Branden R. Williams, Business Security Specialist

19th of December, 2013
In: Consumer Security, Enterprise Security, PCI
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6

I Thought We Were Done With These? standard

Well, it appears that the bad guys hit another giant retailer this year as Target now reports a massive breach. There are a few items here that are interesting to note. First, we are talking about magnetic stripe and a massive volume of cards in a short period of time. This would indicate some kind of software compromise (read, not an attached skimmer) that lead to the capture of stripe or PIN data. Given that there is a concern about PIN, I would guess that the compromise was either in the POS terminal or in the actual payment terminal itself where the PIN is entered. Breaches of this magnitude obviously call their compliance status in question, and the devil will ...

Bitcoin and Virtual Currencies standard

There has been a ton of noise around Bitcoin recently for two big reasons. The first is that the Bitcoin-USD forex climbed above $1,000 (currently just under $900, and the second is a heist that moved around $100 million worth of the currency, all able to be watched online through the public clearing houses. So if you are a business, what should you do with this and other currencies? One of the main attractions to Bitcoin is that it is not regulated by a sovereign government. Some might say that it works in the purest form of capitalism, completely separating the buyer from the seller through an anonymous exchange. Well, somewhat anonymous. The contents and value of the wallet is ...

Hosed by Codeshares AGAIN standard

Yep, a little bit off topic, but that’s why I have a Diversions file! Some of you may remember a post I did for all of your frequent fliers a couple of years ago about some travel trouble I was having with airline tickets purchased as codeshares. In all fairness, this isn’t just an issue with one particular airline (although I did discuss my experience with AA/BA). Here’s what happened today. I was finishing up my tour of Ireland a bit early and wanted to stand by on an earlier flight. With BA, you can do this if you have any status at all including honoring OneWorld levels. BUT! Only if you have a BA marketed & operated ticket. So ...

PCI DSS 3.0: The Good, The Bad, The Confusing standard

If you have not grabbed your copy yet (or had one emailed to you, as it were), go here to get your very own. As we expected, there are a number of important changes that companies will be dealing with over the next several months as they begin to prepare for PCI DSS 3.0. In this post, I wanted to do a quick highlight of some of the more critical changes now that they are public. If you want to read some of my earlier reservations, they all stand with the final version. Let’s dive in. Periodics and shoulds: Yes, these are now a massive shift in the Council’s position toward ambiguity in the standard. Periodic now appears 20 times ...

September/October 2013 Roundup standard

Again, with the forgetting of the months. So what was popular in September and October? Wow, lots of crazy stuff. First, we had the PCI Community Meeting for North America in Vegas. My company threw a great party on Wednesday night, and given it is a release year there was a ton of activity around the event. I would argue that not nearly enough time was spent on the Q/A portion (1 hour each day for 2 days). Then we had RSA Europe in Amsterdam and the PCI EU meeting in Nice. Josh Corman gave a great keynote at RSAC reinvigorating the focus on DevOps and information security. I also gave a talk on leveraging Lean & Kanban in information ...

Have a free month of SlideZip Unlimited! standard

Yep, we just pushed some fun new features to SlideZip, so I figured that we could create an offer to celebrate! Right now, the first 20 people to upgrade to an Unlimited account can get a free month with this coupon code: FreeMonthOct2013. Free is great! Also, we now have support for conferences (with multiple logins which could be for separate tracks or satellite locations)!

EMV vs the UPT, Can We Fix the #FAIL? standard

Update Nov 4, 2013: I was in the UK last week and it looks like the Underground has fixed their terminals to allow the use of the chip at a UPT! This is great news. My guess is there is some upper limit to what can be accepted without signature and it is now implemented. Well, it has struck again. Remember how I told you guys about some of my EMV experiences now that I have a card with the chip in it? Well, it struck again… but not in the place y0u might think! I’m here in Salt Lake City, Utah, and I decided to take advantage of the lovely public transit (UTA) by hopping on the light rail ...

PCI DSS and the Partial Vacuum standard

Earlier this week I posted some thoughts I had about the newly released draft. Unfortunately, I couldn’t give you guys the actual analysis that both I and folks in my company performed (though, if you become a customer of my company, and are already a PO I am certain we can present something to you). Why? Because the Council still is treating this as a pay-to-play community without thinking about the broader impact to the ecosystem. The folks who frame the standard are some smart, experienced people. I’ve met and worked with all of them in varying capacities, and their job is incredibly challenging while being completely thankless. If you think about how things work in their world, they are ...

Managing Vulnerabilities to Closure standard

Edit: Merge.io is no longer, however, will keep this up as part of the discussion around vulnerability management. I’ve been known to say that vulnerability detection is easy—it’s vulnerability management that’s hard. There are too many tools available today that can tell you everything that is wrong with your security posture. The real work comes in finding the root cause of the issue, permanently eradicating it from your environment (as in changing configuration servers, patching gold builds, dealing with sleeping physical or virtual instances), and validating to everyone who wants to know that you were successful in doing so. Time and time again, my customers complain about the challenges associated with getting clean vulnerability scans. In fact, that might be ...