Tag: security

Imagine that you’re a researcher doing some data analysis for your company. You run some queries or load some data and then go home. The next day, you come in and find that all of our data has been deleted. Perhaps you’re the victim of a Meow attack, where people look for unsecured databases and wipe them out. If you read the comments, many of them indicate this may be considered a public service.

I think I agree with that, and here’s why. If you put up data about me in a system and don’t secure it. I’m not sure you should be trusted with the data. The article notes that UFO VPN was a victim. They got caught not only with an unsecured database, but one that had data that wasn’t supposed to be logged, including passwords. They moved their data to a new database, also unsecured, and a meow attack wiped it out.

While I understand this might cause a company to fail and affect employees who hadn’t made the decision to store this data and ignore security, I’m don’t think that the world overall is worse off because their data is gone. I’m also not sure that the employees are worse off as I’d suspect fines or other legal action might have wiped the company out anyway.

I know some university groups may lose data that is difficult or impossible to recover. I know some companies might be irreparably harmed. However, I also know that it’s 2020 and there is no reason to have an unsecured set of data available to the public. Whether a database, a file-share service, or anything else. Security needs to be provided for data.

Like many of you, I do use some services in the cloud to share files. I also find it maddening that most public access has been revoked and I need to specifically invite people, set passwords, and more to easily share things. However, that’s what we need to do in an interconnected world where we have personally identifiable and sensitive data. We need to secure it.

I’m glad SQL Server doesn’t allow blank passwords for sa, and I hope that no one allows simple, easy passwords on their systems. It is convenient, but the price your organization might pay for this convenience could put them out of business. It’s also a large price to ask someone whose data you have to pay if it impacts their life.

Steve Jones

Listen to the podcast at Libsyn, Stitcher or iTunes.

I got a new mobile phone and was going through the setup. On top of numerous Android updates, I had to reset a number of applications back up. While it’s a pain, I also appreciate from a security standpoint that moving access to my data and sites to a new device could be an issue. One of the applications I was trying to set up was Garmin Connect, as I track my exercise, heart rate, and more on my watch. When I first tried this, I got a 404 in the app, which was strange.

Apparently Garmin was having issues. They had a large outage. The next day I saw that article, and while I could get to the main Garmin site and log in, I couldn’t get a new install of the app to connect on my phone, and I couldn’t get access to any of my workout data. Even old data, apparently isn’t on my phone, as I thought. It’s being read from the cloud. That’s disconcerting, though I record my data separately at MapMyRun, so I’m not overly worried. I even found a procedure and tested it for saving my data locally.

Over the weekend after this happened, I didn’t do much, but as of the Monday after the attack, the Verge reported that some data was visible and sync was working. Not for me, but for someone. That’s good, and Garmin has a touch of information about the outage, saying they expect devices to begin syncing at some point. Mine didn’t that day, but did a day or two later.

This is interesting as an attack because it’s not just the company’s own internal data, but also their customers’ data. I don’t know if that was the intention, but what better way to put pressure on a company that take away their customers’ data. I don’t know that this would make them respond differently than losing their internal data, but it  likely would be more public. It also might put more pressure on them to pay some ransom.

Ultimately, this is an area that I think the GDPR started to help, but allowing customers to access copies of their data, as well as have rights over how it is used. I think having the right to not only get a copy of my data, but a regular backup is something I think should be required of organizations that collect information about me. Likely there might need to be a charge, but perhaps some regulation about what is reasonable and how this data should be available is a something else that might need some regulatory boundaries.

Steve Jones

Listen to the podcast at Libsyn, Stitcher or iTunes.

I got a new mobile device recently and despite the restore from backup, I still had to perform quite a few setup chores. Reconnecting various apps to services by logging in was time consuming, but simple. A password manager was useful here, since I have different passwords everywhere. I set that application up first and then proceeded from there.

The only trouble I really had was with Outlook and mail. I have an IMAP provider for one account and Outlook doesn’t make it easy to figure out where to change the settings for this. The second issue was with my corporate mail, which is secured with a 2FA connection through Duo.

This is a technology that doesn’t use text, but has an application on devices and pushes a notification to them. I get a push when I log onto corporate assets from my PC, and I have to approve a login from my mobile. This prevents sum of the sim hijacking that can occur, where someone might have access to my SMS messages. It also prevents a lazy guy with Google Messages from getting a code on the same device rather than walking to the other room to get my phone an ensure I have it.

I had to get help from our admins with the new device, despite having the old device connected and able to approve the connection. I had thought this would work, but there was some issue with Duo. On one hand, maybe this is good that it isn’t simple and I can’t quickly approve a new device, in that it prevents someone from stealing my identity on a cloned device. On the other, in an organization of any size, where mobiles might change constantly, this feels like a time sink.

This might not be an attack vector to be worried about, but I think it’s better to be safer here than we might need. I do think that good security is worth some hassle. I don’t really complain about having to periodically re-authenicate, the requirement for strong passwords, and I love having 2FA enabled on many services. I hope we continue to find more and stronger methods of protecting individual and corporate data, along with more respect for the rights of humans whose data is being captured and used by most organizations. I also hope that we continue to improve the security options in SQL Server, including adding 2FA.

Steve Jones

Listen to the podcast at Libsyn, Stitcher or iTunes.