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Former NSA Honcho Calls Corporate IT Security "Appalling"
Nerval's Lobster writes "Former NSA technology boss Prescott Winter has a word for the kind of security he sees even at large, technologically sophisticated companies: Appalling. Companies large enough to afford good security remain vulnerable to hackers, malware and criminals because they tend to throw technological solutions at potential areas of risk rather than focusing on specific and immediate threats, Winter said during his keynote speech Oct. 1 at the Splunk Worldwide User's Conference in Las Vegas. 'As we look at the situation in the security arena we see an awful lot of big companies – Fortune 100-level companies – with, to be perfectly candid, appalling security. They have fundamentally no idea what they're doing,' Winter said, according to a story in U.K. tech-news site Computing. During almost 28 years at the National Security Agency (NSA), Winter established the spy agency's Technology Directorate and served as the agency's first CTO. He also held positions as the NSA's CIO, its deputy chief of Defensive Information Operations and, oddly, as chief of Customer Response. He is currently managing director of Chertoff Group, the strategic management and security consultancy established by Michael Chertoff, secretary of the Dept. of Homeland Security under Pres. George W. Bush and co-author of the USA Patriot Act."
In my experience, it's much more rare to find a company that knows about security than to find one that doesn't.
Most of them don't. Sometimes the companies that do know just consider it a risk of doing business, easier to pay when things go wrong than to try to secure it. An example of this is credit card companies. Bruce Schenier points out that he would never trust a credit card online because of the security holes, except they promise to reimburse him when things go wrong.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Having worked at several blue chips all anybody cares about is the appearance of security (i.e. security theatre) enough to cover them for audits and compliance. There is no real security in place in most places. Like you say security is hard and expensive. They don't want to make life harder than the minimum.
There is ZERO loyalty, you could put in 80 hour weeks and they'd fuck you over or outsource your job the second they get a chance, and no matter what you do its not good enough.....
That's the corporate world regardless of what department someone is in. It's one of the big reasons that life here in the USA has changed for the worse, as the detrimental effects of living that way eventually invade just about every other aspect of daily life. Hard to care what happens to other people/families when some part of you is persistently fatigued from overwork/stress & worried that you could easily wake up tomorrow to find yourself unemployed and fighting for anything that might pay the bills...
Now mostly at Usenet:comp.misc & SoylentNews.org (it's made of people!)
Actually Man-in-the-Middle transparent proxies, which intercept
and monitor SSL/TLS traffic, are now standard in most corps.
You don't get a browser alert since the corporate "fake" CA
is pre-installed as trusted in your browsers by the corp's IT.
So, yes, basically ... there *is* no encryption and they look
at everything.
Oh! And using Cisco "policy based routing", or WCCP2 or
other networking mojo, you cannot decide to skip the proxy,
from your client.
And ... using Deep Packet Inspection, the protocol will not
just be matched versus the destination port, so your genius
attempts to ssh to your external server running on tcp/443,
will not only be blocked, you will be flagged and tagged.
Solution? Just use your own equipment with either built
in 3/4G connections, or just tether across your personal
phone.
Caesar and Rome ...
(R)ule in Hell or (S)erve in Heaven [R]?