Is not about you…is about me

--Originally published at The shield of the world

So when we talk about Computer Security there is a topic that some of us really think about. How to ensure the ethical and legal responsibilities, why this? Because when someone has the knowledge about this topic is easy to go from white to black hat in a matter of seconds.

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There are some other professionals whose jobs duties affect others’ lives and they receive a formal training, to address ethical issues and how to deal with them. In the case of the IT security personnel they have access to confidential data and knowledge about individuals’ and companies’ networks and systems that give them a great deal of power. That power can be abused, either deliberately or inadvertently. But there are no standardized training requirements for hanging out your shingle as an IT pros are beginning to address the ethical side of the job, but again, there is no requirement for IT security personnel to belong to those organizations.

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This is something related to what happened to Tec de Monterrey, when the institution was growing and becoming important in the country as a quality education institution, their mission was to deliver a god tier prepared technicians to the professional world. And they did, but they all lack of ethical values and were some of the critics that the institution received as feedback from the enterprises that hire the graduates from Tec.

Nowadays the institution has more courses related to ethical challenges and how to deal with them, debating about the best solution with a global perspective of the affected ones. As a technical related career we, with the help of the professors are developing an ethical guidelines. Is something when everybody should be related to.

So the main responsibility is to respect the privacy of the information an IT or

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Not so holy!

--Originally published at The shield of the world

Let´s talk about the CIA and not, this is not a post related to some Tom Clancy book or movie or whatever…

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Yeah…CIA, we are talking about Information Security and when we refer to CIA in information security we are talking about Confidentiality, Integrity and Availability. Which are like the holy trinity.

And this is because all information security try to achieve at least one of these three.

  • Protection of confidentiality of data
  • Preserve the integrity of data
  • Promote the availability of data for authorized use

And we are gonna talk a little bit more about each of these main goals in information security.

Confidentiality

We could say that confidentiality is like privacy… we need to protect the information from people that should not be reading, playing, or doing anything with information that is not related to them. But we need to ensure that the correct people can have access to this information. Access must be restricted like the clubs when they choose who is going to enter and who is not. Data is usually in larger companies categorized according to the amount and type of damage that could be done if it falls into unintended hands.

Some methods to make the data available to the right people are usernames and password, encryption and some biometric verification, reading the retina or fingerprint. Also security tokens, key fobs or soft tokens. Keybase is a cool form of getting in touch with people and to share information encrypted to ensure that only them can decrypt and read it.

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Integrity

This involve maintaining the constancy, accuracy and trustworthiness of data over its entire life cycle… yeah, when you tell the teacher or anyone look I have not changed this file look at the date obviously I haven’t change it, yes you can. So

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Measure this.

--Originally published at TC2027 – Blog will Tear us Apart

After a much needed password therapy let’s take on the generals of what are we protecting. We may know some techniques, and we already know that we want to be safe, but how can we measure it?

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Measure like its hot

 

Luckily for us, there are already some guidelines to measure how a safe a system is. But before, just like Rick Lehtinen stated on his book, Computer Security Basics:

No man, or computer is an island.

Nowadays everything you have is connected, even just to properly work and be up to date so don’t start shouting out load that you’re a not a potential target, because you definitely are.

So in order to measure safeness, we can stick to the core C-I-A  three pillars concept, which states that in order to be safe, a system must guarantee:

  • Confidentiality
  • Integrity
  • Availability

Pretty straight forward, no? Lets tackle one by one. Again, I’m talking user/client-side, so don’t expect server-side practices.

Confidentiality

Here is where privacy is at play. As you may remember from my first post, security and privacy are not the same, and that security makes privacy possible.

And that’s precisely what confidentiality is all about, keeping what you want secret in secrecy and what you want public, public. You definitely want you bank accounts, passwords, chats, and perhaps some of yours spicy pictures secret (which you shouldn’t be sending to anyone, by the way); meanwhile you definitively want everyone to know your spoiler free (I wish) Game of Thrones death -rant tweets.

How can my confidentiality be compromised?

Easy, there are some really easy steps in which anyone interested, without even having to be a hacker can destroy your confidentiality, here are some possible breaches.