Category Archives: Cyber Crime

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Top 10 Ways Businesses Can Protect Consumers

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In a world where customers are frequently being taken advantage of online, a business’s top priority is to protect their most prized asset: the client. With that in mind, the Online Trust Alliance (OTA) has issued its Top 10 recommendations for 2011 to help businesses protect consumers from being fooled. The list includes techniques that businesses can use to help their customers (and even their employees) from deceptive and malicious online threats. Here are the top five:

  1. Upgrade all employees to the most current version of browsers that have integrated phishing and malware protection and privacy controls including support of “Do Not Track” mechanisms and controls. Such controls provide users the control on third party data collection, usage and data sharing of their online browsing activities, while balancing out the value of ad supported online services. Encourage consumers to update their browsers by notifying them of insecure and outdated browsers.
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    In addition consider terminating support for end-of-life browsers with known vulnerabilities by preventing log-ons and providing instructions to upgrade.

  2. Establish and maintain a Domain Portfolio Management program that includes monitoring look-a-like or homograph-similar domains and tracking renewals to prevent “drop catching” of expiring domains. Domain locking is recommended to help guard against unintended changes, deletions or domain transfers to third parties.
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    Such programs and practices can help protect a company’s brand assets and consumers from landing on look-alike sites compromising trademarks and trade names.

  3. Adopt Email Authentication including both SPF (Sender Policy Framework) and DKIM (DomainKeys Identified Mail) to help reduce the incidence of spoofed and forged email, helping to prevent identity theft and the distribution of malicious malware from tarnishing your brand reputation. Authenticated email allows ISPs, mailbox providers and corporate networks an added ability to block deceptive email, reduce false positives and protect online brands and sites from deception.
  4. Encrypt all data files containing customer profiles, email address and or PII, which are transmitted externally or stored on portable devices or media including flash and USB drives.
  5. Upgrade to Extended Validation Secure Socket Layer Certificates (EVSSL) for all sites requesting sensitive information including registration, e-commerce, online banking and any data which may request PII or sensitive information.  Use of EVSSL certificates help to increase consumer confidence of your online brand. When an EVSSL is presented, the address bar turns green providing the user a higher confidence level the site and company they are visiting is a legitimate business.

“The Internet has become a foundation of commerce, communication and community. As such, business and government have a shared responsibility to take steps to curb cybercrime and online abuse,” said Senator Joe Lieberman. “There are a lot of simple, common-sense steps that both businesses and consumers can take to make them more secure.

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I applaud OTA’s efforts to promote practices which enhance the internet’s integrity, privacy, security and resiliency.” Click for the complete list of OTA’s top 10 recommendations.

The Cost of a Data Breach

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Six years ago, The Ponemon Institute conducted its first “Cost of a Data Breach” study in the United States. Since then, the independent research firm has expanded into the United Kingdom, Germany, France and Australia. This most recent study focuses on actual data breach experiences of 51 U.S. companies from 15 different industry sectors.

The results of Ponemon’s 2010 study, which were released this month, find that:

  • For the first time, malicious or criminal attacks are the most expensive cause of data breaches and not the least common one
  • Organizations are more proactively protecting themselves from malicious attacks
  • Companies’ investments in finding and remediating data breaches may be paying off
  • For the third straight year, direct costs accounted for a larger proportion of overall data breach costs

Other important findings include: more organizations favor rapid response to data breaches, and that is costing them greatly; for the fifth year in a row, data breach costs have continued to rise (the average cost of a data breach in 2010 increased to $7.2million, up 7% from $6.8million in 2009); breaches by third-party outsourcers are becoming slightly less common but much more expensive; more companies had better-than-average security postures, and those organizations enjoyed much lower data breach costs.

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The report points to popular and effective technologies that are currently available to secure data both within an organization and among business partners.

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They include:

  • Encryption (including whole disk encryption and for mobile devices/smartphones)
  • Data loss prevention (DLP) solutions
  • Identity and access management solutions
  • Endpoint security solutions and other anti-malware tools

The 10 Best Industry Blogs

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Bloggin’ ain’t easy. Doing it well takes commitment, research, accuracy and regular postings. And, of course, a knack for writing. The staff of Risk Management has a few favorite blogs that we visit on a regular basis for their insight, knowledge and timeliness. The following are 10 of our favorite risk management and insurance blogs:

