Scott Wright, Author at The Social Media Security Podcast

Users Bamboozled and Policies Eroded – Is Facebook still the valuable tool you thought it was?

Posted under Facebook, Privacy, Social Media, Social Networking on May 9th, 2010 by Scott Wright

Geek level: Very Low. Editorial observations and deep, introspective questions…

I just wanted to give props to some folks who are really getting the impact of the changes to Facebook privacy policies and settings, and trying to get the message across in different ways.

Facebook privacy settings are getting so complicated, few people seem to know the implications. And as a result, most don’t bother changing them. For those of you who remember what it was like to try to program a VCR back in the 1980’s and 90’s, what goes around comes around. The comparison is scary, as tweeted by Robert Nunez and Tom Watson – “Facebook privacy settings are the new programming your VCR”

(See http://www.preoccupations.org/2010/05/facebook-2010.html )

I heard about this observation while listening to This Week in Google (at http://www.twit.tv), when Jeff Jarvis mentioned it. Leo Laporte then added, “It’s like we’re all on flashing 12:00’s” (If you don’t remember, it’s sort of like having a digital clock that loses power and forgets what time it is.) For the old VCRs, you had to go in and reset the time, then you had to set the channels and times you want to record. It was so complicated, many people just left them with the flashing 12:00’s. I can relate to that, along with many others I’ve heard from, regarding Facebook’s increasingly convoluted privacy settings.

Facebook just seems to want people to give up on protecting their privacy. To paraphrase Jarvis, it seems strange that instead of leveraging the trust of its 400 million users, and taking the opportunity to establish itself as the “protectors” of our identities on the Net, Facebook is carelessly exploiting that trust to its fullest extent for short term profit. Too bad for them, and for all of us.

Also in that same episode of TWIG, Jeff Jarvis referred to the Electronic Freedom Foundation’s (EFF) timeline of Facebook privacy policies over the years. It’s interesting to see how convoluted it’s become since their first privacy statement in 2005, which read:

No personal information that you submit to Thefacebook will be available to any user of the Web Site who does not belong to at least one of the groups specified by you in your privacy settings.

(from http://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2010/04/facebook-timeline )

Now, as of April 2010, the policy reads…

When you connect with an application or website it will have access to General Information about you. The term General Information includes your and your friends’ names, profile pictures, gender, user IDs, connections and any content shared using the Everyone privacy setting. … The default privacy setting for certain types of information you post on Facebook is set to “everyone.” … Because it takes two to connect, your privacy settings only control who can see the connection on your profile page. If you are uncomfortable with the connection being publicly available, you should consider removing (or not making) the connection.

So, did you know this? Or have you quit Facebook – for good, or in protest – due to these moves? Or will it take one more move toward the cliff?

Not surprisingly, I don’t use Facebook for anything very personal. The stuff I put there is all pretty boring, say my friends. But if you joined a long time ago and have a significant amount of personal information in Facebook, you might want to read today’s Facebook privacy policies and consider how likely it is that what you thought was protected (by the default settings at the time you joined) may inevitably become public at some point.

Today’s trending topics might as well be “Facebook privacy settings changed” and “Facebook privacy policies changed“. So, if you still feel that privacy represents a fundamental personal value, we’d all like to know, “What value does Facebook continue to bring you as a tool, and is it worth the cost?”

Security pros use layered techniques, but so do attackers

Posted under Contributors, Facebook, Social Media, Social Networking on March 23rd, 2010 by Scott Wright

For many years security professionals have advocated using layered safeguards to reduce the risk of threats. While many organizations do employ multiple technologies like firewalls, anti-virus and intrusion detection to try to stop hackers, these guys are getting very good at navigating our layers of security. It’s like the old Mario and Donkey Kong video games where you had to jump over land mines, climb ladders, wait for doors to open and avoid swinging obstacles to reach the bonus prizes.

As an example of how many layers they are able to traverse, consider the reported attack on a financial institution’s enterprise network, which started life as a hacked Facebook account. (Click HERE for the full story.)

To make a long story short the attackers did the following:

They captured the Facebook credentials of an individual who worked for a financial institution
They then scanned the user’s Facebook profile to find recent social events involving co-workers on Facebook (finding a company picnic)
They then sent emails to multiple Facebook friends who were co-workers saying, “Hey, have a look at the pictures I took at the company picnic!”
The emails contained links to malicious web pages that attempted to launch a keylogger on the victims’ computers.
They then scanned the keystrokes of an employee whose laptop had become infected with the keylogger and found the authentication credentials for the corporate VPN
They infiltrated the VPN and infected a computer inside the corporate perimeter and performed vulnerability scans around the network to find servers with sensitive information on them.

The attack lasted as long as 2 weeks. If the attackers’ vulnerability scans had not been so “noisy”, they may not have been noticed, and the company could have suffered severe losses in terms of costly data breaches and corrupted databases, as well as system repairs.

So, what will happen now? Will the company add another layer of security to prevent a similar attack in the future? Probably… and these attackers will probably move on to other organizations with a bit less security. The cat and mouse game continues.

What’s interesting in this story is that the initial attack on the employees’ Facebook friends is pretty hard to defend against, since nothing seemed out of the ordinary. There really was a corporate picnic!

What would you do next if you were a security manager at this financial institution?