Top 10 IT News Stories of the Week: IT Admins Are Security Risk

CIO —

1. "IT Admins are Security Risk,"
Techworld, Feb. 7
If you need something else to keep you up at night, a new analysis shows that employees who sabotage corporate systems are nearly always IT staff who have some kind of mental problem. Looking on the bright side, though, it should be relatively easy to figure out the potential saboteurs, according to an analysis by the U.S. military and Carnegie Mellon University’s Software Engineering Institute Computer Emergency Response Team, commonly known as CERT. When cybercrimes are investigated, it usually turns out that the miscreants are "disgruntled, paranoid, generally show up late, argue with colleagues, and generally perform poorly." Of those who commit such crimes, 86 percent had technical jobs and 90 percent had system administrator or privileged system access. Among those who sabotaged IT systems, 41 percent had their jobs at the time, although most of the crimes were committed by people who had been fired. A whopping 64 percent of incidents involved VPNs and old passwords that hadn’t been eliminated. Carnegie Mellon has developed a methodology to help detect insider threats that involves management, IT, human resources and security.

2. "New U.S. Cybersecurity Chief Lays Out Guidance at RSA,"
CIO.com, Feb. 9
Companies and the federal government need to fix security problems in computer networks, said Gregory Garcia, the assistant secretary for cybersecurity and telecommunications at the U.S. Department of Homeland Security in a speech at the RSA Conference. "This proliferation of applications and devices within the converged network is going to create a breeding ground for security problems," he warned. "Our networks and our systems are vulnerable and they are exposed." Garcia’s position was created in 2005 as a way to turn more attention to computer security at DHS, which has been primarily focused on physical threats. But that post remained empty for more than a year. Now that he’s in place, Garcia said his office is working with other federal agencies on security policies and practices, and he also intends to work with the private sector on the National Infrastructure Protection Plan, which aims to evaluate computer security risks by industry and then detail the steps needed to address those risks. Because the private sector owns and operates 90 percent of the nation’s critical infrastructure, Garcia made it clear that participation in the plan and ensuring security isn’t optional.

3. "Trend Micro Patches Antivirus Scanner,"
Computerworld, Feb. 8
In a week dominated by security news, much of it coming from the RSA Conference in San Francisco, it was revealed that the antivirus scanning engine in nearly all of Trend Micro’s products have a critical flaw that cybercriminals can use to crash or hijack PCs. The risk was rated as "extremely critical" or "critical," depending on the security organization issuing the warning. The flaw can cause a buffer overflow on systems running various security software products from the company and lead to an attacker taking "complete control of the affected system," VeriSign iDefense found. Attacks taking advantage of the flaw could come from an e-mail message or a website. Trend Micro issued a patch and said that all of its customers that have automatic updating enabled got the fix for the flaw.

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