The Department Of Commerce
Internet Policy Task Force
recently released a “green paper” document entitled, “Cybersecurity, Innovation and The Internet Economy”

Secretary of Commerce Gary Locke stated in his introductory message:

The following report – or green paper – recommends consideration of a new framework for addressing internet security issues for companies outside the orbit of critical infrastructure or key resources. While securing energy, financial, health and other resources remain vital, the future of the innovation and the economy will depend on the success of Internet companies and ensuring that these companies are trusted and secure is essential. This is the area of our focus.

The report recommends that the U. S. government and stakeholders come together to promote security standards to address emerging issues. It also proposes that the government continue to support both innovations in security and on the Internet more broadly. We believe this framework will both improve security at home and around the world so that Internet services can continue to provide a vital connection for trade and commerce, civic participation, and social interaction around the globe.

I haven’t yet read the complete document but, but look forward to understanding the policy recommendations laid out in the document and seeing how they influence the improvement of information security in the years going forward.

Michael Barrett, Andy Steingruebl, Bill Smith of Paypal have collaborated on an excellent white paper entitled, “Combating Cybercrime – Principles, Policies, and Program.”  I highly recommend it to you.

Rather than attempt an analysis at this time, please let me share a segment of an introductory paragraph …

What is possible, and perhaps even likely should current trends continue, is the perception by Internet users that the Internet is unsafe and therefore unsuitable for everyday use. Should this perception become widespread, crowd psychology could take hold and as with the recent world financial crisis, result in a loss of faith in “the system”. Certainly there were very tangible and real issues behind the financial crisis, but the long-lasting impact has proven to be the perceptual shift resulting in the Great Recession.

… and a portion of their conclusion:

The authors believe that cybercrime, and other cyber issues are the one area that could cause this type of loss of faith in the safety of the Internet In this white paper, the authors lay out an entire framework of practical actions that could be taken to reduce the impact of cybercrime, and substantially make the Internet safer. Even if only some of these recommendations are implemented, it will make a significant improvement in Internet safety. While we’re hesitant to name any of these initiatives as being more important than any other, we are occasionally asked “list the three things you want us to do”. In general, we list:

• Increase investment in cybercrime law enforcement.
• Start the Internet NTSB.
• Fix the Cybercrime Convention.

Just doing those three things would make a big difference, albeit it would be – to paraphrase the punchline of many a joke – merely “a good start”. We expect this paper to be a first step in a multi-stakeholder and iterative process and approach to making substantial progress against cybercrime. We welcome feedback on our proposals.

In between these bookends lies a thought-provoking analysis of the basic problems, the challenges and roadblocks that complicate potential solutions, and a decisive call to action to bring about a coordinated ecosystem change.  The authors propose ten underlying principles and a series of specific recommendations, ranging from international law enforcement to forcing unsafe devices off the Internet.

I believe this document will help foster and accelerate interactions among the appropriate business, government and user communities to make signifiant progress.  We all have a stake in this.  This document will help us understand the issues and get involved.

When I hear a message that begins, “We’re from the government, and we’re here to help,” I am naturally suspicious.  My political philosophy, based on personal freedom, individual responsibility and natural consequences, is all too often infringed upon by over-reaching, even if well-intentioned, government mandates.  So, when I first learned of the “National Strategy For Trusted Identities In Cyberspace,” I quite naturally envisioned the typical government movement towards stronger control, greater regulation and reduced freedom.

These goals will require the active collaboration of all levels of government and the private sector  The private sector will be the primary developer, implementer, owner, and operator of the Identity Ecosystem, which will succeed only if it serves as a platform for innovation in the market. The Federal Government will enable the private sector and will lead by example through the early adoption and provision of Identity Ecosystem services. It will partner with the private sector to develop the Identity Ecosystem, and it will ensure that baseline levels of security, privacy, and interoperability are built into the Identity Ecosystem Framework.

That said, I include here some key points from the document.  A user-centric “Identity Ecosystem” is proposed – an online environment where individuals and organizations will be able to trust each other because they follow agreed upon standards to obtain and authenticate their digital identities—and the digital identities of devices. 

Where are Abby Sciuto and Timothy McGee when we need their help?  It would seem that their almost supernatural skills in cybersecurity and good-guy hacking are in great demand.  As reported by Josh Smith in NextGov:

Many of the FBI field agents assigned to combat cyber threats say they do not have enough expertise to do it, according to a new report from the Justice Department’s inspector general.

 

Justice Department officials found that more than a third of the 36 FBI agents surveyed said they don’t have the networking or counterintelligence expertise needed to effectively investigate national security breaches. The report also said that field offices lacked the forensic and analytical capabilities to take on national security investigations.

Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, who has proposed cybersecurity legislation on Capitol Hill, said the need for a capable cybersecurity work force is “more urgent than ever.”

