Helping you Piece IT Together

Issue February 2007

About BH Consulting
BH Consulting was founded in answer to demands for an independent consulting firm to assist clients gain a competitive edge by achieving IT Operational excellence in deploying, managing and securing their IT infrastructure. With over 20 year’s experience, we provide you with access to in-depth expertise, experience and technical know-how. Backed with our quality processes and commitment to deliver, BH Consulting provides clients with quality solutions at cost effective rates.

Support Focus Ireland
If you have found any items in our Security Watch Newsletter to be of use to you we ask that you make a donation to Focus Ireland who work tirelessly supporting the homeless throughout Ireland.  Focus Ireland aims to advance the right of people-out-of-home to live in a place they call home through quality services, research, and advocacy.  The objectives of Focus Ireland are to respond to the needs of people out-of-home and those at risk of becoming homeless, through a range of appropriate high quality services, to provide emergency transitional and long-term accommodation for people out-of-home, to  campaign and lobby for the rights of people out-of-home and the prevention of homelessness.  No sum is too small and all is put to excellent use.

BH CONSULTING NEWS
Security Watch Blog Reaches Final of the Irish Blog Awards.

Despite our Security Watch Blog being active for only a short while, we are delighted that it has been selected as a finalist under the Best Business Blog Category for the Irish Blog Awards 2007.  Many thanks to our readers and subscribers who contribute to our Blog and made this nomination possible.  The awards happen on the night of March the 3rd and we will update you all with how we do in our next newsletter and of course on the Blog.

BH Consulting Supported Safer Internet Day
BH Consulting proudly supported Safer Internet Day which fell on the 6th of February 2007.  There was some good coverage of the event in both national papers and also on TV3's Ireland AM program.

The theme for this year was "Crossing Borders" and countries from all around the work participated in the event.  For this year’s event schools in Ireland have been working with partner schools in Portugal, Estonia, and Denmark as part of a competition that combines the educational use of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) with raising awareness of the risks of using the internet and mobile phones.  More details of the day are available on our Security Watch Blog.

A survey conducted as part of Safer Internet Day highlighted some of the issues facing younger people when using online services.   A key finding from the survey shows 57% of young people make their online social network profiles public and disclose a great deal of personal information.  More details on the results of this survey are also available on our Security Watch Blog.

Brian Honan Interviewed by the Irish Times
TJX released more details on the security breach which exposed their customers' credit card details to hackers.  The attack is now believed to be more significant than first thought.  More importantly from an Irish perspective is the breach is now believed to have impacted on Irish customers of TK Maxx.  The Irish Times discussed with Brian the impact this could have on affected customers and what concerned customers should do in response to this breach.

BH CONSULTING WEBSITE UPDATE
We strive at BH Consulting to provide information that is relevant and useful in securing and running your business. To this end we provide a range of whitepapers available for download free from our white papers page.

LATEST THREAT LEVELS
Get more information on the latest updates on current threats at our online resources page;

FEATURES

Irish Cybercrime Survey Released
The Irish Chapter of the Irish Information Systems Security Association and University College Dublin’s Center for Cybercrime Investigation recently released the results of the first comprehensive survey on the impact on cybercrime on companies and organisations in Ireland, the Irish CybercrimeSurvey 2006.

This is a significant event for those of us working in the Information Security field within Ireland as up until now we have depended on surveys from other sources such as the annual CSI/FBI Computer Crime and Security Survey, Ernst & Young’s Survey or others provided by vendors such as Symantec’s Internet Security Threat Report. While all these surveys provide valuable information and insight into the upcoming trends and issues we should be aware of, they provided very little hard facts that we could use to convince Irish senior management to invest scarce Euros into information security initiatives.

The main problem being many companies that take part in the above surveys are much larger than those here in Ireland thus undermining any like for like comparisons. The argument is further weakened when the figures for items such as the average costs of security breaches are quoted in US dollars as the listener immediately thinks this is not relevant to them.

The Irish Cybercrime Survey now provides us with hard data that is relative and pertinent to the Irish IT environment and will hopefully act as a wakeup call to business people who think their company is too small to be a target of cybercrime.

Some key statistics that got our attention were;

• 98% of all organisations were impacted by cybercrime
• 90% impacted by computer virus infection
• 20% suffered losses > €100,000
• 33% suffered losses > €50,000
• 52% had incidents resulting in 10 man days to recover
• 25% had incidents resulting in 50 man days to recover
• 55% lost data as a direct result
• 90% suffered loss in productivity
• 12% of internal misuse resulted in criminal cases

Keep IT Secure on the Road
Windows Vista will include a nice Network and Sharing Center that lets you configure whether individual wireless networks are at home (and thus trusted), at work (also trusted, but usually configured differently), or public (a wireless AP at a café, airport, hotel, or other public space where you don't want other users to access your PC's files). But you don't have to jump into a time machine and run Vista to be secure on the road today. ... Click Here for more

Identity Federation with ADFS
Your organization might be one of the many that would like to share data with authorized external users over the Web. You’d like to make it easy for these suppliers or customers to connect to your resources by using their existing user account and not requiring them to establish an account on your system, but you need to be sure that only authorized users get access.......  Click Here for more.

FREE SECURITY SCAN
In partnership with Qualys, BH Consulting are offering a for a free Network Security Scan so you can check how healthy your network is. To find out more about what this service can do for you, visit our free Network Security Scan. 

Alternatively contact us or visit our website to get more details on our risk assessment service.

This issue of Security Watch is being brought to you by BH Consulting.  If you have found this issue to be of use please support our drive to raise funds for Focus Ireland.

Each Security Watch eNewsletter, and the special Security Alert issues, are produced independently by the Windows IT Pro Custom Media Group and is distributed by various Microsoft security partners. Each eNewsletter contains up-to-date information about security strategies, technologies, and alerts. Each Security Alert contains the latest information about security threats.

Additional news courtesy of Silicon Republic, Cnet, Silicon and Zdnet

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