As CIO at Bunker Hill Community College, Bret Moeller embraces students experimenting with technology as part of their education, but he’d prefer if their independent studies didn’t involve hacking into the college’s network.

“There are some students who discover at school that their whole point in life is to hack into the college’s network to either glean information they have no right to access or to simply kill the network to prove they can do it,” said Moeller, who works to manage and secure the Boston-area college’s network.

“We can detect scanning on our network and we try to lock things down as much as possible or not allow software on workstations, but sometimes there can be a hole in our protections. We can’t control the end users to the same degree one can in a corporate environment, but we still have to do as much as possible to secure the environment from end users,” he said.

Yet, Moeller may have more in common than he realizes with corporate network and security managers.

Recent research from the Ponemon Institute revealed that a majority of users disobey company security standards — and they do so knowingly.  In addition, survey data just released by RSA shows that trusted insiders “create data exposures of extraordinary scope” through their everyday behaviors.

“End users are smarter than ever. The advent of the PC at home and not just work anymore, as well as the ability to look up and verify what the IT people are saying to you, is a different world,” said Steve Moore, technology leader at Mary Kay Inc. in Dallas.

In addition, users can easily find detailed accounts of how to sidestep corporate policies, available from countless Internet sites and even laid out clearly in publications such as The Wall Street Journal.

With compliance regulations a constant factor, IT executives are caught between a rock and a hard place.

“We’re constantly trying to balance the need for expanded access to information and the requirements to protect information from unauthorized and inappropriate use,” said James Kritcher, vice president of IT at White Electronic Designs Corp.

in Phoenix. “We now have an expanding number of accounts, passwords and other mechanisms to manage access to various resources. The resulting overhead and complexity increases the likelihood that inappropriate access may be granted.”

For instance, users can unwittingly grant inappropriate access to co-workers, friends and family if they share too much information or neglect to update passwords. One area Craig Bush finds lacking among users is password security. He said the company has policies in place to ensure passwords aren’t abused or revealed, but users consider managing passwords more of a hassle than a safeguard.

“It’s funny how end users just don’t think passwords are a big deal and think we are just here to make their lives miserable when we request them to change or update passwords,” said Bush, who is network administrator at Exactech Inc. in Gainesville, Fla. “General password security is an area I see lacking among most end users. They just don’t realize there is technology that can use their passwords to get information and corrupt the entire network.”

Other times, it’s the more technology-savvy users who cause the most trouble. Users have tried to deploy consumer wireless routers at work, said Martin Webb, manager of data network operations, Ministry of Labour and Citizens’ Services, Province of British Columbia, Canada.

“Consumer routers are shipped with all the security settings turned off, which makes it easier to deploy, but it also immediately creates holes with security on the network,” Webb said. “It seems to be an innocuous thing and usually they are deployed without malicious intent, but it is still something we have to stay on top of or we are at serious risk.”

Mixing business and personal life

Another common problem is when users try to take their work home with them, but wind up taking more data off corporate networks and premises than they should. For instance, thumb drives, or USB flash drives, used improperly could bring a company to its knees, according to Albert Ganzon, director of network services and engineering at Pillsbury Winthrop Shaw Pittman LLP, an international law firm in San Francisco.

Being responsible for securing company and client data puts Ganzon into a state of heightened alert, considering information saved on a thumb drive is nearly impossible for him to secure.

“Thumb drives make it so easy for someone to download a copy of anything and just walk out with it. We can’t catch that before it happens; we can’t turn the USB drives off without debilitating other valid functions of the drives,” he said. “It is critical for us to keep client data confidential, and it’s a very touchy area when the potential of leaks occurs.”

Ganzon doesn’t necessarily believe users intentionally put the network, the company and its clients at risk, but when working to get their jobs done they may sidestep certain security policies without considering the potential repercussions. “If that data is lost or stolen, well, people just don’t understand the risk they pose at times,” he said.

Christ Majauckas agreed. The computer technology manager at Metrocorp Publications in Boston said users, in some cases, believe they are following the policies yet continue to pose significant risk with their actions. For instance, one of his security pet peeves is users who download e-mail attachments from personal accounts while logged onto the corporate network via their company PC.

“Downloading e-mail attachments from personal e-mail is one of the main sources for virus attack” Majauckas said. “If they use corporate mail, we check that for viruses. But they think it’s better not to use corporate e-mail for personal use, so instead they open the mail in such a way that we can’t scan for viruses. I am not going to rely on Google to check for viruses on my network.”

For Koie Smith, IT administrator at Jackson, Tenn.-based law firm Rainey, Kizer, Reviere & Bell PLC, users trolling the Internet and visiting personal sites such as MySpace or Facebook represent a big risk, so much so that he uses a Linux-based proxy server called Squid for content filtering and to shut down access to those sites.

For one, he is quite certain the sites aren’t being used for work purposes and on top of that, Smith said he finds those sites and others are ripe with spyware ready to latch onto his corporate network.

“Even though we need the Internet for productivity reasons, browsing the Web is obviously a concern because users can pull down spyware or a virus. Without adequate protections on the computer — or even in some cases when there is — viruses in the wild can still cripple your network by one user browsing to a site they shouldn’t be going to,” Smith said. He added that the content filtering also serves to protect the user and organization legally. “There are things our company can’t have happening in the workplace, and unrestricted Web browsing opens the door for that.”

