Network World - LAS VEGAS -- To celebrate the 15th anniversary of the Black Hat Conference here, a panel of experts got together to expound on what they see as the privacy and security mess of our times, and they had plenty to say about the U.S. government, cyberwar and Google.
The government really sucks at handling classified data, opined Marcus Ranum, CSO at Tenable Security. He said the vast WikiLeaks dumps of sensitive data from the U.S. government seen over the past few years shows that agencies such as the Department of State need to improve data custodianship.
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As the panelists veered into the topic of who would you trust less with your data, the U.S. government or Google, ICANN CSO Jeff Moss answered that he feared Google more than the feds. That got Ranum to quip: thats because Google has a history of getting things done.
And it so it went as the others on the panel -- Bruce Schneier, chief security technologist at BT; Adam Shostack, senior program manager at Microsofts Trustworthy Computing Group; and Jennifer Granick, director of civil liberties at the Stanford Law School Center for Internet and Society, who acted as moderator all got their digs in, too.
I dont trust sending my data across the border because the NSA is going to grab it, said Schneier (read our review of his new book).
The panelists noted the era of the advanced persistent threat (APT), targeted attacks by governments or industrial spies to steal critical information, is upon us, with company after company being hit and critical information stolen. APTs against companies mean absolute security matters, said Schneier, which he added, is freakin hard. We are terrible as an industry dealing with the targeted attacker.
The buying and selling of software and hardware vulnerabilities is now a big business, pointed out Ranum. He said he wouldnt be surprised if young people going into the high-tech industry ended up getting lured by thoughts or promises of money into putting vulnerabilities into products just to be able to sell knowledge about such weaknesses. Schneier said theres serious money in vulnerabilities, noting that you can sell them to the U.S. government now.
The situation with distributed denial of service (DDoS) is also serious today, with known DDoS attacks now hitting 123Gbps, said Moss. Weve entered a realm where its impossible to defend yourself against DDoS floods that large.
The number of known data breaches just keeps piling up over the years, but consumers that have had their personally identifiable information lost or stolen are finding that lawsuits arent generally effective, Granick pointed out. She also said that the law expects to see a standard of care of a reasonable person, but there theres little formal consensus on that in computer security and among security experts, who often leave people mystified by what theyre talking about.
