Microsoft Corp. and the state of Washington this week filed lawsuits against a slew of "scareware" purveyors, scam artists who use fake security alerts to frighten consumers into paying for worthless computer security software.

The case filed by the Washington attorney general's office names Texas-based Branch Software and its owner James Reed McCreary IV, alleging that McCreary's company caused targeted PCs to pop up misleading security alerts about security threats on the victims' computers. The alerts warned users that their systems were "damaged and corrupted" and instructed them to visit a Web site to purchase a copy of Registry Cleaner XP for $39.95.

I would have thought that existing scam laws would be enough, but Washington state actually has a specific law about this sort of thing:

The lawsuits were filed under Washington's Computer Spyware Act, which among other things punishes individuals who prey on user concerns regarding spyware or other threats. Specifically, the law makes it illegal to misrepresent the extent to which software is required for computer security or privacy, and it provides actual damages or statutory damages of $100,000 per violation, whichever is greater.

When a data owner's (a business) sensitive data is breached it is difficult to quantify the monetary loss. According to respectable survey sources, the average cost of sensitive data breach for a large size company is about $50,000. I am attempting here to think about this in simple mathametical terms:

There is a data breach. From the data owner's perspective the loss is:

Loss = Cost to protect data + Loss of business due to data theft aka cost of competitive disadvantage

From the data thief's perspective

Net Gain= [Cost of producing the data  *  Data freshness factor] - Cost to steal the data + Profit of business due to data aka gain of competitive advantage

From the above two equations it is very clear that this is not a zero sum game. There is a clear cost asymmetry for a data owner and for a data thief. When there is an asymmetry there is an opportunity. Data owner would not even know that the data is lost because the original copy of the data may be still intact - data thief could have simply copied the data. Data theft does not look like a car theft, there is no vacuum left behind. 

This motivates a data thief to keep the cost to steal low, steal highly valuable data that has a long shelf life and in a way that data owner will never even be aware of theft.

From a data thief's perspective, the cost to steal data if kept high would disincentive him. Moreover, Data freshness factor, i.e. how valuable this data is over period of time plays an important role. A good example is content of today's newspaper is hardly valuable tomorrow, but the content of newspaper two days ahead (if can be procured)would be invaluable. Data relevance is a function of time and other marketplace variables -  Data freshness Factor accounts for that variable. A good way to discourage data thief is to increase his/her cost to steal the data. There are other inferences from the above equation. If there exists no competitive advantage with the stolen data, hardly any thief would even venture to steal the data in the first place. If the cost of producing data is very low, then probably thief can just produce the data himself and would not attempt to steal the data. If the cost of theft is kept high, it would definitely deter the data thief from stealing data using technical mechanisms, then the data thief would exploit weak links in data security such as use of social engineering to get access to the data.

From data owner perspective protecting data becomes very important. How much would the owner be willing to spend? Not definitely the cost equal to cost of producing the data. 1% to 10% of cost of producing data is considered prudent. For a data owner it is difficult to estimate cost of data protection of a specific data, because it is not easy to chunkify data protection costs. Moreover, as Dan Geer says in his book, a data owner has to protect himself from number of intruders not just one.

It pays for a data owner to: be aware of data breaches (or data leaks), employ appropriate mechanisms to protect the data; the cost of protection which is fractional cost of the valuable data and enhance information security awareness of personnel who handle the data.

Data loss is not a zero sum game. The advantage is in favor of a data thief (data thieves rather). Data owner does not give much thought on the value of data unless there is a data theft. But, a data thief has every reason to think about economics of data theft before he acts to steal the data else data thief won't survive in this game and he is very well aware of his advantageous position.

On the CD-ROM accompanying the book we included a tool called Passgen. In the book, we recommended that you maintain separate passwords on every local administrator and service account in your enterprise. This is, of course, almost impossible to manage without something to automate it for you. That’s what Passgen does. The tool generates unique passwords based on known input (an identifier and passphrase you define), sets those passwords remotely, and allows you to retrieve them later.

For a while Jesper maintained a web site for the book, running on a server in his house. His ISP changed policies and made it impractical to continue running the site. But because the tool is still so useful, I’ve put a copy in my SkyDrive—look in the “Passgen” folder.

Also, note that I’ve put a new section in the right-side column, “Resources for you.” Here’s where I’ll keep links to bits and pieces that many of you will find relevant and interesting.

Steps are now being taken, rather faster since Dan Kaminsky came up with a really effective DNS poisoning attack, to secure DNS by using DNSSEC.

The basic idea of DNSSEC is that when you get an answer from the DNS it will be signed by someone you trust. At some point the “trust anchor” for the system will be “.” the DNS root, but for the moment there’s just a handful of “trust anchors” one level down from that. One such anchor is the “.se” country code domain for Sweden. Additionally, Brazil (.br), Puerto Rico (.pr), and Bulgaria (.bg) have signed their zones, but that’s about it for today.

So, wishing to get some experience with the brave new world of DNSSEC, I decided that Sweden was the “in” place to be, and to purchase “cloudba.se” and roll out my first DNSSEC signed domain.

The purchase wasn’t as easy as it might have been — when you buy a domain, Sweden insists that people provide their identity numbers (albeit they have absolutely no way of checking if you’re telling the truth) — or if a company they want a VAT or registration number (which are checkable, albeit I suspect they didn’t bother). I also found that they don’t like spaces in the VAT number — which held things up for a while!

However, eventually they sent me a PGP signed email to tell me I was now the proud owner of “cloudba.se”. Unfortunately, this email wasn’t in RFC3156 PGP/MIME format (or any other format that my usually pretty capable email client understood).

The email was signed with key 0xF440EE9B which was reassuring because the .se registry gives the fingerprint for this key on their website here. Rather less reassuringly footnote (*) next to the fingerprint says “.SE signature for outgoing e-mail. (**) June 1 through August 31.” (the (**) is for a second level of footnote, which is absent — and of course it is now September).

They also enable you to fetch the key through a link on this page to their “PGP nyckel-ID” at http://subkeys.pgp.net.

Unfortunately, fetching the key shows that the signature on the email is invalid.

Since the email seems to have originated in the Windows world, but was signed on a Linux box (giving it a mixture of 0D 0A and 0A line endings), then pushed through a three year old copy of MIME-tools I suppose the failure isn’t too surprising. But strictly the invalid signature means that I shouldn’t trust the email’s contents at all — because the contents have definitely been tampered with since the signature was applied.

Since the point of the email was to get me to login for the first time to the registry website and set my password to control the domain, this is a little unfortunate.

Even if the signature had been correct, then should I trust the PGP key?

Well it is pointed to from the registry website which is a Good Thing. However, they do themselves no favours by referencing a version on the public key servers. I checked who had signed the key (which is an alternative way of trusting its provenance — since the email had arrived to a non-DNSSEC secured domain). Turned out there was no-one I knew, and of 4 individual signatures, 2 were from expired keys. The other signature was the IIS root key — which sounds promising. That has 8 signatures, once again not people I know — but only 1 from a non-expired key, so perhaps I can get to know some of the other 7?

Of course, anyone can sign a key on a public key server, so perhaps it makes sense for .se to suggest that people fetch a key with as many signatures as possible — there’s more chance of it being signed by someone they know. Anyway, I have now added my own signature, using an email address at my nice shiny new domain. However, it is possible that I may not have increased the level of trust

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