Today is the kickoff for the 14th annual National Cyber Security Awareness Month. Do your part to protect your own and other people’s information. For tips, visit https://stopthinkconnect.org/resources/preview/tip-sheet-basic-tips-and-advice
Archive for the ‘Identity theft’ Category
October is National Cyber Security Awareness Month
Posted: October 2, 2017 by IntentionalPrivacy in Identity theft, National Cyber Security Awareness Month, Personal safety, Security or Privacy Initiatives, TipsTags: National Cyber Security Awareness Month, NCSAM, Security tips
Equifax breach: UPDATE
Posted: September 9, 2017 by IntentionalPrivacy in Financial vulnerabilities, Identity theft, Privacy, Security Breach, VulnerabilitiesTags: credit fraud alert, credit freeze, Equifax breach, identity theft protection, New York Attorney General Eric T. Schneiderman, protect personal information, pseudorandom generators, security breach
The newest large breach, potentially affecting 143 million people in the US, was announced Thursday by Equifax at https://investor.equifax.com/news-and-events/news/2017/09-07-2017-213000628 . It also affected a small number of consumers in Great Britain and Canada. According to the Equifax PR statement, “Criminals exploited a U.S. website application vulnerability to gain access to certain files.”
There’s been at least one potential class-action suit already filed. The New York State Attorney General, Eric T. Schneiderman, has also opened an investigation.
Based on US Senator Al Franken’s Facebook post on Equifax, it might be a good idea to wait to sign up for Equifax credit monitoring until Equifax clarifies that you are not trading your rights to sue them or join a class-action suit in return for accepting their credit monitoring service. However, you should still visit the Equifax site (http://www.equifaxsecurity2017.com/) to find out if you are one of the affected parties. If your information was not affected (although I would not trust that completely), the site will continue on to give you the date when you will be allowed to sign up for credit monitoring if you should decide to do so. Make sure you note the date, because you will receive no other notice.
Since I cannot sign up for the TrustedID service yet, I have not personally read the agreements that Equifax has put in place.
Furthermore, credit monitoring usually just alerts you to an event that has already happened. It is not always accurate or even timely. Although good to know that something has happened, taking preventive action is better.
What should you do?
Act as if your information was stolen and move to block access to your credit and financial accounts. Yes, it’s painful, but far less painful, expensive, and time-consuming than dealing with identity theft. We need better oversight of credit bureaus, but in the meantime protect yourself. Your personal information is important for credit and insurance availability and costs, getting a job, and even renting an apartment or buying a home.
Brian Krebs has an article about credit freezes and credit monitoring at How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Embrace the Security Freeze. The FTC article on credit freezes is good, but Kreb’s article is more thorough and he explains about his personal experience with credit monitoring services. Here are the actions he recommends:
- Put a credit freeze on your credit at each of the four credit bureaus (you will need to provide social security number, address, zip code, date of birth, and a credit card number for the fee (which is between $0 -$15 to place or lift):
- Equifax — 1-800-349-9960, https://www.freeze.equifax.com/Freeze/jsp/SFF_PersonalIDInfo.jsp
- Experian — 1‑888‑397‑3742, https://www.experian.com/freeze/center.html
- Innovis – 1-800-540-2505, https://www.innovis.com/personal/securityFreeze
- TransUnion — 1-888-909-8872, https://www.transunion.com/credit-freeze/place-credit-freeze
- Free: Get your free yearly credit report for all three credit reporting agencies (if available) from the FTC website, https://www.annualcreditreport.com/index.action
- Free: Opt out of prescreened/preapproved insurance and credit offers at https://www.optoutprescreen.com/?rf=t You can choose 2 time frames: permanent or 5 years.
- ChexSystems, https://www.chexsystems.com/
- Monitor your financial accounts for any irregularities daily if possible, but at least weekly.
Update: Unfortunately, the pin that Equifax automatically assigns starts with the date you call you to start the credit freeze (i.e, 090917xxxx). The automatic pin is not random. To change it, you have to call 888-298-0045; the line is only available Monday – Friday 9 am to 5 pm (and the message doesn’t even tell you which time zone). You cannot change the pin on their website.
