Presentation:

1. Detecting, Protecting, Preventing, and Reporting Computer BreachesDr. Linda WilbanksU.S. Department of Education

2. Presentation: • Introduction • Risk Identification – Understanding the risk to Data/Networks • Risk Management – Source of the risk to Data/Networks • Risk Mitigation – Preventing data loss at work and home • Cyber Crime Terminology

3. Introduction

4. You HAVE a Problem • People think that the data they store is worthless to another person therefore protecting the data is not worth the effort • The easiest data to steal is data that people don’t know is valuable • The bad guys will come after the data the easiest way that they can get it • You can never second guess the use of data by malicious parties

5. Hacking Data Loss https://www.privacyrights.org/data-breach/new

6. You Don’t Know What You Don’t Know There’s No Such Thing as Worthless Data • The bad guys gather seemingly worthless bits of data to launch social engineering attacks or use a small piece of information to complete the attack puzzle Compromises Happen All of the Time • Even to companies who take security seriously • Even to companies who do everything reasonable • It’s not YOUR data but it is YOUR responsibility to protect it

7. It’s NOT just IT’s Problem • YOU assume the risk for the loss of data • IT protects the data to the identified risk level • Data protection, breach prevention MUST be a joint operation for success

8. Breach Scenario • E-mail work from office to home computer • Work on it at home, e-mail it back • Virus from home computer comes with file • Network infected • Worm takes system down • Bomb deletes data • Trojan sends FSA data externally • Password cracking by security experts: • Six characters: 12 seconds • Seven characters: 5 minutes • Eight characters: 4 hours • Component type can influence security

9. Virus Infection

10. There is a Cost for a Compromise When, NOT IF, You Have a Compromise, Data Will be Assumed to be Compromised Investigations average $300 per user impacted • Data integrity must be examined • PR nightmare and costs to mitigate bad press • Potential loss of federal contracts • Class Action lawsuits possible • Intruders don’t care whether or not there was damage

11. Risk Identification • Terminology • Potential victim • Potential threat source Financial Aid At Risk

12. Risk The potential that a chosen action or activity (including the choice of inaction) will lead to a loss (an undesirable outcome). The notion implies that a choice having an influence on the outcome sometimes exists (or existed).

13. Threat • A possible danger that might exploit a vulnerability to breach security and thus cause possible harm • A threat can be either “intentional” (i.e., intelligent; e.g., an individual cracker or a criminal organization) or “accidental" (e.g., a computer malfunction, environmental such as an earthquake, or fire) or otherwise a circumstance, capability, action, or event • Threats take advantage of your vulnerabilities

14. Vulnerability • A weakness of an asset or group of assets that can be exploited by one or more threats which reduces a system's information assurance • The intersection of three elements: a system susceptibility or flaw, attacker access to the flaw, and attacker capability to exploit the flaw. To exploit a vulnerability, an attacker must have at least one applicable tool or technique that can connect to a system weakness. In this frame, vulnerability is also known as the attack surface • Vulnerabilities and threats together result in risks to the organization that need to be mitigated

15. Example • A vulnerability could be a known patch that was not applied • A threat would be that someone would use that known vulnerability to access data • Security’s responsibility to ensure all patches are promptly applied based on the risk thus reducing the threat to data loss or compromise

16. Who are the Victims? 37% of breaches affected financial organizations (+) 24% of breaches occurred in retail and restaurants (-) 20% of network intrusions involved manufacturing, transportation, and utilities (+) 20% of network intrusions hit information and professional services firms (+) 38% of breaches impacted larger organizations 27 countries affected 2013 Data Breach Investigations Report (Verizon) results based on 47,000 reported incidents, 621 confirmed data disclosures, 44M compromised records

17. Who Perpetrated the Breaches? 92% perpetrated by outsiders 14% committed by insiders (+) 1% business partners 7% multiple parties 19% state-affiliated actors (+)

18. How do Breaches Occur? 52% some form of hacking (-) 76% network intrusions exploited weak or stolen credentials (-) 40% incorporated malware (-) 35% involved physical attacks (-) 29% leveraged social tactics (+) 13% resulted from privilege misuse and abuse

19. Middle School Phishing

20. Incidents by Type and # Records Breached

21. Lost While Transporting

22. What Commonalities Exist 75% financial motives (-) 71% targeted user devices (+) 54% compromised servers (-) 75% opportunistic attacks (-) 78% low difficulty 69% discovered by external parties 66% took months or more to discover (+)

23. “New” Threats • Bring your own device(BYOD) - the policy of permitting employees to bring personally owned mobile devices (laptops, tablets, and smart phones) to their workplace, and use those devices to access privileged company information and applications • Cloud computing - the use of computing resources (hardware and software) which are available in a remote location and accessible over a network (typically the internet). The name comes from the common use of a cloud-shaped symbol as an abstraction for the complex infrastructure it contains in system diagrams. Cloud computing entrusts remote services with a user's data, software, and computation • Big data - collection of data sets so large and complex that it becomes difficult to process using on-hand database management tools or traditional data processing applications 23

24. Risk Management • The identification, assessment, and prioritization of risks • Identify, characterize threats • Assess the vulnerability of critical assets to specific threats • Determine the risk (i.e. the expected likelihood and consequences of specific types of attacks on specific assets) • Identify ways to reduce those risks • Prioritize risk reduction measures based on a strategy

25. What is at Risk Data – is it being taken or altered? Networks – is someone on the network, capturing the data?

26. Risk Management of Networks There is no one set of best security practices that can be applied across all educational institutions. Any attempt to enforce an one size fits all approach to securing our assets may result in under-protection from targeted attacks while over-spending on defending against simpler opportunistic attacks. Complex systems like that at FSA must employ a Defense in Depth methodology.