“The threat of cyber attacks continues to grow every day,” said Collins, ranking member on the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, in a statement. “That is why it is so troubling that the federal government has not adequately trained its cyber professionals to combat these threats.”

…

 

A dearth of trained cybersecurity professionals is plaguing government and industry efforts, with some analysts estimating that the U.S. needs 20,000 to 30,000 more people to adequately defend cyberspace.

The recent security breach affecting Sony Corp’s PlayStation network, is receiving high profile attention. As reported by Nick Wingfield in today’s Wall Street Journal:

Two U. S. Congress members are asking Sony Corp. to explain its handling of the recently disclosed data breach involving its PlayStation Network, one of the largest data thefts in history.

 

On Friday, Rep. Mary Bono Mack (R., Calif.) and Rep. G.K. Butterfield (D., N.C.), members of a Congressional subcommittee on commerce, manufacturing and trade, asked Kazuo Hirai, the head of Sony’s videogames division, to address their concerns. The letter asked when Sony first learned of the recent breach, why it waited days to notify its customers, and how Sony intends to prevent further breaches in the future.

Sony has said the breach occurred earlier this month and resulted in the loss of names, addresses and possibly credit card numbers associated with 77 million accounts on its online game network. While Sony and law enforcement officials haven’t addressed whether they have any suspects in the intrusion, one prominent target of a past Sony legal attack over a hacking incident denied any involvement in the data theft.

…

 

Sony hasn’t said what the financial impact from the data intrusion will be. Larry Ponemon, founder of a firm called the Ponemon Institute that analyzes the costs of data breaches, estimated it could run as much as $1.5 billion, including everything from Sony’s own forensic investigation, to the diversion of Sony personnel from their regular responsibilities to the cost of making amends to customers with free offerings.

Besides the punny article title, Computerworld’s Lucas Mearian offered a provocative opening line in his article, “What happens to data when your cloud provider evaporates?“

Over the past year, four cloud storage service providers have said they’re shutting down and Amazon’s cloud services have been problematic since Thursday.

Does that scare you away from Cloud Computing? What does a company do if its cloud storage provider goes out of business?

Currently, there’s no way for a cloud storage service provider to directly migrate customer data to another provider. If a service goes down, the hosting company must return the data to its customer, who then must find another provider or revert back to storing it locally, according to Arun Taneja, principal analyst at The Taneja Group.

Is help on the way?

The Storage Networking Industry Association’s Technical Work Group is developing an API called the Cloud Data Management Interface that would allow providers to migrate customer data from one vendor’s cloud to the next — a move aimed at alleviating vendor lock-in.

That API, if adopted by the industry, will become more important over the next several years as nearly three out of four cloud storage companies that cropped up in recent years whither and die, according to Taneja.

It seems that the Amazon cloud troubles has caused a fair bit of introspection into the cloud services industry. Given the unabashed hysteria about cloud computing in the past several months, I think deep instrospection is very healthy.

Today, in a Computerworld article entitled, “Security still top concern with cloud, despite Amazon outage,” Jaikumar Vijayan stated,

Despite the heightened focus on cloud availability and uptime caused by Amazon’s prolonged service outage last week, security will likely remain the bigger long-term concern for enterprises.

Kyle Hilgendorf, a cloud computing analyst at Gartner reminded us that we need to plan for emergencies:

Amazon portrays an aura of invincibility, whether intentional or not, and this outage is going to remind enterprise customers that nobody is perfect and increased due diligence is required.

However, Hilgendorf said that security is really the more pressing concern.

I still consider it to be the bigger, long-term concern. Enterprises I speak to are more concerned about security than they are about availability, reliability or performance.

Jonathan Penn, an analyst at Forrester Research, said that last week’s Amazon outage is sure to stoke enterprise anxiety about cloud performance and uptime, but security is still going to be the bigger worry for most enterprises.

Companies that are looking to move applications to a hosted cloud environment are going to want even more availability assurances from their vendors now.

Ultimately though, enterprises need to realize that there can never be 100% uptime in a cloud environment, just as there can never been continuous availability within an enterprise data center.

Failures of the sort that happened last week will happen again, and it’s up to enterprises to ensure that they have measures in place to mitigate any resulting service disruptions.

Over the longer term, the thornier issue for most companies will continue to be data security. Forrester’s clients have consistently rated security as their top concern with cloud computing, ahead of other issues such as performance and availability.

It looks like we in the information security industry still have our work cut out for us.

I first read the news about Apple’s secretive location tracking capability in the Kaspersky Labs Threat Post article, “Secret iPhone Feature Tracks Owners’ Whereabouts“:

Security researchers have discovered a hidden iPhone feature that secretly tracks and saves the meanderings of the phone – and presumably its owner.