While Fraud Alerts are free, they have to be updated again every 90 days.
NPR.org is reporting that three Equifax executives sold small amounts of stock shortly after the breach was discovered. You can look at the SEC filings here; open the Beneficial filings to see what the stock sales were. Even though all 3 only sold a small portion of their holdings, it is still a lot of money – about $1.8 million. I find it hard to believe that the CFO was not alerted to a breach of the company. The stock price was $145.09 on July 28, 2017, before the breach (discovered on July 29, 2017); yesterday the stock closed at $123.23.
Equifax hack just announced may have exposed 143 million consumers’ private information.
Posted: September 7, 2017 by IntentionalPrivacy in Financial vulnerabilities, Identity theft, Privacy, Security BreachTags: Equifax, FTC credit freeze, identity theft, security breach
Today Equifax announced that a breach may have exposed 143 million consumers’ private information. Equifax has created a special website at https://www.equifaxsecurity2017.com/enroll/ so you can find out if you are affected (at least as far as they know right now) by the breach. They are also providing credit monitoring.
What should you do?
- Sign up for the complimentary identity theft protection and credit file monitoring product, called TrustedID Premier.
- Put a freeze on your credit at each of the three credit bureaus. The Federal Trade Commission has an article at https://www.consumer.ftc.gov/articles/0497-credit-freeze-faqs that explains the process of implementation and how to temporarily remove it when you apply for new credit.
- If you were affected by the breach, the Federal Trade Commission has a site that explains exactly what to do to keep your information safe. https://www.identitytheft.gov/
Medical Records Flapping in the Breeze!
Posted: May 11, 2017 by IntentionalPrivacy in HIPAA - HITECH, Identity theft, Privacy, Private Health Information (PHI), Security Breach, VulnerabilitiesTags: HIPAA/HITECH, identity theft, medical records theft, tax fraud
Medical record theft is on the rise, and according to Reuters ( http://www.reuters.com/article/us-cybersecurity-hospitals-idUSKCN0HJ21I20140924 ), a stolen medical record is worth ten times what a stolen credit card number on the black market. The reason medical records are worth so much more, is because they are used to steal benefits and commit identity theft and tax fraud.
How easy is it to steal medical records?
This morning, I read Brian Kreb’s report on True Health Diagnostics health portal, which allowed other patients’ medical test results to be read by changing one digit on the PDF link. The company—based in Frisco, Texas—immediately took the portal down and spent the weekend fixing it. https://krebsonsecurity.com/2017/05/website-flaw-let-true-health-diagnostics-users-view-all-medical-records/
While I think it is great they fixed the problem so rapidly, I am disgusted that our medical information is so often flapping in the breeze. Health professionals are notoriously lax about protecting their patients’ medical information. A security professional that I know defended medical people by saying they do not understand HIPAA/HITECH. Yes, I know they do not necessarily understand the technical details. But is ignorance an excuse? I do not think so. They have IT people to support those computers and medical professionals are supposed to attend HIPAA training on a regular basis.
For instance, upon reading the FAQs at http://www.holisticheal.com/faq-dna , I noticed that after a patient completes their tests (recommended by my doctor), this practitioner sent results in email. It is not a simple test like cholesterol; it contains information about someone’s DNA.
After I emailed them and told them I would not consider using their service because email is not secure unless encrypted and in my opinion this practice—sending medical results in unencrypted email—is contrary to HIPAA/HITECH, they changed their policy. While they now send the results for US patients on a computer disk through the mail, they still send international clients their results through email.
I have frequently caught my own medical professionals leaving their patient portals open when I am alone in the exam room or even away having tests. During one notable session, without touching the computer, I could see a list of all the patients being seen that day on the left, and the doctor’s schedule across the top (including 3 cancellations). Another medical professional texted me part of my treatment plan. (I thought we were limiting our text conversation to time, date, and location. Otherwise I never would have agreed to text. I had never even met this person!) Another provider grouped three receptionists with computers (no privacy screens) in a circle with windows on two sides. I could read two of the screens when signing in and the third when leaving and I saw them leave their screens open when they walked away from their computers so that the other receptionists can use those computers.
