Firewall

1. Regulations meant to segregate a bank's securities underwriting from its deposit gathering and lending activities. The intended purpose of Federal Reserve Board regulations dealing with securities underwriting is maintaining the functional separation of banking and commerce.

2. Combination of hardware and software separating a computer network from external networks, mainly the Internet.

Hardware Theft

Although computer viruses and other high-tech threats cause the most dread within the business community, the most common type of computer crime actually involves the theft of computer hardware. Unfortunately, employees are often the culprits with this type of crime as well, especially if they work shifts after business hours. Other losses are attributed to outsiders who abscond with computers through elementary breaking-and-entering means. Security experts, though, say that companies can do a lot to cut down on such losses simply by maintaining accurate and up-to-date equipment inventories; locking up hardware that is not in use; locking computers and monitors to desks; and attaching electronic tags to computers. The latter device emits a radio-frequency signal that can activate video cameras or set off alarms when the computer is removed from the premises. Finally, companies should make sure that they purchase adequate insurance.

Business travelers, meanwhile, need to keep a close eye on their notebook and desktop computers, which are highly coveted by thieves. Indeed, the allure of these portable computers is so great that thieves sometimes work in teams to get their hands on them. Airports and hotels are favorite haunts of thieves looking to make off with these valuable items. Security experts thus counsel business travelers to be especially vigilant in high traffic areas, to carry computer serial numbers separately from the hardware, and to consider installing locks, alarms, or tracing software.

Non-Criminal Security Threats

Of course, not all threats to computer well-being come from parties with criminal intent. Savvy small business owners will make sure that their computers—including data as well as hardware—are protected from environmental disaster (power surges, floods, blizzards, fires, etc.) and operator incompetence alike.

Any computer security program should include elements that reflect an understanding of the basic environmental conditions a computer requires in order to operate properly. Ensuring that the system receives adequate power is paramount. Drops in voltage or blackouts can occur due to utility switching problems, stormy weather, or other difficulties at the utility company. In such instances, computers may lose unsaved data or fall victim to "disk crashes." Computer systems can also be endangered by sharp increases in voltage, known as "spikes," which can seriously damage hardware. A variety of voltage regulators, surge protectors, grounding techniques, and filters exist to combat these problems. In the 1990s, intense activity centered on the development of uninterruptible power systems that use storage batteries to ensure a smooth transition between power sources in the event of power failure. Local area networks as well as individual computers can be protected by these devices.

Denial of service attack

An assault on a network that floods it with so many additional requests that regular traffic is either slowed or completely interrupted. Unlike a virus or worm, which can cause severe damage to databases, a denial of service attack interrupts network service for some period. A distributed denial of service (DDOS) attack uses multiple computers throughout the network that it has previously infected. The computers act as "zombies" and work together to send out bogus messages, thereby increasing the amount of phony traffic.

Everyday "Legal" Jargon

The threat of cybercrime is rising sharply.

Crime and illegal activities in the global information environment are growing rampant. Because of the rapid growth of high technology, targets of crime are becoming more plentiful and complex. Toady’s criminal- whether a company employee, petty thief, con artist, corporate executive, gang member, or professional thug- is far better prepared to meet the challenges of his or her vocation. They commit complex economic crimes using modern processes, sophisticated devices, and highly technological equipment that frequently delays or prevent detection. Private and public law enforcement are struggling to keep up.

The Internet is vulnerable, but as it is now part of society's central nervous system, attacks could threaten whole economies. Online theft costs $1 trillion a year, the number of attacks is rising sharply and too many people do not know how to protect themselves. The past year had seen "more vulnerabilities, more cybercrime, more malicious software than ever before", more than had been seen in the past five years combined

But does that really put the Internet at risk? At recent conference on "Cybercriminality or information warfare? - Insecurities in the information space" organized by the Rencontres de l’ Innovation of the Liege Science Park of the University of Liege (Belgium), Mr. Daniel Ventre (1), a researcher at the CNRS/CESDIP, gave a thorough, yet frightening, presentation of the issues stakes. Last week, Barack Obama declared that cyber-security was a top government priority, calling it "one of the most serious economic and national security challenges we face as a nation.” His response was to create a cyber security coordinator inside the White House who will be part of the national security apparatus and have direct access to the Oval Office.

