusion, enterprises that don't have sufficient security tools in place will have a hard time simply piecing together the details of what has happened when their data is attacked, industry watchers observed. On Feb. 21, Framingham, Mass.-based TJX announced that it had discovered a new set of IT systems intrusions that exposed the personally identifiable information of an undetermined number of its customers. Company officials said that in addition to the IT systems break-ins TJX detailed in January 2007 -- which occurred during 2003 and between May and December 2006 -- it now believes that intruders also infiltrated its databases repeatedly during 2005. TJX offered no further details regarding the nature or volume of the information that was accessed by outsiders during the newly reported intrusions, and said that the firm only recently discovered the additional incidents, which started in July 2005 and continued over a period of time that the company classified only as "subsequent dates," in a statement. The fact that TJX -- which has already been publicly chided by MasterCard International, among others, for failing to meet established data security standards -- is still unraveling the exact details of the attack serves as testament to the notion that ill-prepared businesses will struggle just to understand how and when they've been penetrated, experts said. "The scary thing is that we are learning that this type of situation is not uncommon. It's like someone broke into your house by picking the lock and only took items you wouldn't notice were missing," said Richard Mogull, an analyst with Gartner, in Stamford, Conn. "Companies such as retailers are collecting tons of information and not securing it properly, and if they don't have sufficient monitoring technology in place, which most firms do not, it's surprising that they can figure out what has happened at all," he said. Makers of security software designed to help companies fight such data loss contend that IT executives, when they first try out one of the programs, are typically shocked to find out where all their sensitive data is located and how it is being handled by employees and business partners. "Most people are really surprised by what they see. We were even shocked when we turned on the ILP technology for the first time," said Devin Redmond, director of security products at San Diego-based Websense, which acquired information leakage prevention (ILP) specialist PortAuthority Technologies for $90 million in December 2006. "It is amazing to see how much data is moving around the network and being used in ways that existing security policies don't cover," Redmond said. "For companies who haven't addressed the problem that are attacked, the biggest challenge is simply figuring out where your sensitive data might reside to begin with, and what was done to it." Privacy watchdogs said that many businesses, specifically retailers such as TJX, have been aggregating vast amounts of sensitive consumer data for years with little regard for its security. Because businesses struggle just to understand the parameters of such an attack, there is little hope that large companies will soon be able or willing to more intelligently defend their data, said Lillie Coney, associate director at the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) in Washington, DC. -- even when faced with glaring examples of what can go wrong. "Incidents like the one experienced by TJX provide the best argument for not holding onto large amounts of sensitive information, but there's no evidence yet that these events have pushed other companies to improve their own data security efforts," Coney said. "This is exactly the situation that the criminals want; they can move in and steal the data and it's hard to tell what they made off with, which lets them keep doing business longer." One of the major problems in convincing companies to invest in technologies to defend information from internal and external threats, experts said, is that security workers still have a hard time justifying the cost of expensive new tools to senior executives, who want to know why the systems they've already installed aren't enough. Making a case for how a data breach could affect a company's bottom line should be simple, but many business leaders are unwilling to dip into their coffers for new IT defense systems, EPIC's Coney contends. "If you consider the problem in terms of risk analysis and the potential cost of an incident that exposes sensitive information, including the damage to a company's reputation, it shouldn't be a hard case to make," Coney said. "But getting companies to think like that is still a challenge, as the IT workers don't have a way to position the issue from a bottom-line standpoint; eventually someone will make a case for liability with one of these breaches, and that's when people will really get it." Research company, Ponemon Institute, based in Elk Rapids, Mich., estimates that information losses cost U.S. companies an average of $182 per compromised record in 2006. However, other industry watchers, including Gartner's Mogull said there's no real way to quantify the long-term damage done to a firm's reputation by a TJX-like event. The analyst said that such incidents are causing many enterprises to reconsider their data protection policies and look into new security technologies, but few companies are taking a comprehensive approach to addressing the problem of information security and are instead focused on potential return on investment (ROI) -- a serious mistake, he said. "Companies are trying to do ROI analysis to decide what they need to spend or what they'll lose in an incident, but that's a silly way to do it. The estimates that are out there for the cost of a breach are mostly worthless because they can't take into account the long-term effect," Mogull said. "What they really need to do is find where the data is and how it is being used in their business and try to create smarter policies," he said. "Trying to piece things together after an attack has already happened clearly isn't going to cut it."