Granted, these incidents may not be breaches, but I think they are violations of HIPAA/HITECH and they could lead to breaches. What are the chances they are using appropriate access control, backing up their systems, encrypting their backups, thinking about third-party access? Are they vulnerable to phishing, crypto ransomware, hackers, employee malfeasance, someone’s child playing with the phone?
Yes, I get that people make mistakes. The problem is they have the ability to make mistakes! Set up fail safes. Require each employee’s phone to be physically encrypted and give them a way to send encrypted emails or texts or do not allow them to text or email patients. Make screens lock after five minutes or sooner. Give them training. Spot check what they’re doing.
I always discuss these issues when I notice them with the practice HIPAA Privacy Officer (and sometimes change medical providers if egregious). Does it help? Maybe. But it always makes me wonder what I have not seen.
Pay attention! Protecting your data helps protect everybody’s data.
Data Privacy Day 2017: remember to protect your medical information!
Posted: January 28, 2017 by IntentionalPrivacy in HIPAA - HITECH, Identity theft, Privacy, Private Health Information (PHI), VulnerabilitiesTags: Data Privacy Day, HIPAA/HITECH, identity theft, PHI
A member of my family has recently been having some medical issues, and has been making the rounds of doctors and other medical practitioners. It is bad enough when someone doesn’t feel well, but what can make it worse? A medical professional being careless with our personal health information in spite of the medical privacy laws (HIPAA and HITECH). A visiting nurse called to make an appointment for a home visit, which turned into a SMS text dialogue. A question from the nurse left me speechless, “Have you received your {INSERT PRESCRIPTION BRAND NAME HERE} yet?”
Really? She really put part of the treatment plan in an unencrypted text message?
Text messaging by a medical professional should be limited to location and time of appointment.
I informed her that in my opinion putting a prescription name in an unencrypted text message was a violation of HIPAA, especially since the patient had never met the nurse or signed any HIPAA disclosures. She said she deleted the messages from her phone and gave me the name of her supervisor. I called the woman, who wasn’t available. I left a voice mail message, saying that I was concerned because putting treatment details in an unencrypted text message was a violation of HIPAA.
Strike two: A week later, no one from the nursing service has called me back.
I called the company that ordered the nursing service, explained what happened and asked that the service be cancelled. I took the patient to the doctor’s office—much less convenient—but a better option in this case. I was concerned that the nurse might be using a personal phone that did not have encryption on it, that she might have games installed (a common source of malware), that she did not use a pass code to lock her phone or that her phone did not automatically lock, or any of 100 different bad scenarios. What further concerned me is that I did not receive a call back from the nursing company. They are supposed to have a HIPAA Privacy Officer, who should have returned my call and explained what they were doing to protect the patient’s information in the future. At the very least, the nurse should have been required to re-take HIPAA Patient Privacy training (which is mandated to occur yearly anyway by the Office of Civil Rights).
Why is this such a big deal?
When you consider that your medical record is worth more to an identity thief than your credit card, it is a very big deal. A CNBC article published on March 11,2016, “Dark Web is fertile ground for stolen medical records,” stated:
While a Social Security number can be purchased on the dark Web for around $15, medical records fetch at least $60 per record because of that additional information, such as addresses, phone numbers and employment history. That in turn allows criminals to file fake tax returns.
Your credit card might be worth one or two dollars at most.
Another informative article, “Is Texting in Violation of HIPAA?,” appears in The HIPAA Journal.
If you feel that your medical privacy has been violated, you can file a complaint with the Office of Civil Rights.
I’m going to call the nursing service again on Monday and ask to speak with their HIPAA Privacy Officer and try to explain my concerns.
The Bottom Line: They lost a client!
