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Latest Comment: George has not accepted that the technology age has come to an end.
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How Enterprises are Developing Secure Applications
Recent breaches of third-party apps are driving many organizations to think harder about the security of their off-the-shelf software as they continue to move left in secure software development practices.
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User Rank: Ninja
12/13/2018 | 4:18:28 PM
→ "Always have a different password for every different service."...and it's impossible to manage them all without technology to help manage the digital identity."
Yes, he is right about that but we don't have to remember passwords for every service. We can integrate the solution with AD/LD and AD Federated services. We can associate 2FA/MFA (as mentioned in the article) as a way to centralize our password management scheme and we can use IdM (Identity Management) tools that will encrypt the data traffic from the source to the destination while the password management solution manages all of the back and forth requests.
→ The first is that 2FA isn't available for many services, he points out.
Most if not all o the providers provide 2FA/MFA, the problem is the consumer does not utilize this service when it is brought to their attention, they bypass the security mechanisms to make things easier. So in retrospect, it is not the vendor but the user who does not utilize the services. I think it would be better if we did not give them a choice but provide different mechanisms of how to enable 2FA/MFA authentication (AWS, Google, F5, MS provide the ability to do just this).
→ "it only costs a few dollars to buy the text messages of an individual," Schalit says."
I am not so sure it is that easy to purchase text messages of individuals, for one, the person has to impersonate that person, they have to know most if not everything about them. Secondly, they have to know which vendor they use (phone company) and third the assailant has to be to know something very specific about the account in order to identify and extract this information. Now if the person on the other end (member of the phone company) was selling this information, then we have bigger problems because now someone on the inside is making it very easy for this information to be obtained. If the phone company has numerous layers of security in place, then it will be only a matter of time to remove and prosecute that person for acting in such a fraudulent manner.
As a side note, I am curious from the conversations of Ed Snowden, are those text messages being sold to the highest bidder from NSA to third-parties. This is not surprising (not to say that they are) since from the time of Bush to now (Obama included) they are still using technology to extract information from the web (US Citizen Surveillance program) to keep an eye on the US public. Hopefully is not easy to get text messages but you never know.
T
Todd