Cybercrime is regarded as computer-mediated activities which are either illegal or unauthorized by certain parties and which can be conducted through global electronic networks. It includes: cyber-stalking, electronic crime, high-tech crime, internet crime, etc., and relates to criminalizing the internet, computers as targets or criminal tools, page-jacking, internet fraud, online child pornography, sale of prescription drugs and controlled substances, online sale of firearms, online gambling, online encryption, internet securities fraud, intellectual property theft, cyber-stalking, and challenges for law enforcement.

Cyber-crime has reached epidemic proportions. Disgruntled employees and hackers commit many cyber-crimes, and others are committed by con artists using the Web to perpetrate auction fraud, identity theft and other scams. Credit-card users are only liable for the first $50 of fraudulent charges, but financial institutions get hit hard. Identity thefts cost them billions in losses and expenses. Some policymakers, wary of Internet-facilitated terrorist attacks, call for tough, new laws to prevent computer crimes. Others fear that such initiatives will trample on civil liberties. Still others want legislation to make Microsoft and other computer-software companies liable for damages caused by their software-security failures.

With the increasing sophistication of cyber criminals and the promise of low costs and high returns, cybercrime is poised to become the world's most costly form of crime. This organized, profit motivated criminal activity often takes advantage of flaws in complex information systems and information infrastructures such as the Internet.

Moreover, the rapid expansion of E-commerce and the widespread use of digital devices have created unprecedented opportunities for those who would carry out many types of traditional criminal activity, especially fraud. Deterring criminal activity in the digital age requires more secure systems, user education, new legislation, new enforcement methods, and international agreements that address the often transnational nature of this crime.

The emergence of transnational criminal organizations in the late twentieth century generated concern analogous to that produced by American society’s "discovery" of the mob in the 1960’s. Nations, law enforcement, and others who tracked organized criminal activity began concentrating on transnational organized crime as a new and even more dangerous phenomenon than the emergence of the Mafia. This focus continues today. Since the globalization of crime is a trend that will only accelerate, this concentration on transnational organized crime will persist

According to the U.S. Department of Justice, the Internet "provides unparalleled opportunities for socially beneficial endeavors—such as education, research, commerce, entertainment, and discourse on public affairs—in ways that we may not now even be able to imagine. By the same token, however, individuals who wish to use a computer as a tool to facilitate unlawful activity may find that the Internet provides a vast, inexpensive, and potentially anonymous way to commit unlawful acts …"

Cybercrime costs approximately $50 billion annually. "In fact, only about 10% of all cybercrimes committed are actually reported and fewer than 2% result in a conviction. This is primarily due to two reasons. First, businesses and financial institutions feel that they have more to lose by reporting computer security breaches. They argue that customers will lose confidence in the company if business and financial transactions are know to be insecure. Second, a majority of cybercrime victims do not report crimes against them, assuming that law enforcement will provide little or no assistance...."

Threat #1: Crime

There is a wide range of threats facing the Internet. It is not about vandalism anymore, but organized criminality.

There is traditional cybercrime: committing fraud or theft by stealing somebody's identity, their credit card details and other data, or tricking them into paying for services or goods that do not exist.

The majority of these crimes are not being committed by a youngster sitting in a basement at their computer. Rather, they were executed by very large and very well-organized criminal gangs.

Cybercrime, alas, does pay so far and one could make a lot of money though cybercrime. You can even professionalize the business and assemble a gang of about 300 people with specialized roles - computer experts, lawyers, people harvesting the data etc. Such criminals use viruses to take control of computers, combine thousands of them into so-called "botnets" that are used for concerted cyber attacks.

In the United States, a "virtual" group had managed to hijack and redirect the details of 25 million credit card transactions to Ukraine. The group used the data to buy a large number of goods, which were then sold on eBay. This suggests organization on a huge scale.

This is not vandalism anymore, but organized criminality. This is it is not about technology, but our economy.

Indeed, there are much more cyber criminals than cyber cops; criminals feel "safe" committing crimes from the privacy of their own homes. Law enforcement is facing brand new challenges: most officers are not trained in the technologies - computers can be used to commit a crime: child porn, threatening email, assuming someone’s identity, sexual harassment, defamation, spam, phishing; computers can be a target of a crime: viruses, worms, industrial espionage, software piracy, hacking; Internet crimes span multiple jurisdictions; we need to retrofit new crimes to existing laws.