Hacker Tips to Help Keep Your Debit and Credit Cards Safe
Posted: October 19, 2016 by IntentionalPrivacy in Financial vulnerabilities, Historical and future use of technology, Identity theft, safe use of credit and debit cards, Security BreachTags: ATMs, automatic payments, credit cards, credit monitoring, debit cards, FTC credit freeze, replacing your credit cards, self-service checkout, technology
The number one rule for safely using a debit card: Don’t! But, if you have to use a debit card, here are some suggestions from two of Austin’s leading computer security experts.
Michael Gough and Brian Boettcher are co-creators of LOG-MD, a sophisticated analytical tool used by computer security professionals. I recently had a conversation with them about how to use credit cards and debit cards more safely.
They said: Limit debit card use to only one local grocery store chain, especially if it has gas stations and stays open 24 hours a day. That way you can get cash without using the card in an outside ATM. Of course, the risk of being robbed is also much higher at an ATM. If you always use the same grocery store, then if the number is stolen, you know where it happened.
They said: Do not ever use a debit card at a self-service checkout, an ATM, or a gas pump. It is almost impossible to tell if the card reader has been compromised.
(Brian Krebs, who writes the blog KrebsOnSecurity, talks about card skimmers in this series of articles. Krebs updates these articles on a regular basis and they are well worth reading. In fact, as I have mentioned before, his column is a great place to find out about security issues.)
They said: You may also be able to buy store gift cards with your debit card to use at their gas pumps without having to pay a fee to use them the way you do with MasterCard or Visa cards. And the cards may even be reloadable. The one drawback? If the card is lost or stolen, the money on it is not replaced the way it would be if you used a credit card.
They said: Do not use a debit card at a restaurant. You have no idea if the person is using a hand-held skimmer on your card. Someone may have placed a skimmer on the restaurant’s card terminal.
(Restaurants are weak in security because the staff holds your cards out of your sight and out of your control. The authors of this blog each had fraudulent charges placed on their cards after two visits to the same restaurant in the same week. We usually take turns paying. We had different servers each night. We think that they had a little ring going.)
They said: Debit cards are less secure than credit cards because debit cards are directly hooked to a bank account or credit union account. If a debit card gets compromised, your account can be drained. It may take some time—even months—to get the money replaced in your account. And the money may not be replaced at all since it is not insured as it is with a credit card.
They said: Most banks and credit unions are helpful about getting a new debit card, but if a credit card gets compromised, usually a new card can be received in 2 or 3 days, maybe even faster if you can pick it up at your financial institution.
Here are their recommendations for safer credit-card use:
They said: Get a second card with a low limit. This card should be mainly used at less safe locations: public kiosk use (think train tickets or parking) and online shopping, as well as automatic payments. If you have to use self-service checkouts, use the second card. Avoiding self-service checkouts is the best strategy.
They said: That second card can be a handy back-up, in case your main credit card is lost or stolen.
They said: Look over your statements on a regular basis for transactions that you did not make.
They said: Patronize companies that use chip and signature (in the US) card terminals, which in most cases was supposed to be in place in the US by October 2015. Europe uses chip and pin. If a company still has not upgraded from magnetic stripe terminals, tell them why you do not want to shop there. (Or only use cash there.) Gas pump card terminals are required by major credit card brands to be updated to use chip and signature (in the US) by October 2017.
They said: Keep a list of automatic payments, and when they renew. Cancel automatic payments as soon as possible when you switch to another card.
One problem with automatic payments is that they may move to a new card even if you did not authorize it.
They said: Some cards (American Express is one example) will allow you to set a daily limit on spending. They usually alert you as soon as possible if spending goes over that limit.
They said: Replace your cards at least every two years.
They said: Put a credit freeze on your credit. The FTC explains the pros and cons of credit freezes here. There may be a small charge for freezing and unfreezing your credit file, but it is cheaper than credit monitoring, which will not tell you about a breach until after it has already happened.
Michael said: Using credit monitoring is like going to a dentist who only monitors your teeth, but does not fix any cavities found.
They said: Get a copy of your credit report from each of the three credit bureaus yearly. You can cycle them so you get one every four months.
They said: As soon as you hear about a mass data breach that could involve your accounts, call your bank or credit union and request a new card. Do not wait for a notification.
