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