366221
President Bush has authorized another surge -- this time in the White House counsel's office. Facing a blizzard of congressional investigations, hearings and subpoenas, the White House has hired a new crop of lawyers to do battle with the Democratic Congress.
708171
That plastic card, the one with the lousy photo that's jammed into your wallet or purse, isn't just a license to drive. It's the green light to buy a drink, the ticket to federal benefits, the must-have document to get aboard airplanes. Now it's also the flash point for an argument about how best to balance America's security needs with worries that personal privacy could be swept away.
254293
President Bush stuck to generalities in his State of the Union message, but the White House this week provided some details of its plan to set up private accounts in the Social Security system. The administration didn't lay out a complete road map. It remains unclear, for example, how much traditional benefits will have to be cut or how the ...
427531
Virginia lawmakers are considering a futuristic plan to embed computer chips in driver's licenses, making the cards harder to counterfeit by criminals or terrorists and placing the state at the forefront of a national debate about trade-offs between security and privacy.
180619
Description: President Bush has asked Andrew Card to stay on as chief of staff, and that&#39;s expected to help make the transition to the second term smoother.
502051
Fourteen organizations have been tapped to serve on an advisory board, part of an effort to give stakeholders more say in the Payment Card Industry (PCI) data security standard.
613093
The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission wants to know more about the circumstances surrounding the resignation of Thomas Perkins from the Hewlett-Packard board earlier this year.
279668
Despite ongoing privacy concerns and legal disputes involving companies bidding on the project, the U.S. State Department plans to begin issuing smart chip-embedded passports to Americans as planned Monday.
656090
Apple Inc.  disclosed on Friday that the U.S. government had informally requested more information and documents on its past stock-options practices, and said the issue was a distraction for management.
193994
A leading security expert warns that new chip and pin credit and debit cards could be open to fraud.
451664
White House has given federal agencies 120 days to develop and implement a security breach notification policy.
463385
(InfoWorld) - Secure card maker HID Corp. is objecting to a demonstration of a hacking tool at this week's Black Hat Federal security conference in Washington, D.C. that could make it easy to clone a wide range of so-called "proximity" door access cards. HID has sent a letter to IOActive, a security consulting firm, accusing Chris Paget, IOActive's director of research and development, of possible patent infringement over a planned presentation, "RFID for beginners," on Wednesday, a move that could lead to legal action should the talk go forward, according to Jeff Moss, founder and director of Black Hat. IOActive will hold a press conference Tuesday at 9:00AM to discuss the issue, according to Joshua Pennell, IOActive's CEO told InfoWorld. Paget's talk will address widespread security issues with the implementation of RFID in proximity cards that are sold by HID and other companies and that are widely used for building access. His RFID cloner was on display at the recent RSA Security Conference in San Francisco, where he demonstrated for InfoWorld how the device could be used to steal access codes from HID brand proximity cards, store them, then use the stolen codes to fool a HID card reader. Paget's presentation at Black Hat Federal will go deeper, providing schematics and source code that attendees could use to create their own cloning device, and discussing vulnerable implementations of RFID technology in a wide variety of devices, Paget told InfoWorld at RSA earlier this month. "Hopefully I'll be able to give people some information about RFID and get some pressure on vendors to fix these lousy RFID implementations," Paget said. "As it stands, I can walk up to someone on the street or maybe stand next to them in an elevator, grab their card ID and get into the building," he said. So far, Black Hat organizers have not been contacted or asked to cancel Paget's presentation, but lawyers representing Black Hat, which was purchased by CMP, are ready should that happen, Moss said. "We're prepared for the worst," Moss said. The incident between HID and IOActive recalls a 2005 imbroglio between researcher Michael Lynn and Cisco Systems over a presentation of a flaw in Cisco's IOS at a Black Hat event in Las Vegas. In that incident, Cisco attorneys demanded that Lynn's presentation be torn out of the printed conference proceedings