They said: Keep records of each card, the card numbers, the customer service phone numbers and addresses. (It is pretty easy these days to make blow-up copies of the fronts and backs of your cards.)
Michael Gough has worked in the IT and Information Security field for over 18 years. He has a wide variety of experience that includes positions as a security analyst for the State of Texas and the financial and health-care sectors, and security consulting with Hewlett Packard. Michael currently works in the health-care sector as a Blue Team Defender, incident responder, and malware fighter.
Michael has created or co-created several tools used in the security industry, such as LOG-MD, which is a logging tool, and the “Malware Management Framework,” which is used to discover and manage malware. In 2012, Michael discovered a type of malware called Winnti that continues to plague gaming and pharmaceutical companies.
Brian Boettcher, co-creator of LOG-MD and co-host of Brakeing Down Security, has worked in the IT and Information Security fields for a number of years. Brian currently works as a senior security engineer and incident responder. He is a member of several security groups and presents regularly at security functions.Do not ever use a debit card at a self-service checkout, an ATM, or a gas pump. It is almost impossible to tell if the card reader has been compromised.
Lions and Tigers and … Passwords? Oh my!
Posted: August 3, 2016 by IntentionalPrivacy in Identity theft, Privacy, Security or Privacy InitiativesTags: 2-factor, email privacy, identity theft, KeePass, password safety, privacy
Graham Cluley released an article today called “200 MILLION YAHOO PASSWORDS BEING SOLD ON THE DARK WEB?” about various web sites that have had stolen passwords recently posted on criminal web sites (the “dark web”).
While not really news—new password breeches are revealed quite often—but it brings some questions to mind. How do you know if your passwords have been stolen? And, what do you do about them?
If you haven’t changed your important passwords recently, you could just assume they have been stolen and change them.
Or, you can look up your email address or user name at a site like LeakedSource.com. When you put in a user name or email and click Search, it will show you possible accounts and the types of information contained in their databases for free, but not the actual information contained. You have to pay to see that.
Do you actually need to see those old passwords? Probably not; what you really need is the accounts that were compromised. If you look at those accounts and you have not changed your password in a while, here’s what to do:
- Install some kind of password manager on each of your devices, something well known, such as KeePass 2 or LastPass. Come up with a password for the manager that you will not forget. If you forget it, the password probably cannot be recovered (99.99% chance of no recovery). Keep a copy of the master password somewhere safe—your safe deposit box or even in your wallet if you need to. (Note: this may not protect you against family members or friends who want to know your secrets.) If your wallet gets stolen, you only have 1 password to change.
You can download those applications from the following sources. Note: Only download applications from the original site:
- LastPass: https://lastpass.com/
- KeePass 2: http://keepass.info/download.html Choose the Professional version.
Personally, I prefer KeePass, but LastPass is much easier to synchronize between devices because it is web-based. LastPass has had recent vulnerabilities however.
The nice thing about a password manager is that it will autotype your password (unless the username and password are on separate pages, such as some bank accounts and credit card sites use). Even in those case you can drag your username and/or password to the proper place.
- Change your important passwords—email, Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn (for example)—to something at least 15 characters long. Do not reuse it anywhere! A password safe will generate a password for you and you can customize length and character types.
- If the site offers some kind of multi-factor authentication (MFA), take advantage of it. Yes, it is painful! But you can often set it so that your devices will remember for at least 30 days (unless you clear your cache).
- Do not share your passwords with anyone! Not your spouse, kids, friends, boss, coworkers, or someone claiming to be from Microsoft support.
- Last, change your passwords at least yearly. A good day to change them? World Password Day at https://passwordday.org/ celebrates password security on May 5 every year. They have some funny videos starring Betty White! Check them out!
Save your information and your privacy. Practice safe MFA like Betty White!
Passwords
Posted: January 29, 2016 by uszik11 in Identity theft, Password need-to-knows, Personal safety, Uncategorized, VulnerabilitiesTags: personal safety, privacy, security research, technology
Are your passwords strong enough to resist a brute force attack?