  1. The Call: Foreign Policy magazine’s blog posts are authored by Ian Bremmer, president of the global risk research and consulting firm Eurasia Group. The blog uses political science to analyze the future of politics and the global economy. When it comes to industry blogs, this one is my personal favorite.
  2. Terms + Conditions: The Insurance Information Institute’s blog covers current disasters, risks, laws, regulations and market conditions, among other topics. Claire Wilkinson, vice president for global issues at III, has done a great job of posting timely articles first thing in the morning, and it seems she’s been joined recently by James Lynch, a veteran insurance professional and blogger.
  3. Clear Risk: The company itself works with organizations to help improve their risk management techniques and the blog, managed by Craig Rowe, covers the various aspects of risk management and insurance in a well-organized and easy to read manner.
  4. Schneier on Security: Bruce Schneier, a security technologist and author, manages this blog, which focuses on security and security technology. He has testified on security before the United States Congress and has written articles for some of the worlds biggest publications. Schneier, an opinionated tech man, knows what he’s talking about — and it shows in every post.
  5. Workers’ Comp Kit Blog: This blog covers (you guessed it) everything relating to the world of workers’ comp. It acts as a discussion forum for employers to learn about workers’ comp cost containment, techniques and strategies. The blog is managed by Rebecca Shafer, and attorney and risk consultant, and features posts by more than 30 other professionals. Though the format of the blog can be somewhat distracting (ads galore), the content is useful.
  6. GC Capital Ideas: The website, a part of reinsurance intermediary Guy Carpenter, refers to itself as more of a platform from which it disseminates information that has been published through reports, briefings and bylined articles. I refer to it as a blog and its information is has proved valuable to our team on more than one occasion.
  7. Calculated Risk: This blog offers a sophisticated analysis of economic data, from consumer sentiment to the mortgage and housing industry to the banking industry. Managed by Bill McBride, a full-time blogger with a background in finance and economics, Calculated Risk proves successful at turning complicated technical data into useful information for the masses. McBride publishes several posts per day.
  8. Political Risk Explored: Brian Hasbrouck, a man with a serious interest in the international political economy, manages this blog. PRE’s short and sweet posts pull from other publications or reports that the blog’s readers may have never come across on their own. The blog’s simple format makes it easy to navigate and read and the Twitter feed embedded on the right-hand side is an added bonus.
  9. Product Liability Monitor: This blog was created by attorneys in the Weil product liability practice and discusses key trends, developments and events that have shaped and are shaping the product liability landscape. The blog’s clean format is something to be imitated.
  10. The FCPA Blog: Its simple name leaves no guesses as to what it covers — news and views about the United States Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. Managed by Richard Cassin, the multiple daily posts gives readers a grim reminder of the oft-corrupt corporate world and analysis of the FCPA’s actions.

If you think we have left off an important blog related to the industry, please let us know in the comments section below.

More iPhones, More Data Threats

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As the Verizon iPhone comes to market in retail stores across the nation today, hundreds of thousands (maybe millions) of mobile phone users will switch to iPhone 4 now that AT&T’s exclusive contract with Apple is a thing of the past. But this presents problems, lots of problems. The iPhone is not known for its steel cage-like security features, and numerous security breaches that have compromised iPhone user passwords and data have been documented. So with more and more iPhone users, the risk of personal data breaches increases.

With that in mind, here are a few suggestions of how to secure just about any Apple mobile device:

  • The first and most essential step is to enable a passcode. Always set “simple passcode” to off and create a longer, more secure passcode.
  • Set “erase data” to ON. This will automatically erase all data after 10 failed passcode attempts.
  • If you must store sensitive personal info such as credit card details, you should encrypt such info. You can download the Keeper Password and Data Vault app to do such a thing.
  • Several security firms offer apps that give you the ability to monitor virus threats on your iPhone in real-time, including Symantec, Cisco SIO To Go and Threatpost. All are free of charge.
  • For file encryption, there is Folder Lock or iDiscrete. Both enable users to transfer files to their iPhone from a PC or Mac and are designed to safeguard a wide variety of file types.
  • For those looking to monitor feeds from surveillance cameras (IP and CCTV cameras), there is the iCam Viewer, which allows the user to view up to eight feeds at once and is simple to operate.

If we need more convincing that mobile data threats are a real risk, McAfee just released their fourth quarter 2010 threat report, which revealed a steady growth of threats to mobile platforms.

“Our Q4 Threats Report shows that cybercriminals are keeping tabs on what’s popular, and what will have the biggest impact from the smallest effort,” said Vincent Weafer, senior vice president of McAfee Labs. “In the past few quarters, malware trends have been very similar in different geographies, but in the last quarter we’ve seen a significant shift in various regions, showing that cybercriminals are tapped in to trends worldwide. McAfee Labs also sees the direct correlation between device popularity and cybercriminal activity, a trend we expect to surge in 2011.”

There will (hopefully) be an app for that.