Computer forensics is an autopsy of a computer or network to uncover digital evidence of a crime, which must be preserved and hold up in a court of law. It’s a growing field. Many are becoming computer forensic savvy: FBI, State and Local Police, IRS, Homeland Security, defense attorneys, judges and prosecutors, independent security agencies, white hat or "ethical hackers".

Smart Criminals don’t use their own computers. They resort to cell phones, floppy disks, Zip/Jazz disks, tapes, digital cameras, memory sticks, printers, CDs, PDAs, game boxes, networks, hard drives… Digital evidence is not obvious…it’s most likely hidden on purpose or needs to be unearthed by forensics experts.

The new crime scene (with computer forensics).

Criminals Hide Evidence, they delete their files and emails, they hide their files by encryption, password protection, or embedding them in unrelated files (dll, os etc), They use Wi-Fi networks and cyber cafes to cover their tracks. Forensics uncover evidence, restore deleted files and emails – they are still really there!, find the hidden files through complex password, encryption programs, and searching techniques, track them down through the digital trail - IP addresses to ISPs to the offender.

Similar to traditional crime scenes, forensics specialists must acquire the evidence while preserving the integrity of the evidence: no damage during collection, transportation, or storage. You need to document everything, collect everything the first time and establish a chain of custody.

But it can also be different… you can perform analysis of evidence on exact copy, make many copies and investigate them without touching original, use time stamping/hash code techniques to prove evidence hasn’t been compromised.

Top cyber crimes that attack business fall in the following categories: Spam, viruses/worms, industrial espionage and hackers, Wi-Fi high jacking.

1/ Spam

Spam accounts for 9 out of every 10 emails in the United States. You pay for spam, not spammers; email costs are paid by email recipients.

Spam can be dangerous: never click on the opt-out link! it may take you to hostile web site where mouse-over downloads an .exe file or executable files containing nefarious code to be run on your computer. It actually tells spammers they found a working address and they won’t take you off the list anyway. What should they do?

Filter it out whenever possible, keep filters up to date. If you get spam, just delete the email

2/ Viruses and Worms

They are different types of "ailments". Viruses are software that piggybacks on other software and runs when you run something else (e.g. a macro in Excel, Word). They are transmitted through sharing programs on bulletin boards, passing around floppy disks or USB keys, an .exe, .com file in your email.

Worms are software that uses computer networks to find security holes to get in to your computer. They exist on all platforms: Microsoft OS (95% of the market!), Linux and Macintosh!

3/ Industrial Espionage: hackers are everywhere

They are busy stealing data, doing industrial espionage, appropriating people’s identity, defaming others, deleting data for fun. Or they can be bored 16 year olds late at night turning computers into zombies to commit crimes, take down networks, distribute porn, harass someone. Ethical/white hat hackers exist too as they help break into networks to prevent crimes.

4/ Wireless Fidelity (Wi-Fi)

Using antennas to create “hot spots”, Hotspots – Internet Access (sometimes free), cities are now getting equipped: Newport Harbor - all the boats in Harbor have internet access, San Francisco Giants Stadium – Surf the web while catching a game, University of Massachusetts (you need to register, but it’s free) in Cambridge, in Philadelphia, PA the entire city was covered by 2006.

An estimated 60-70% of the wireless networks are wide open. Why are the Wi-Fi networks unprotected? Most people say: "Our data is boring." But… criminals look for wireless networks to commit their crimes and… the authorities will come knocking on your door!

Threat #2: The system

A much larger problem, though, are flaws in the set-up of the web itself. It is organized around the principle of trust, which can have unexpected knock-on effects. The Internet protocols are too fragile at the base to withstand the current situation and to provide an adequate level of security. Design flaws are one thing; cyber warfare is another.

Lack of widely available Internet security has discouraged some commercial users. Security capabilities must continue to evolve to meet increasingly sophisticated threats. The Internet community is now more aware of the importance of security. This awareness, coupled with new technology, should produce a much more secure Internet that is appropriate for widespread commercial use

Nearly a year ago, Pakistan tried to ban a YouTube video that it deemed to be offensive to Islam. The country's Internet service providers (ISPs) were ordered to stop all YouTube traffic within Pakistan. However, one ISP inadvertently managed to make YouTube inaccessible from anywhere in the world. But in cyberspace, nobody is responsible for dealing with such incidents. It fell to a loose group of volunteers to analyze the problem and distribute a patch globally within 90 minutes. "Fortunately there was no Star Trek convention and they were all around," is the relevant joke.

