A novel experiment in deploying large-scale trusted data networks has begun in Helsinki, the capital of Finland. A variety of city services have been linked together using the open-source MyData Global solution, it was announced earlier this month. This puts city at the forefront of how it gathers data from its citizens and how it stores and uses the data. The goal is to give each person control over how their data is shared with various city agencies.

In this blog post for Avast, I  examine the announcement and its significance for the rest of us and what it means for our own data privacy.

1. The FDA has appointed Kevin Fu its first Acting Director of Medical Device Cybersecurity in the Center for Devices and Radiological Health. This center has several bodies, including the CyberMed Safety Board, the Digital Health Center of Excellence and other offices. Fu is an interesting choice: he’s most recently an associate professor of computer Science at the University of Michigan, and has previously held major management roles in the private sector. Fu was credited for establishing the field of medical device security beginning with a 2008 IEEE paper on defibrillator security and founding the non-profit research collaborative Archimedes Center for Medical Device Security. I interview him about his agenda, along with linking to various draft policy efforts the agency is working on to improve cybersec for IoT medical devices.

You can read my blog post here.

Sandbox security is complementary to honeypots. It usually involves a special VM that is kept in isolation from the rest of your network resources. Its sole purpose is to be a miniature laboratory to observe malware behavior. Security researchers have been using such sandboxes to analyze malware for many years. Because the sandbox is a controlled environment, its code can be dissected line by line without worrying about potential harm to other computers.

You can read my post on Network Solutions’ blog here, where I talk about its evolution and some of the online sources of sandboxes that can be used for testing for the presence of malware. Sandboxes also play a key role in the escalating war of obfuscation and detection evasion by malware.

You might have missed the news about a FaceTime bug that was found about a year ago. The bug enabled anyone to start a group FaceTime call with one of your contacts, even if that person didn’t explicitly accept the call. Apple disabled group FaceTime calls for a couple of days until it was able to issue a patch in iOS 12.1.4. Since then, Google security researchers have been busy finding the same bug in other group chat apps including Signal, JioChat, Mocha, Google Duo, and Facebook Messenger.

In my blog for Avast, I go into details about this bug, how a teenaged gamer discovered it, and how it was tamed.

One of the most popular attack methods in IT security starts with posing a simple question: How many places in your IT infrastructure have administrative access? Unfortunately, getting to the bottom of answering this question is anything but simple, but it can be instructive. This is because understanding administrative access is perhaps one of the most important ways to defend your business computing network.

Admin access permissions are the bane of all security managers because they can serve as the golden ticket for hackers to compromise your computers. Once they figure out this privileged access, they can worm their way into your network and create all sorts of havoc. This class of problems is usually labeled privilege escalation. Fixing this will require some careful diligence, including locking down Active Directory permissions, using zero trust methods, and application sandboxes.

You can read my blog for Network Solutions here.