Passwords are just about dead. Many systems now offer “two factor identification.” You give them your cell phone number and you have to use both a password and a code number sent to the phone for your log in. But passwords continue. They are easy for administrators. They are part of the common culture.
Steve Gibson has the engineer’s “knack.” (See the Dilbert video here.) His company, Gibson Research Corporation (here), sells a wide range of computer security products and services. He also offers many for free. Among the freebies is Haystack: How Big is Your Haystack – and how well is your needle hidden? (here) This utility provides a metric for measuring password security.
It is pretty easy to do yourself, if you like arithmetic. 26 upper case letters, 26 lower case, 10 digits, 33 characters (with the space) for 95 printable ASCII characters in the common set. So, if you have an 8-character password that is 95 to the 8th power possible combinations: 6.634 times 10 to the 15th power or over 6-and-a-half quadrillion. If you could try a million guesses a second, it would take 6.5 billion seconds or just over 200 years. (60 seconds/minute * 60 minutes/hour * 24 hours/day * 365.25 days / year* 200 years =6.3 billion .)
Gibson Research makes all of that automatic. Just key in your password, and it tells you how long it would take to crack.
Cracking passwords is a “routine activity” for a hacker. They have tools. At one meet-up for hackers, the speaker told us, “If you have to use brute force, you are not thinking.” They do not type in a million guesses per second, of course. They have programs to do that. Also, most websites just do not allow that kind of traffic: you cannot do a million guesses per second. What the hackers do is break in to a site, such as Target, Home Depot, LinkedIn, or eHarmony, download all of the log files, and then, on their own time, let their software attack the data offline.
Also, hackers do not use the same computers that you and I do. They start with gaming machines because the processors in those are built for high-speed calculation. They then gang those multiple processors to create massively parallel computers. The calculators from GRC show the likely outcome for brute force by both a “regular” computer and a “massive cracking array.”
If someone got hired today at a typical midrange American corporation, their password might just be January2016. If, like most of us, they think that are really clever, it ends with an exclamation point: January2016! Hackers have databases of these. They start with standard dictionaries, and add to them all of the known passwords that they discover.
One common recommendation is to take the first letters of a phrase known only to you and personal only to you. My mother had naturally red hair for most of her life. She was born in 1929 and passed in 2012. So, “My mother’s red hair came from a bottle” becomes mmrhcfab19292012. According to Gibson Research, brute force guessing with a massive cracking array would take over 26 centuries.
Gioachino Rossini premiered his opera, William Tell, in 1829. “William & Tell = 1829” would take a massive parallel cracking machine about 1 million trillion centuries to guess. On the other hand, a “false phrase” such as Five + One = 27 could not be done in under 1.5 million centuries.
Texas State Guard Maritime Regiment non-commissioned officers at leadership training. Only the one on your far right is a real Marine.
Remember, however, that a dictionary attack will crack any common phrase. With over 1.7 million veterans of the United States Marine Corp, someone—probably several hundred someones—has “Semper Fi” for a password. Don’t let that be you. A brute force attack would need only 39 minutes, but that is not necessary: a cracker’s dictionary should have “Semper Fi” in it already.
(Above, I said that cracking passwords is a “routine activity” for a hacker. “Routine activities” is the name of theory of crime. Attributed to sociologists Marcus Felson and Lawrence E. Cohen, routine activities theory says that crime is what criminals do, independent of such “social causes” as poverty. (See Routine Activity Theory on Wikipedia here.) That certainly applies to password crackers. Like other white collar criminals, they are socially-advantaged sociopaths. They are planfully competent, calculating their efforts against a selfish return.)
Secured online applications … Trust but verify
Posted: August 16, 2015 by IntentionalPrivacy in Identity theft, Issues, Privacy, VulnerabilitiesTags: data privacy, identity theft, ssl, webiste privacy, website security
I had an interesting experience last week (my life seems to be full of them!). I signed up to take a class that purported to give me a better understanding of what I was looking for in a career.
