Saturday, December 09, 2017

For my Computer Security students.
NIST Publishes Second Draft of Cybersecurity Framework
Introduced in 2014, the framework is designed to help organizations, particularly ones in the critical infrastructure sector, manage cybersecurity risks. Some security firms and experts advise businesses to use the NIST Cybersecurity Framework as a best practice guide. Others, however, believe such static guidelines cannot keep up with the constantly evolving threat landscape, and malicious actors may even use it to devise their attack strategy.
According to NIST, the second draft for version 1.1 of the Cybersecurity Framework “focuses on clarifying, refining, and enhancing the Framework – amplifying its value and making it easier to use.”
The second draft also comes with an updated roadmap that details plans for advancing the framework’s development process.




A nice survey of the field.
How to Encrypt All of the Things
Cryptography was once the realm of academics, intelligence services, and a few cypherpunk hobbyists who sought to break the monopoly on that science of secrecy. Today, the cypherpunks have won: Encryption is everywhere. It’s easier to use than ever before. And no amount of handwringing over its surveillance-flouting powers from an FBI director or attorney general has been able to change that.
Thanks in part to drop-dead simple, increasingly widespread encryption apps like Signal, anyone with a vested interest in keeping their communications away from prying eyes has no shortage of options.




Better locks, not attack tools.
Fighting Back Against the Cyber Mafia
Four distinct groups of cybercriminals have emerged, serving as the new syndicates of cybercrime: traditional gangs, state-sponsored attackers, ideological hackers and hackers-for-hire. This is the central thesis of a new report titled 'The New Mafia: Gangs and Vigilantes'. In this report, the gangs are the criminals and the vigilantes are consumers and businesses -- and the vigilantes are urged to 'fight back'.
The report (PDF) is compiled by endpoint protection firm Malwarebytes. It is designed to explain the evolution of cybercrime from its earliest, almost innocuous, beginnings to the currently dangerous 'endemic global phenomenon'; and to suggest to consumers and businesses they don't need to simply accept the current state. They can fight back.
Fighting back, however, is not hacking back -- or in the more politically acceptable euphemism, active defense.




We should be so lucky!
Howard Solomon reports:
Canadians don’t give up their right to privacy after sending a text message to another person, the country’s top court has ruled. It’s a decision that one privacy lawyer said still means if you want to ensure privacy, encrypt your text messages.
The case involved an Ottawa area man who had his conviction for firearms offences dismissed after the Supreme Court of Canada ruled today that evidence of text messages he sent and found on an alleged accomplice were wrongly admitted as evidence at his trial. Essentially, the court ruled that without a search warrant the accused right to privacy under the Charter of Rights had been violated.
Police in fact had a warrant to search the house of a man the court calls M and the alleged accomplice and seized their cellphones. However, the trial judge ruled that warrant was invalid for technical reasons and the text messages on M’s phone couldn’t be entered as evidence.
Read more on IT World. This is actually quite huge and a slap on the side of the head to the U.S., where third party doctrine would suggest that there is no expectation of privacy. As Solomon reports, in Marakah, the court held:
“An individual does not lose control over information for the purposes of s. 8 of the Charter [the right to privacy] simply because another individual possesses it or can access it,” the court ruled. “Nor does the risk that a recipient could disclose an electronic conversation negate a reasonable expectation of privacy in an electronic conversation. Therefore, even where an individual does not have exclusive control over his or her personal information, only shared control, he or she may yet reasonably expect that information to remain safe from state scrutiny.”




Good arguments make good laws.
Why Microsoft Challenged the Right Law: A Response to Orin Kerr
This coming spring, the Supreme Court will hear arguments in the United States v. Microsoft – a case that will determine the authority of U.S. law enforcement to compel, via a warrant, US-based companies to turn over data held outside the United States. Over at Lawfare, Orin Kerr posits that Microsoft and the government—as well as the numerous lower court judges that have weighed in—have missed the core issue in the case. According to Kerr, the key is the All Writs Act; the parties and lower court judges have, in contrast, all focused on the Stored Communications Act. According to Kerr, only the All Writs Act gives the Supreme Court the necessary latitude to craft the kind of nuanced response that is needed.
This is a more detailed reprise of a claim that Kerr made some two year ago. I disagreed then (see our back and forth here). And I disagree now.




Zig in public, Zag in private? All things are possible?
Trump says fines against Wells Fargo could be increased
… “Fines and penalties against Wells Fargo Bank for their bad acts against their customers and others will not be dropped, as has incorrectly been reported, but will be pursued and, if anything, substantially increased. I will cut Regs but make penalties severe when caught cheating!” Trump wrote.
… The financial industry is hoping regulatory agencies will adopt a less aggressive approach to fines under the Trump administration.
Those hopes were raised when Mulvaney, Trump’s pick to lead the CFPB on a temporary basis, told reporters this week that he was reviewing more than 100 enforcement actions currently in the works, including litigation, cases that are being settled and investigations. Mulvaney said he would delay at least two enforcement actions, without naming them.
“The notion that this administration is or will be tough on Wall Street doesn’t pass the laugh test, and that fact is evident in deeds, not tweets,” said Lisa Donner, the executive director of Americans for Financial Reform, a coalition of groups advocating for tougher oversight of the financial system.




Why the University has really great anti-virus security?


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