Network Endpoint Security News - Watch Your End

Social engineering is the practice of obtaining confidential information through the manipulation of users with proper access and authentication credentials. Through the use of the phone or internet someone practicing social engineering will seek to gain someone’s trust to trick them into providing confidential information, that may seem unimportant to the victim at the time.

Camsnuffling describes the use of digital cameras to photograph secret documents and files from a computer system in order to remove them from offices.

The term is similar in definition to Podslurping. Where podslurping was originally defined to specifically mean the using an iPod to store documents and data, it has been expanded to include any removable media device. Camsnuffing and podslurping are essentially synonyms used to define the stealing of corporate data through the use of removable media devices.

A termed coinged by by Michael Thelander in his article “The Great Wall syndrome [workplace information security]” where he discussed a 2004 survey of Fortune 100 companies by the Ponemon Institute found that insiders were responsible for roughly 70 percent of reported security breaches (Reardon, 2005). BBC News, quoting another survey by data forensics from Ibas, stated that 70 percent of staff surveyed have stolen key information from the workplace, that 72 percent of these offenders had no ethical issues with helping themselves to information that would benefit them in a new job, and that 30 percent of respondents had stolen contact data when they left an employer (2004). The discussion focuses on the the focus of IT security being primarily on the perimeter, whereas the majority of security breaches occur from within.

Citation: Michael Thelander. ”
The Great Wall Syndrome,” IT Professional, vol. 7, no. 5, pp. 25-30, September/October, 2005.

Universal Serial Bus (USB) provides a serial bus standard for connecting devices, usually to computers such as PCs and the Apple Macintosh, but is also becoming commonplace on video game consoles such as Sony’s PlayStation 2, Microsoft’s Xbox 360, Nintendo’s Revolution, and PDAs, and even devices like televisions and home stereo equipment.

This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article “Universal_Serial_Bus”.

A USB flash drive is essentially NAND-type flash memory integrated with a USB 1.1 or 2.0 interface used as a small, lightweight, removable data storage device of up to 16 GB (as of 2006). USB flash drives use the USB mass storage standard for removable storage devices. To use such a device, your operating system must have driver support for both USB mass storage plus the file system used on the flash drive. Microsoft Windows ships with driver support for USB mass storage since Windows Millennium Edition and Windows 2000. Windows 98 did not ship with USB mass storage support, so a driver supplied by the vendor of the flash drive is required.

SB flash drives are also known as “pen drives”, “chip sticks”, “thumb drives”, “flash drives”, “USB keys”, and a wide variety of other names. They are also sometimes erroneously called memory sticks, which is a Sony trademark describing their proprietary memory card system.

This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article “USB_flash_drive”.