The unabated proliferation of Information Technology has had significant impact on the manner in which organizations conduct their business, effectively rendering geographical boundaries redundant. This impact has been particularly notable in developing countries such as India, which has witnessed a meteoric rise in the use of Information Technology and Information Technology services over the past few years. While immensely contributing to the nation’s economy, this growth has unfortunately also served as an invaluable tool for terrorism and other anti-national activities. Consequently, citing the best interests of the security and safety of its citizens, the government of India has amended its Information Technology Act (2000), which has recently passed into law.
The Impact of E-Surveillance on Information Security in India
Cisco SIO Delivering Training at Black Hat DC 2010 – Round 2
A few months back at Black Hat USA 2009 a few members of Cisco Security Intelligence Operations (SIO) delivered our first, of what is expected to be many, training sessions to conference attendees. Well, here we are three months later with Black Hat DC 2010 just around the corner and we (Cisco SIO) are back on the agenda again to deliver our hands-on Detecting & Mitigating Attacks Using Your Network Infrastructure training session. One small change for round 2 though, John Stuppi will be joining us as an instructor for our training session in Arlington, VA. Welcome aboard John -- oh if he only knew what he was getting himself into. ☺
As described in a previous blog post by one of my fellow instructors and esteemed Cisco Security blogger, Tim Sammut, we will be informing and teaching attendees about the built-in features, solutions, and capabilities that exist in devices within your network infrastructure and how to make practical and effective use of the devices to monitor, detect, prevent, and trigger responses to attacks and threats.
Internet Safety for Kids and Parents
Cisco is committed to working with the public sector, partners, and customers to ensure cyber security from the workplace to the home. The month of October is National Cyber Security Awareness Month, and as it comes to an end we thought we’d share a short video from Cisco CSO John N. Stewart where he provides tips on Internet safety for kids and parents to protect themselves online.
When it comes to 21st century education, parents and kids have an important role. Recently, Cisco took that message to Piedmont Middle School in San Jose, CA, with the help of the characters from The Realm.
Considering the Risks and Rewards of Social Media
Social media continues to pervade cultures around the globe, and the usefulness and popularity of social media sites and services has been demonstrated in some impressive ways. The power and reach of social media outlets has empowered individuals to make their voice heard around the world in an instant, most often unfiltered and unrestrained. The extent of social media’s influence on individuals’ lives has pulled it into organizations, many of which have embraced these new technologies and sought to leverage them for profit.
Still, the application of blogs, videos, real-time status updates, and online collaboration are cause for concern, in no small part because of the concentration of power in the hands of the individual employing them. Organizations continue to struggle with whether to allow employees to participate in these networks, how to enforce policies, and how to adjust to all that the networks have to offer — even for industries that are built in large part around individual identities, like the entertainment studios discussed in this week’s Cyber Risk Report.
Common Errors Causing DKIM Verification Failures
Cisco recently upgraded its email infrastructure to use our IronPort email security appliances to apply and verify DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM) signatures on outgoing and incoming email. We had previously been using a prototype implementation of DKIM that we had begun early in the process of standardizing DKIM. In the process, they made available to me some information on DKIM signature verification successes and failures. While we had previously published information on DKIM signature verification showing the increasing deployment of DKIM signing, this is the first time that we have had comprehensive information on signatures that fail to verify. The study involved about 14.2 million messages with DKIM signatures, 5.33% of which failed to verify. The messages came from 16,797 different domains, 10,968 (65%) of which had 100% verification rates and 2,899 of which failed consistently.
