If You're Not Investigating, You Are Out of Touch! : Naivety, False Trust and Peer Pressure Within the Enclaves of Our Education Centers Is Fueling Criminal Acts

Sunday, February 23, 2014

Naivety, False Trust and Peer Pressure Within the Enclaves of Our Education Centers Is Fueling Criminal Acts

Naivety, False trust and peer pressure Within the Enclaves

of Our Education Centers Is Fueling Criminal Acts

By Nick Ashton, Founder, CEO, Tracometry Group of Companies.

The hubs of learning are teaching more than the three R’s, it is the three D’s

Drug use, manufacturing and selling
Data Extraction (Hacking, Phishing & Man In The Middle Brutal Attacks) and Identity Theft,
Dumbing Down of Intelligent Potential

Two are criminal acts, the last one should be!

Peer Pressure is more prevalent today, than ever before. Those that are wanting to learn are having their will to be educated diminished by the unsocial actions of others. Many falter under the misnomer to go along with the behavior, just to fit in.

Schools, colleges and universities are havens of information to be taken from unsuspecting individuals. Phishing and Man in the Middle attacks are happening in all of these establishments as we speak.

It is the Duty of Care of the administration to protect the unwitting from these known issues. Ignoring or watering down the possibilities of data theft, which leads to personal information, such as Social Security Numbers, Bank card numbers and passwords and even more personal data of the individual’s family and background being criminal used, is a failure that is occurring worldwide.

It must stop!

Is it possible to protect all from these digital miscreants?

Yes!

It is not just up to the faculty to provide Trust and Security of Information, each individual has to participate and there will be rule changes.

We are surrounded by computers which are input and output devices that includes your Smartphone, Tablet and Laptops. It would be nice if all devices could be trusted to transmit and receive on all data networks.

They can!

Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) is part of the Key Talk Solution of Protecting Data in Motion.

So why are we not talking?

It is SERIOUS matter and getting worse day by day.

It is not IF it is going to happen to you, it is WHEN! Then it is too late…

Believe it or not, there are companies who have developed the solution for these issues. Key Talk is more than one step ahead of the situation and there to assist with virtually zero managerial impact on the day to day running of your IT requirements. Not a new company, they have been protecting Europe for over twenty years.

Although some schools, colleges and universities will have expensive security in place, that sadly is not doing the job that is demanded today, KEYTALK overlays the existing system without having to replace or make radical changes.

In our case it is Plug and Secure!

Just ask the IT/Trust and Security Director at the University of Maryland how they are feeling regarding the outright criminal act of stealing 300,000 Social Security Numbers and the need now to spending monies on credit protection for those people for at least the next year. This is a reactive move, which should not be needed if you are PROACTIVE!

Universities have long been a favorite target for hackers bent on pilfering private data for identity theft and exploitation.

Since 2005, when breaches at universities began being recorded, an average of 1,268,394 records have been exposed in the US per year.

Numbers have been declining, however. In 2011, a reported 478,490 records were breached. 2013 it has built yet again and 2014 is not off to a good start!

To complicate matters, higher education has a reputation for employing looser data security protocols in general, making those susceptible to accidental data loss and exposure.

The breadth and volume of personal data collected by universities, coupled with high turnover and a generally technically un-savvy population, makes the problem of data loss at institutions nearly epidemic in nature.

A prominent educational group suffered damages from highly skilled students hacking their network, allowing them to change student grades and accessing upcoming tests and exams.

Investigating the source of the hacks revealed that students hacked the login web-portal installing Trojans on teacher/professor computers to obtain their usernames/passwords.

During an initial pilot program of 30.000 teachers and professors, KeyTalk’ s solutions provided all known and identified laptops, tablets and smartphones with short lived certificates to secure data in motion.

As a result, students who still manage to obtain the teacher/professor’s authentication credentials through Malware or Phishing, are unable to use them, since KeyTalk authenticates the laptop, Tablet or Smartphone instead of the user.

With the KeyTalk solution being software based, cost could be significantly reduced when comparing to traditional physical security tokens.

Maintenance wise the solution required around 0.1 FTE to manage once up and running and could also be offered as a managed service by the providing partner.

Since the KeyTalk solution makes use of standards, existing school and university network infrastructure could be re-used, requiring no additional investments.

Additionally the KeyTalk solution scaled sufficiently to allow the 300,000 students in the pilot group to also make use of the solution, allowing for secure read access to their privacy sensitive school files.