The first day of class the instructor gave us the URL for an application that he had developed to collect a considerable amount of information about each of us: likes, desires, Myers-Briggs profile, and results from other assessment tests. During the class break, I asked him why the application was not using HTTPS. He said it did, but it used a referrer. I looked at the code of the web site. Hmm, not that I could see.
When I got home, I loaded up Wireshark so I could watch the interaction of the packets with the application. The application definitely did not use HTTPS. I emailed the instructor. Oh, he said, there was a mistake in the documentation, and he gave me the “real” secure URL.
Ok, so this application is sending his clients’ first and last names, email addresses, passwords, and usernames in clear text across the Internet. Not a big deal, you say?
It is a big deal, because many people use the same usernames and passwords on their accounts around the Web. Then add in their email address and their personal information is owned by anyone sniffing packets on any unsecured network they might be using, such as an unsecured wireless network in a coffee shop, an apartment building, a dorm room ….
So, next—because I now had their “secure” website URL—I checked their website against http://www.netcraft.com/, https://www.ssllabs.com/ssltest/, and some other sites—all public information. According to these tests, the application was running Apache version 2.2.22, which was released on January 31, 2012, WordPress 3.6.1 (released on September 11, 2013), as well as PHP 5.2.17 (released on January 6, 2011). It is never a good idea to run old software versions, but old WordPress versions are notoriously insecure.
Please note: I am not recommending either of these websites or their products; I merely used them as a method to find information about the application I was examining.
Not only that, but the app used SSL2 and SSL3, so the encryption technology is archaic. Qualys SSL Labs gave the app an “F” for their encryption, and that was after he gave me the HTTPS address.
(“It was harder to implement the security than we thought it would be,” he said.)
Although I did not find out the Linux version running on the web server, based on my previous findings—which I confirmed with the application owner—I would be willing to bet that the operating system was also not current.
So, then I tried creating a profile. I made up first and last names, user name, and a test email from example.net (https://www.advomatic.com/blog/what-to-use-for-test-email-addresses). I tried “test” for a password, which worked. So, the app does not test for password complexity or length.
He asked me on the second day of class if I now felt more comfortable about entering my information in his application since it was using HTTPS. I said no; I said that his application was so insecure that it was embarrassing, that it appeared to me that they had completely disregarded any considerations about securely coding an application.
He said that they never considered the necessity of securing someone’s information because they were not collecting credit card information.
I said that with the amount of data they collected, a thief could impersonate someone easily. I reminded him that some people use the same usernames and passwords for several accounts, and with that information and an email account, any hijacker was in business.
Then he said that he was depending on someone he trusted to write the code securely.
Although I believe in trust, if it were my application, I would verify any claims of security.
I told him he was lucky someone had not hacked his website to serve up malware. I said that I was not an application penetration tester, but that I could hack his website and own his database in less than 24 hours. I said the only reason it would take me that long is because I would have to read up on how to do it.
I told him I would never feel comfortable entering my information in his application because of the breach of trust between his application and his users. I said that while most people would not care even if I explained why they should care, I have to care. It is my job. If my information was stolen because I entered it in an application that I knew was insecure, I could never work in information security again.
So, what should you look for before you enter your information in an application?
- Does the web site use HTTPS? HTTPS stands for Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure; what that means is that the connection between you and the server is encrypted. If you cannot tell because the HTTPS part of the address is not showing, copy the web address into Notepad or Word, and look for HTTPS at the beginning of the address.
- Netcraft.com – gives some basic information about the website you’re checking. You do not need to install their toolbar, just put the website name into the box below “What’s that site running?” about midway down the right-hand side.
- Qualys SSL Labs tests the encryption (often known as SSL) configuration of a web server. I do not put my information in any web site that is not at least a “C.”
- Another thing you should be concerned about is a site that serves up malware: Here are some sites that check for malware:
→ http://google.com/safebrowsing/diagnostic?site=<site name here>
→ http://hosts-file.net/ — be sure to read their site classifications here
- Do not enter any personal information in a site when using an insecure Wi-Fi connection, such as at a coffee shop or a hotel, just in case the site doesn’t have everything secured on its pages.
Intentional Privacy 