and that Lynn be blocked from giving his talk. Lynn ultimately resigned his position at Internet Security Systems Inc. (ISS) and gave the talk anyway, spawning lawsuits and even an FBI investigation of him. Lynn now works as a researcher at Cisco competitor, Juniper Networks. Whereas Lynn's hack of IOS was considered novel, however, the IOActive demonstration of RFID vulnerabilities is largely a rehash of known issues, intended more as an introduction, Moss said. "They've known about this for years and years," Moss said. Kathleen Carroll, a spokeswoman for HID's Government Relations group acknowledged that a letter was sent to IOActive but that it did not mention patent infringement. She said that the company has long been aware that its proximity cards are vulnerable to hacking but does not believe that the cards are as vulnerable as Paget suggests. "For someone to be able to surreptitiously read a card, they'd have to get within two or three inches and get into the same plane as the card," Carroll said. HID is also concerned that Paget's demonstration will popularize the vulnerabilities in its proximity cards and endanger its many customers. "These systems are installed all over the place. It's not just HID, but lots of companies, and there hasn't been a problem. Now we've got a person who's saying let's get publicity for our company and show everyone how to do it, and it puts everyone at risk. Where's the sense of responsibility?" Carroll said. According to Moss, HID has charged Paget with patent infringement over his presentation, but has not laid out any particular remedies or threatened actions, making it difficult to ascertain what the company might do -- if anything -- to block the presentation. Security problems with implementations of RFID are well known and have been publicized before. In 2005, security consultant Jonathan Westhues detailed attacks against implanted VeriChip RFID chips. More recently, in January, Westhues posted detailed code and schematics for an RFID hacking device that can act as a reader, eavesdrop on RFID transactions between reader and a tag, analyze the signal received over the air, or impersonate a tag.Â  In 2005, Avi Rubin and other researchers at Johns Hopkins also sounded the alarm about weak security in RFID implementations by hacking technology from Texas Instruments that is used in late model car ignition systems and electronic payment systems, as well. All that attention hasn't sparked much change at companies like HID, which makes fifteen different types of proximity cards in their Prox Products and Indala Prox Products lines, all of which are believed to be vulnerable to cloning, according to Paget. "Some of these cards have been around for 15 years and were developed when there was no awareness of the problem," Carroll said. Asked why HID hasn't addressed the issue in more recent proximity card systems, after knowledge of RFID threats became common, Carroll said that doing so would cause "major upheaval" among customers.Â  Inertia is a more likely cause, said Dan Kaminsky, director of penetration testing at IOActive. "They didn't want to change to a more secure implementation because of backwards compatibility issues, and they had a lot of sites that use these cards, and HID has stuff to sell them," Kaminsky said. Paget's hack was no feat of engineering wizardry, Kaminsky said. "It took a month -- and he wasn't even working on it full time." The problem is that RFID technology, although good for inventory tracking as a replacement for barcodes, is not well suited for security, Kaminsky said. "The technology is very convenient, but don't interpret the convenience as security," Kaminsky said. "At the end of the day, many companies are essentially using barcode technology to control access to their facilities. I'd posit that perhaps there are more secure technologies out there." HID recommends that customers who are concerned about cloning upgrade to one of HID's smart card products, which do encrypt transmissions between card and reader and are more difficult to hack, Carroll said. HID also recommends that companies that use the cards train their employees to look for suspicious activity that might indicate that someone is trying to clone or spoof access cards. As for Paget's presentation, Moss expressed frustration over HID's actions, especially given the widespread attention to RFID security holes. "It's just so frustrating from a security standpoint. Now anytime someone wants to talk about anything, they need a team of lawyers. Even when it's about commonly understood problems," Moss said. For now, Moss said Black Hat is supporting Paget and his presentation -- even if last minute changes are needed to satisfy HID, Moss said.
333636
There should be more checks on the use of information collected by supermarket loyalty cards, suggests David Blunkett.