Threat #3: Cyber warfare

Two years ago, a political dispute between Russia and Estonia escalated when the small Baltic country came under a sustained denial-of-service attack which disabled the country's banking industry and its utilities like the electricity network. This was repeated last year, when Georgia's web infrastructure was brought down on its knees during its conflict with Russia. 2008 was the year when cyber warfare began; it showed that you can bring down a country within minutes. It was like cyber riot. Russia started it and then many hackers jumped on the bandwagon.

This threat is now getting even greater because of the "multiplication of web-enabled devices" - from cars to fridges, from environmental sensors to digital television networks. The methods that terrorists could use to attack or undermine the whole Internet, and posed the question whether the web would be able to survive such an assault.

The real problem, concluded one of the experts, was not the individual loss. It was the systemic risk, where fraud and attacks undermine either trust in or the functionality of the system, to the point where it becomes unusable.

What solution? International action on cybercrime?

The problems are daunting, and it's getting worse. Do we need a true disaster to bring people together?

Unlike the real world - where we know whether a certain neighborhood is safe or not - cyberspace was still too new for most of us to make such judgments. This uncertainty created fear. And as the Internet is a global network, it doesn't obey traditional boundaries, and traditional ways of policing don't work.

Comparing virus-infected computers to people carrying highly infectious diseases like H1N1, some people proposed the creation of a World Health Organization for the Internet. "If you have a highly communicable disease, you don't have any civil liberties at that point. We quarantine people. We can identify the machines that have been co-opted, that provide the energy to botnets, but right now we have no way to sequester them."

But others worry about the heavy hand of government. The Internet's strength was its open nature. Centralizing it would be a huge threat to innovation, evolution and growth of the web. "The amount of control required to exclude all risk is quite totalitarian." Instead they suggested fostering the civic spirit of the web, similar to the open source software movement and the team that had sorted the YouTube problem. "Would a formalized Internet police following protocols have been able to find the Internet service provider in Pakistan as quickly and deployed a fix that quickly?" one can ask.

In the hands of juvenile delinquents and global miscreants, high-technology can steal from those who honestly labored for their possessions, destroy businesses, and cause major disruptions, chaos and even death through telemedicine. Thus far, the miscreants are winning the high-technology war – and it’s a war. It part of the global information war taking place now and that is likely to increase in intensity in the 21^st century. It is the new crime scene, the new battlefield.

We must hope for the best but also plan for the worst.

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Daniel Ventre is the author of "Information Warfare", to be published in August 2009, Wiley-ISTE, ISBN: 978-1-84821-094-3

This book introduces policy, government, and security professionals to the concept of "information warfare," covering its evolution over the last decade and its developments among such economic and political giants as China, Russia, Japan, India, and Singapore. The text describes various conceptions of information warfare, along with how they function in military, diplomatic, political, and economic contexts. Recent notable cyber attacks are analyzed, the challenges faced by countries who fail to secure their cyberspace (Japan, the US, etc.) are enumerated, and ways to distinguish between cybercrime, cyberwarfare, and cyberterrrorism are discussed.

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As If Your Life Depended On It… or How to get to Carnegie Hall? - Practice, practice

Through A Mirror, Darkly / In A Mirror, Darkly

Here’s an error with a very distinguished heritage.

When in 1 Corinthians 13:12 Paul tries to express the imperfection of mortal understanding, he compares our earthly vision to the dim and wavery view reflected by a typical Roman-era polished bronze mirror. Unfortunately, the classic King James translation rendered his metaphor rather confusingly as "For now we see through a glass, darkly." By the time of the Renaissance, mirrors were made of glass and so it was natural for the translators to call the mirror a "glass," though by so doing they obscured Paul’s point. Why they should have used "through" rather than the more logical "in" is unclear; but it has made many people think that the image is of looking through some kind of magical glass mirror like that in Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass.

Although most other translations use more accurate phrasing ("as in a mirror," "a blurred image in a mirror," etc.), the King James is so influential that its misleading rendering of the verse is overwhelmingly more popular than the more accurate ones. It’s not really an error to quote the KJV, but if you use the image, don’t make the mistake of suggesting it has to do with a dirty window rather than a dim mirror.