The tracking feature was described in a presentation at the Where 2.0 Conference in San Francisco on Wednesday. According to the researchers, Pete Warden, founder of Data Science Toolkit and Alasdair Allan a researcher at Exeter University in the UK, the tracking feature records the phone’s movements, including what cell phone towers and Wifi hotspots it connects to, when and where. While that information isn’t shared with Apple, it is retained even when iPhone users update their hardware, suggesting that Apple had plans to use the data at a later time.

Was I surprised?  No.  Irritated?  Yes.  We have one more piece of evidence, that when power is concentrated in the hands of a few, abuses tend to occur.

After reading the O’Reilly Radar article, “Got an iPhone or 3G iPad? Apple is recording your moves“, I followed a link to an application to see for myself:

How can you look at your own data?

We have built an application that helps you look at your own data. It’s available at petewarden.github.com/iPhoneTracker along with the source code and deeper technical information.

The broad view clearly showed the four states in which I have used my month-old iPad:

But the real interesting view was of my supposed meanderings in Arizona:

I can easily explain three of the four major clumps of usage in the Phoenix metropolitan area – my home, the Phoenix airport, and a client site. But I have never taken my iPad to the fourth area of supposed heavy use.

All the outliers are even more problematic.  I used the iPad once in a mountainous area northeast of Phoenix, but all the other outliers?  My only explanation is that I must have forgotten to place the iPad in “Airplane Mode” on one or more more of my flights (heaven forbid!).  The iPad must have connected with dozens of cell towers as we flew over.

My message to Steve Jobs?  Please, just call. I’d gladly invite you over for dinner or take you to my favorite restaurant, where we could discuss the things that are important to me in my life.  But these shenanigans?  Really tawdry for a supposely high class company.

Thanks to my colleague Kevin Moulton for pointing out an excellent Yahoo! special report: In cyberspy vs. cyberspy, China has the edge.

According to U. S. investigators, China has stolen terabytes of sensitive data — from usernames and passwords for State Department computers to designs for multi-billion dollar weapons systems. And Chinese hackers show no signs of letting up. “The attacks coming out of China are not only continuing, they are accelerating,” says Alan Paller, director of research at information-security training group SANS Institute in Washington, DC.

Private enterprise is also getting hit big time.

The official figures don’t account for intrusions into commercial computer networks, which are part of an expanding cyber-espionage campaign attributed to China, according to current and former U. S. national security officials and computer-security experts. 

In the last two years, dozens of U. S. companies in the technology, oil and gas and financial sectors have disclosed that their computer systems have been infiltrated. 

In January 2010, Internet search giant Google announced it was the target of a sophisticated cyber-attack using malicious code dubbed “Aurora,” which compromised the Gmail accounts of human rights activists and succeeded in accessing Google source code repositories.

The political ramifications of this cyber warfare are huge. The US and China are the world’s two largest economies, both cooperating and competing on the world’s stage.  With China owning more than $1.1 trillion in U. S. government debt, destabilization of U. S. markets due Chinese cyberattacks would, in effect, be an attack on China’s economy itself.

The old Mad Magazine Spy vs. Spy comics were hilarious, with each spy destroying the other through nefarious means, and then getting up quickly to compete another day.   On the other hand, the China vs. USA cyberspy game is serious business – we play this one for keeps. 

I am anxious for the time when I can buy groceries or pay for a meal with my iPhone.  According to Juniper Research, that time may be be closer than you would think.

As reported by GigaOM, Juniper Research predicts that 1 in 5 Smartphones Will Have NFC by 2014.  NFC, or “Near Field Communication,” is a technology that allows a payment to be made by holding a device, such as a mobile phone, in close proximity to a NFC-capable point of sale terminal.

I think it would be great to use a mobile wallet on my iPhone, working in concert with an NFC chip embedded within my iPhone, to make a payment.

The GigaOM article states:

Juniper said the increasing momentum behind NFC, with a stream of vendor and carriers announcements in recent months, is helping boost the prospects of NFC. North America will lead the way, according to Juniper, with half of all NFC smartphones by 2014. France, in particular, is off to a quick start, with 1 million NFC devices expected this year.

Of course, there is more than just putting moble wallet apps and NFC chips on smartphones.

But the NFC ramp-up will still faces challenges. With so many players involved, from merchants, operators, manufacturers and web giants like Google, service complexity will be an issue. The industry also needs to work out business models around NFC while ensuring strong security for consumers unfamiliar with the concept of a mobile wallet, said Howard Wilcox, the author of the report.

Which smart phone vendor will be first to the races with a mainstream NFC-equipped device? Will the next iPhone be NFC-equipped?  I hope so, but I had also hoped for that in the iPhone 4.  Time will tell.  I’m just hoping for sooner, rather than later.

And, by the way, Identity Management and Information Security are crucial to an overall solution. Knowing who the user is and that user wants to do, and making sure their information is absolutely safe, are critical components of the mobile payments infrastructure that must be built. In that vein, its great to be in the industry that is making this all happen.