More education required

Bruce Bonsall, CISO at MassMutual Financial Group in Springfield, Mass., worries most about the intertwined work and home life of most corporate employees that leaves networks open to security holes and employees vulnerable to attacks. He said he also gets concerned when a user population isn’t as educated about security policies or potential threats as they should be.

“It’s not realistic for me to think that people are going to stop mixing their personal and work lives. We have to rely on them to practice good hygiene when opening links and try to prevent all the sewage that is out there from backing up into corporate networks,” Bonsall said.

For him, targeted attacks such as phishing and whaling concern him because they could take advantage of users not keeping up with corporate education efforts. He said technologies such as network access control and security information management can help protect the network, but only to a certain degree. As attacks get more sophisticated, user education is the only option.

“The bad guys are going after high network staff and senior executives, which is very disturbing. The more information they use that relates to the target, the more likely someone will get tricked, even savvy end users,” Bonsall said.

Source: ComputerWorld

December 06, 2007 (InfoWorld) — While Asynchronous JavaScript and XML may have issues with security and performance, Zimbra Inc. still sees AJAX as the best way to deliver experiences on the Web and has based its open-source Web 2.0 platform on 200,000 lines of JavaScript, a company executive said Monday.

At the Web Builder 2.0 conference in Las Vegas, Zimbra’s president and chief technology officer, Scott Dietzen, emphasized a variety of AJAX and Web 2.0 technologies for developers and users, including the extension of AJAX to offline usage.

Despite AJAX’s problems, Dietzen said he favors it over other technologies such as Flash when it comes to the Web.

“There’s no other way to deliver a richly interactive experience on the Web,” said Dietzen, who was once CTO at BEA Systems Inc. “If you want the Web look and feel and the ability to mash up all sorts of other Web technologies, I think AJAX is the best fit.”

Zimbra, which was acquired by Yahoo Inc. earlier this year for $350 million, is a provider of collaboration and messaging software.

Dietzen did cite AJAX security issues such as cross-site scripting attacks, in which user data can get interpreted in the browser, creating a breach. Also noted as a security concern was use of source code in the browser.

“The goal for rich Internet applications at least ought to be to deliver the same level of security that we’ve delivered for Web applications, because to deliver less undermines user confidence in various ways,” he said. This is a goal that is close to being achieved, Dietzen said.

Blocking execution of user JavaScript inside of an application is important for combating server-side scripting attacks, according to Dietzen. Obfuscation and minimization technologies to remove white space can be used as security measures, he said. On the positive side, there is no caching of user data on the desktop with AJAX. Dietzen also advised that sensitive code not be put in a browser.

Browsers, meanwhile, also present challenges. They render the same HTML differently and were not designed for the load presented by AJAX; browsers have memory leaks and performance gaps, Dietzen said. But browsers are getting better, Dietzen said.

“Safari 3 is dramatically better,” he said.

And Zimbra has found that Internet Explorer 7 executes JavaScript two to four times better than Internet Explorer 6 does, he noted.

Tool kits also have been a problem, but that situation, too, has been getting better. Tool kits now are available from organizations such as the Eclipse Foundation, Adobe Systems Inc. and Microsoft Corp. “I’m happy to say no more Zimbra developers are using text editors or vi to craft their JavaScript,” said Dietzen.

Offline AJAX usage is a “hot topic,” Dietzen said. Zimbra now can be used offline, he said.

“The answer for occasionally connected apps is to provide a cache on the client side that allows the application to interact locally with a data set, and then synchronize over the network when the network is available,” said Dietzen.

Offline AJAX systems can be developed by using a set of caching APIs in JavaScript that enable this. These are accessible via offerings such as Google Gears and the Dojo offline tool kit.

Also, developers can program a client in something other than JavaScript, using technologies such Adobe AIR (Adobe Integrated Runtime). Developers build full programs on the client integrated with the browser, like what Microsoft is doing with its Silverlight platform.

But Zimbra used another approach. “What we did at Zimbra is we actually took Zimbra server code, which was written in Java, and we created a microserver that runs on my local client,” said Dietzen.

Dietzen mentioned the AJAX technique of AJAX Linking and Embedding (ALE), in which one document can be embedded inside another. This expands content-sharing.

He also cited a technique called “lazy loading,” which cuts down loading time for Web pages. With lazy loading, the page loads but other parts of the application, such as calendaring, are loaded only as needed.

Dietzen noted that Zimbra’s platform enables use of mashups — quickly assembled task-based applications deriving data from other, larger systems. Mashups get Dietzen’s vote as the killer app for Web 2.0.

Source: Computerworld

Free domain name service Open DNS speeds up your web surfing sessions and protects you from phishing sites.

OpenDNS provides free DNS server addresses which you enter on your home router or within your computer’s network settings. The service caches the billions of DNS requests made by its users into a giant database on a distributed network, which turbocharges surfing for everyone who uses it.

Open DNS also flags phishing sites and auto-corrects URL typos

via lifehacker