SECURITY IS A STATE OF MIND

A data miner and hacker by the name of "Anonymous Coward" has posted personal data about 6 million Chilean residents on the Internet. The data was posted early Saturday morning on Fayerwayer.com, a popular Chilean technology blog.

The hacker included a dummy's guide to downloading and using the information, which included making a script that does not connect directly to the server but through a proxy.

Obviously this guy wanted to show Chileans how insecure their data is. Why does it matter to us? In light of the number of breaches of information and losses of personal data in this province from the Provincial Government and School Boards, it highlights the issue of how valuable our personal information is to the criminal element who would pay for it.

In fact, if you are more of a credit card fraud kind of person, U.S., Austrian and Spanish credit cards with full information, including cw2 validation details and SSN, are available in packs of 10. Want to do the dirty job yourself? Skimmers designed for fitting onto ATM machines or “dump tracks” to create your own fake cards can also be acquired.

I wonder what payment options are available for folks who are interested?

Targeted data theft is no longer as easy as it once was. Everyone should use firewalls now, and almost everyone uses network address translation, proxies, and other common perimeter security measures.

But what about physical security in addition to your network perimeter? What data leaves your immediate area of control on USB flash drives, laptops, optical media such as a CD-R, and by other physical means? What can you do to ensure this doesn’t become a security disaster?

So the example from Chile, or the 100,000 Veterans' personal information that was stolen recently in the United States, or the security breaches in the province, all serve as wake up calls.

Security is a state of mind, not a solution.