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The WiKID Blog

Viewing posts from January, 2009

value-protection-and-information-security

There is a very interesting article (and old one - sorry, I'm running behind) on CSO Online called Value Made Visible about how American Water's Bruce Larson has developed a security metric call Value Protection:

The basic Value Protection metric is a ratio that looks like this: Value Protection = Normal Operations Cost ($) – Event Impact ($) / Normal Operations Cost ($). In formula:

validating-online-transactions-with-two-factor

There has been much discussion recently about session hijacking attacks. Briefly, a trojan sits on your machine and when you go to an online banking URL, the trojan kicks in and makes a fraudulent transaction inside your SSL-encrypted sesssion. Pretty strong strong stuff, seemingly.

vint-cerf-et-al-on-internet-security

I had the pleasure to attend the recent security summit at the Georgia Tech Information Security Center (webcast is available, but only if you have quicktime and IE7 apparently, which ain't me) and getting to hear Vint Cerf and a very strong group of panelists. Here are my take-aways:

  • When you sell your company for big bucks, you get to be on panels at colleges. Maybe this is because the event was held in the Chris Klaus building.
  • The internet needs better, stronger authentication - and not just the user, but better Damballa a local Atlanta start-up spun out of Georgia Tech to help ISPs address the bot problem. Good luck to those guys. Seems like cool technology.

version-3-0-of-the-wikid-strong-authentication

Thanks to everybody for all the hard work. I would especially like to thank the various people that have done bug-testing, submitted patches and written documentation.

visa-adds-carrot-to-stick-for-pci-goulash

This will be interesting to look back on in a year: Visa is creating a $20,000,000 bonus pool to incent their members to be PCI compliant. :

Visa's new Visa PCI Compliance Acceleration Program is designed to spur entities that are covered by PCI rules to comply in a speedy fashion, said Jennifer Fischer, a director with Visa USA. "This program is part of our larger strategy for protecting card holder data and to ensure that we are doing everything we can to protect it from compromise," she said.
Why is it needed? Because:
Though nearly 18 months have passed since PCI rules went into full effect, only 36% of Tier 1 merchants and 15% of Tier 2 merchants are currently compliant with the requirements, according to Visa.
I think this might be the more effective bit:
At the same time, acquiring banks that fail to ensure compliance by Sept. 30, 2007 will be assessed fines starting at $5,000 a month for each non-compliant merchant. The fines increase to $25,000 per month for each non-compliant merchant after Dec. 31, 2007. Until now, fines have only been assessed in cases where actual data breaches occurred.
That will get them going!

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