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“We asked who owns database security, and what we found is that a lot of companies have multiple people involved,” Oltsik says.

According to ESG, the most common stakeholders listed by survey respondents were security administrators, DBAs, and system administrators. But some organizations could have as many as 10 different individuals or functional groups burdened with responsibility for regulatory compliance when it comes to the sensitive information within their databases.

Approximately nine different corporate roles were listed by at least a quarter of respondents as having a say in database security, including the usual suspects along with auditors, compliance departments, and legal staffers.

Unfortunately, with so many stakeholders responsible for securing valuable database information, Oltsik suspects that too many of them believe someone else is taking care of database security — thus leaving no one at the tiller.

“Instead of investing in hardware or software, I would start with the people first,” says Kornbrust, CEO of Red-Database-Security GmbH, a consultancy that specializes in securing Oracle databases.

This could start by testing out cooperation with the hardening of just a few databases.

http://www.darkreading.com/database_security/security/app-security/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=224201189&cid=RSSfeed

In addition to the FAA’s own cybersecurity efforts, the FAA’s security operations center manages cybersecurity for the rest of the Department of Transporation as well as for parts of the Department of Energy and the Department of Commerce, and Brown expects the amount of cybersecurity information being fed to the FAA’s analysts only to grow with time.

According to IBM, the effort will work by first establishing certain baselines in order to be able to identify anomalous traffic, and then use those baselines to detect the presence of possible attackers in real-time and even to perform predictive analytics to anticipate what hackers who have infiltrated a system might do next in order to cut them off at the pass before they’re able to do real damage.

InfoSphere Streams is able to digest heavy streams of low-level data in multiple formats simultaneously, analyze them with pre-processing, and adjust to tweaks in algorithms and analytical models on the fly.

http://www.darkreading.com/vulnerability_management/security/perimeter/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=224200806&cid=RSSfeed

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Though security experts described the hacking trio as “relatively unskilled cyber criminals,” they managed to use Mariposa — the Spanish word for butterfly — to steal account login information for social media sites, online e-mail services, user names and passwords to banking accounts and credit card data by infiltrating more than 12.7 million compromised personal, corporate and government IP addresses in more than 190 countries.

Email Article Print Article Comment on this article Share Articles Digg del.icio.us Newsvine Facebook Google LinkedIn MySpace Reddit Slashdot StumbleUpon Technorati Twitter Windows Live YahooBuzz FriendFeed “Our preliminary analysis indicates that the botmasters did not have advanced hacking skills,” Pedro Bustamante, Panda Security’s senior research advisor, said in a blog posting detailing the attacks and subsequent investigation.

Related Articles Database Security Lacking at Financial Services Firms McAfee Fingers Microsoft IE Flaw in Google Attack Kneber Botnet Pierces 2,500 Organizations McAfee Finds Spike In Malware From China Investigators said the hackers attacked vulnerabilities in Microsoft’s Internet Explorer browser software to infect machines with the Mariposa bot client.

http://www.esecurityplanet.com/features/article.php/3868436/Crackdown-on-Mariposa-Botnet-Infected-13-Million-PCs.htm

“When our investigators are conducting a forensics investigation, they use this tool to collect, aggregate, analyze, and report… It becomes our data breach investigation report,” says Wade Baker, director of risk intelligence for Verizon Business.

Aside from offering a common format for reporting and sharing that data, the hope is that such a framework will facilitate and help organizations share breach information so investigators can find common threads among attacks and attackers, for instance.

VerIS — which is available today via a free download — can be used to supplement an organization’s existing methods for collecting attack data and analysis, or as a replacement.

Verizon’s Baker says half of all incidents his firm has investigated during the past couple of years have been related in some way.

http://www.darkreading.com/insiderthreat/security/attacks/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=223100886&cid=RSSfeed

One problem is that computer “geeks” use jargon to cloak their work in scholarly mystique, resulting in a lack of clarity in everything from instruction manuals and systems design to professional training, the experts said.

“If you don’t demystify security, people become anxious about it and don’t want to do it,” former U.S. Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff told Reuters on the sidelines of the EastWest Institute security meeting in Brussels. “There are some people in the profession who to some degree enjoy the mystification of what they do, that it’s not penetrable… Doctors and lawyers used to enjoy “a sense of mystified special knowledge,” Chertoff said.

The industry has made progress in educating users, but a huge and urgent task lies ahead in view of the growing criminal threat and the imminent arrival of billions more Internet users.

Plain language is vital, said Steve Purser, head of Technical Competence at the European Network and Information Security Agency, a European Union body. They are going to think how to get round the system.”

Educating the individual customer has long been a top goal for an industry struggling to balance security against ease of use and the clamor for mobile communications. “If we try to teach standard messages such as ‘always protect your password’ the danger is that people will learn the recipe but not learn why this happens,” Purser said.

Delegates said imaginative messages explaining the importance of online protection are needed, tailored to different age groups and audiences and posted on media ranging from TV advertising and schools curriculums to Youtube, Second Life, social network sites and video games.

Curtis Siller, director of Standards at the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, said the industry had to do a better job of communicating the risks to various audiences.

http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/2010/02/19/technology/tech-us-security-cyberspace.html?_r=2&scp=5&sq=computer&st=cse