Data Forensics and New State Laws

According to an interview by Networkperformancedaily, with Matt Miller of the Institute for Justice, "Last year ( 2007 ), the state of Texas passed a law that basically said that to perform a lot of types of data analysis; you have to have a private investigator's license. And, if you perform that analysis without a license, or if you are a customer and you seek to have that analysis performed by somebody without a license, it is punishable by up to one year in jail and up to $14,000 in fines."

ThiSo this is not a new case, but it's important, and it's not over, and you should follow this and similar cases in other states, as it could severely limit your ability to do parts of your job.

As IT professionals, security and related operations have always been part of the job of designing and administering systems, maintaining uptime, and investigating problems.

The summary statements of the laws we discuss here sound sensationalist, and indeed, the devil is in the details. However I'm not going to dissect the related laws from every state. I will review the important aspects, and try to avoid exaggeration. I will also provide POV from the Private Investigator, through interviews.

For now, some good resources are :
http://legal-beagle.typepad.com/wrights_legal_beagle/computer-forensics-license/
http://hack-igations.blogspot.com/2008/12/digital-forensics-private-eye-pi.html
http://www.networkperformancedaily.com/2008/07/interview_with_matt_miller_w_i.html

New SANS and WebSense reports point to where we should focus our defense.

NY Times picked this up with the headline that "Security Pros Are Focused on the Wrong Threats" ( By Riva Richmond )

Not really alarmist, considering the facts.

SANS:

Summary:
Point 1. PATCH!!!!!! What are you waiting for ?!?!?!?
because
Point 2. 60% of attacks are against legit websites, many of which are open to being sql-injected. This means unpatched users hitting those sites can easily be exploited while doing legitimate browsing. Point 2 was really FIX YOUR WEBSITES!, but the dual message is because so many sites are broken, patch your clients!

Websense:

Highlights:
• Websense Security Labs identified a 233 percent growth in the number of malicious Web sites in the last six months and a 671 percent growth during the last year.
• 77 percent of Web sites with malicious code are legitimate sites that have been compromised. This remains unchanged from the last six-month period.
• 87.7 percent of email messages were spam. This represents a three percent increase over the last six months.
• 37 percent of malicious Web/HTTP attacks included data-stealing code. This remains unchanged from the last six-month period.
• 57 percent of data-stealing attacks are conducted over the Web. This number has stayed consistent over the six-month period.

Online Security Conference - 6->8 Nov 2009

For those of us whose companies still have limited to no funding for travel and training "investment", this may be a welcome development.

http://securitytubecon.org/cfp.html

Quality will be interesting, with one parameter being "no rejection" of papers and talks.