This website is intended to bring you the latest news, how to's, tools and resources in Information Security. Security Awareness of our Faculty, Members and Staff is key in creating a safer computing environment.
The three major Principles of Information Security, Availability, Integrity and Confidentiality, will be covered throughout the security awareness program at the Institute. For a description of these principles, please see our About section.
In keeping with the spirit of the Institute, I encourage questions and open discussions about security. And if you discover anything out of the ordinary, please feel free to bring it to my attention so that we can work together to create a more productive, safer environment.
Thanks,
Brian Epstein <security@ias.edu>
twitter: @epepepep
Dear Faculty, Members, Visitors and Staff,
For your convenience, we have merged the functionality of the IAS-Scholar wireless network into the eduroam network. If you haven't already configured your device to use eduroam, we recommend you take a look at the link below for instruction on how to configure it. Accordingly, on August 7, the IAS-Scholar network will no longer be available. This change will have no impact on the public IAS network.
Submitted by ep on
As a security professional, I spend a lot of my time making sure that the bad guys aren't able to break in. I set up all the fancy firewalls and anti-virus to keep us safe. But what happens when a user unknowingly gives up their credentials due to a phish? Well, if you are lucky, the spammers just use it to spam the world. If you are unlucky, the figure out how to attack the inside of your network to get to the crown jewels.
Before you travel:
Ensure any devices (laptops, tablets, phones, etc.) you are traveling with are both backed up and current on security updates/patches.
Submitted by ep on
Submitted by ep on
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.
Submitted by ep on
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.
Submitted by ep on
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!
Submitted by ep on
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.
Submitted by ep on
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.
Submitted by ep on
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.