Wednesday, January 13, 2021

What I tell my family about protecting their identity.

 Recently a family member asked me how to respond to a solicitation for "identity protection."  The ad appealed to fear and some of the benefits were ambiguous. 


Every time we open an account or do business, we expose ourselves to fraud.  About three percent of us will be the victims of transaction (e.g., payment card) fraud but almost one percent of us will be victims of fraud so serious as to cause serious financial loss or crippling  damage to our reputations.  Therefore, I offer the following advice in the order of its importance.  

  • Use strong (e.g., multi-factor) authentication wherever it is offered.  (Prefer Passkeys for a good balance of security and convenience.)
  • Avoid doing business with those who do not offer it.
  • Prefer purpose-built applications for financial activity.  Avoid the use of browsers.
  • Prefer mobile computers to personal computers for financial activity.
  • Review all account balances and activity on a timely basis (for large and active accounts, "review" equates to online and "timely" may equate to daily.)
  • Sign up for "paperless" options.  (For good security these should be the default option but for reasons of "backwards compatibility," one must usually opt in.)
  • Allow notifications.  (Again, this should be the default.)*
  • Freeze your identity on all three credit bureaus.  (Locking and unlocking is now easy and free but all three bureaus will take every opportunity to try and sell you "identity protection" for a relatively high annual fee.  All three have had major compromises of personal data and are not reliable.)
  • Use complimentary credit monitoring from AAA, American Express, or, as offered, by your bank or credit union.
  • Most card issuers now permit you to "lock" your cards, using a mobile app.  Balance this with the convenience of using the card but be sure to lock the card if it is misplaced, lost, or stolen.  
  • When buying online, prefer to pay with such checkout proxies as PayPal, Apple Pay, or Click to Pay.  Avoid using debit or credit cards.  However, prefer credit cards to debit cards.  
  • When paying at the point of sale, prefer "contactless."  This resists the leakage of the Primary Account Number on the magnetic stripe.  Most banks now offer such cards and both Apple and Google Pay offer.
  • Do not use the option permitting the merchant to retain debit or credit card information.  Checkout as a guest; avoid signing up for accounts.  
  • When using debit or credit cards for the convenience of frequent purchases from a merchant (e.g., Amazon) consider the use of a one-time or one merchant token number from Privacy.com.  
  • Consider insurance against financial loss and/or expenses related to identity theft.  Such insurance is not a substitute for any of the measures above, may be redundant of protections that you already enjoy (from homeowners insurance, fiduciaries, e.g., https://www.fidelity.com/security/customer-protection-guarantee ), may be expensive, and is best purchased from insurance sources (e.g. as an optional endorsement  to one's homeowners insurance).  https://tinyurl.com/FTCreportidenttiyfraud

* While I have been writing this I have received notices of three legitimate transactions.  This assures me that I will get timely notification of fraudulent ones.  

Tuesday, January 5, 2021

SolarWinds

By now most should realize that SolarWinds is a compromise on an almost unimaginable scale. It is a crisis.  While there are "indicators of compromise" there are no indicators of all compromises.  While the attackers have concentrated on gathering intelligence on only a small number of target sites, all SolarWinds customers must assume that they are compromised and that there may be multiple backdoors into their systems for which there are no ICUs.  Only a small number of enterprises, perhaps none, have sufficient control over the content of their systems to be sure that they are resistant to such backdoors.

In https://us-cert.cisa.gov/ncas/alerts/aa20-352a DHS/CISA has suggested that some enterprises under some circumstances will have to "rebuild (from scratch) hosts monitored by the SolarWinds Orion monitoring software using trusted sources."  In fact, we may have to rebuild all enterprise systems.  

President Obama's chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, famously said in 2008, “You never want a serious crisis to go to waste. I mean, it's an opportunity to do things that you think you could not do before.”  It would be tragic, if after rebuilding our systems, we should come away as vulnerable as when we started.  

We should take Rahm's "opportunity" to introduce "zero trust," indeed zero trust on steroids.  One might well start with a Software Defined Network.  One should include mutually suspicious processes, strong authentication at all levels, and "least privilege" access control.  

Rebuilding systems in month's that took decades to evolve is a daunting task.  I am reminded of what my father taught me when I was just starting out in IT almost sixty years ago.  "Son," he said, "all hard problems in information technology have one and the same answer: one application at a time."  We can do this.  We should use the crisis to overcome the inertia that has kept us from doing what we all know we should have done a while ago.  We know what to do: all we need is the leadership to do it.  

Do not worry about the cost.  Much of what we need to do, we can do with available resources.  For example, we can implement "least privilege" with available tools.  It only requires a change in intent.  In any case, there is always enough money to do that which must be done.