Deep packet inspection is a methodology that network security professionals have been doing for many years.  It involves looking at the data going over the network and determining if anything malicious is going on based on what's in those packets.

My last post on Ransomware was in 2013 when we were being hit by Cryptolocker.  I mentioned that in around 2010 Data Doctor 2010 was the ransomware in the news.  According to Wikipedia, the first "ransomware" was called the "AIDS Trojan" in 1989, which didn't encrypt your files, but merely hid their data by encrypting the filenames.

NJEDge has released two Security Awareness videos, one for Students, and another for Faculty and Staff that reviews various topics in keeping yourself safe online.

Here are the links:

http://www.njvid.net/showvideo.php?pid=njcore:39068  Students

Thanks to NJEDge!

The security community has been buzzing over Lenovo's gaff of including Superfish Adware with their Lenovo laptops.  Superfish comes pre-installed with a compromised root CA, which is by default installed into the trusted certificate store of system web browsers.

Why is Google Chrome complaining about my certificate?

A recent update to Google Chrome is now warning users that certificates do not have public audit records.  They put a yellow triangle over the normal lock display in the location bar and give a somewhat confusing explanation.

Although November is here, let's not forget the many lessons we learned this year from CyberSecurity Awareness Month (CSAM).  The majority of issues I spoke about related to technologies that are dead, or should be dying in the 2014 Tech Obituaries section of my talk.  Here are the highlights of what technology died (or should have) over the last year.

Poodle and the Beast, this isn't a love story

Three years ago, Thai Duong and Juliano Rizzo demonstrated ^[1] an attack against one of the methods used in securing Internet traffic. 

Shellshock, a Bash Code Injection Vulnerability

In late September, 2014, a bug was released to the public in the popular Linux/Mac shell called bash.  For those that aren't familiar, the shell is the black box that some computer folks seem to spend a lot of time in typing archane commands to magically fix the computer.

Short Story

Heartbleed vulnerability

A flurry of information is coming out about the Heartbleed vulnerability that is affecting Internet websites everywhere.  As the Information Security Officer at the Institute for Advanced Study (IAS), I worked closely with the Computing Groups across our campus to secure our services.

As you may have heard from news reports (such as http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2014/04/09/heartbleed-...), a major Internet security vulnerability, known as Heartbleed, was disclosed earlier this week.