Security can be an overwhelming topic to get started and as a result, a concept known as Defense in Depth has been making its way across the industry for the last couple of years. Defense in Depth is an organized and systematic way to ensure that your network is as unattractive to hackers as reasonably possible. Keep in mind that there is no such thing as “unhackable,” so the object of security is to make the costs of attacking your network more than the benefit of doing so without incurring more cost in defense than your network’s security is worth. Defense in Depth does this by breaking the security process down into eight distinct phases.
These sections are only a snippet of the fifteen pages that I've dedicated to security and privacy in my 140pg book, Understanding IT: Decoding Business and Technology. I've posted this to introduce the concept of Defense in Depth as it relates to the Malware Business Model and as a precursor to Cutting The Cord, Episode Four: Securing Your Network [Episode One and Two]. The topics covered here may be broad strokes, but before a specific technical understanding can be reached, the frameworks have to be established.
We hear a lot about various security or privacy problems throughout the world and we correctly fear for our digital safety; but we seldom stop to consider the intentions of these attackers and why our data is so important. As I've mentioned before, the issues surrounding our digital culture aren't so much privacy as they are data ownership; and the first step to ensuring that you own your data, is to ensure that you own your computer.
We tend to think of botnets as being a collection of bots, or infected computers, that are nothing more than zombies. And while this may have been true at one point, this is no longer the case: bots are not zombies. The infection that haunts them is far more subtle than anything resembling a "zombie," and recognizing that you're a bot takes far more effort than most users are capable of exerting. Simply put: You can be a bot and never know it.
After all, the owner of the botnet is not interested in your computer: You are the tool being used to achieve a higher purpose. Keeping you oblivious keeps you from doing pesky things like reinstalling Windows or calling Geek Squad, so there are a lot of reasons for an attacker to be extremely subtle in their use of your computer.
The demonstration by Cloudfare that it's possible to extract private SSL certificates means that out of an abundance of caution, administrators of sites that used vulnerable versions of OpenSSL should revoke and replace old certificates with new ones as soon as possible. Given the huge number of sites affected, the revelation could create problems.
So this is a pretty big deal for sites that rely on OpenSSL to encrypt their traffic. The question that users should be asking themselves is which sites are affected?
Yesterday, a security vulnerability was discovered that has been colloquially called the "Heartbleed Bug." You can read about the vulnerability in more detail, but in laymen's terms: the vulnerability allows attackers to copy a web server's private key and decrypt (current and previous) communication received by the server - to include passwords.