27. College and Universities – Network Targets • Current student and alumni information • Widely distributed: • Admissions • Registrar’s Office • Student Assistance • College Book Store • Health Clinic • Hackers seek diverse information

28. Hackers

29. FSA Risk Management of Networks Trending FIREWALLS ZONES Patching Scanning Monitoring Metrics

30. Risk Management of DATA FAFSA DATA : • Name • Date of birth • Social Security number • Parents names, dates of birth, Social Security numbers • Citizenship (if not US, then identified) • Tax return information of student and parents

31. FSA Applicants - A Vulnerable Population Profile of FSA Applicants • 39% male, 61% female • 43% less than 23 yrs old • 87% do not yet have a B.A. • 62% full-time students • 80% not married • 68% of applicants’ parents not married • 50% of applicants’ parents never went to college • 89% have family income < $40K 31

32. Students (and Parents) at Risk • Facebook = share everything (Security questions?) • Very mobile = casually carry laptop, iPhone, iPad everywhere • Very trusting = limit password usage, write passwords down anywhere • Not organized = often do not track credit cards, “junk” mail • High debt = attractive to foreign actors » High risk for data compromise that can result in monetary loss or identify theft

33. Social Media Hacks

34. Privacy • “The right to be left alone” • Types of privacy • Communications privacy • Physical privacy • Locational privacy • Information privacy • FSA is mostly concerned with “information privacy”—the right of the individual to control what information about them is released

35. Personally Identifiable Information (PII) “PII is information that can be used to distinguish a person’s identity, e.g., name, social security number, biometric data, etc., alone, or when combined with other personal data, linked or linkable to a specific person, such as date and place of birth, mother’s maiden name, etc.” • Some PII is always sensitive and requires a high level of protection because of the substantial harm to an individual that could occur if it were wrongfully disclosed • The level of protection should reflect the sensitivity of the data – data that is determined by the owner to be of high value or that represents a high risk to the individual if it were wrongfully disclosed requires increased protection OMB Memorandum M-07-16, Safeguarding Against and Responding to the Breach of Personally Identifiable Information, May 22, 2007

36. What Is A Privacy Breach? A privacy breach occurs when PII is lost or stolen, or is disclosed or otherwise exposed to unauthorized people for unauthorized purposes. • This includes PII in any format, and whether or not it is a suspected or confirmed loss • Examples of PII breaches: • PII left on the printer or scanner • PII e-mailed without encryption or other protection • PII mailed to the wrong recipient • PII stored on a stolen laptop or thumb drive • PII posted to a public-facing website, etc.

37. Risk Mitigation What you CAN and SHOULD do

38. Establish Good Governance • Create policies and procedures for protecting sensitive data and enforce penalties for noncompliance • Identify a privacy official and make sure privacy has a “seat at the table” • Develop a training and awareness program. There are lots of good free stuff available • Publish rules of behavior – Make users sign a “confidentiality contract” • Have a breach response plan that includes roles, responsibilities, timeframes, call trees, alternates, etc. • Know your inventory of HW, SW, PII • Do you know how much PII you have? Where it is stored (USB drives, CD-ROMS, etc.), who touches it, and why? • Map out your business process flows—follow the PII

39. Implement Network Security • Utilize the HEISC inventory for self assessment* • Ensure essential controls are met • Collect, analyze, and share incident data • Collect, analyze, and share tactical threat intelligence • Emphasize prevention • Ensure patches are current • Focus on better and faster detection • Utilize metrics to drive security practices • Evaluate the threat landscape • Don’t understand the determination of your advisary Higher Education information Security Council (HEISC) http://www.educause.edu

40. Guidelines for Strong Passwords • Minimum password length of 12 to 14 characters if permitted • Avoid passwords based on repetition, dictionary words, letter or number sequences, usernames, relative or pet names, romantic links (current or past), or biographical information (e.g., ID numbers, ancestors' names, or dates). • Include numbers, and symbols in passwords if allowed by the system • If the system recognizes case as significant, use capital and lower-case letters • Avoid using the same password for multiple sites or purposes • Avoid using something that the public or workmates know you strongly like or dislike

41. Safeguard PII Minimize PII • Collect only PII that you are authorized to collect, and at the minimum level necessary to accomplish a required purpose • Limit number of copies containing PII to the minimum needed Secure PII • When not in use, store PII in an appropriate access-controlled environment • Use fictional personal data for presentations or training • Review documents for PII prior to posting on ED web pages • Safeguard PII in any format around your work area • Disclose PII only to those authorized to see it Safeguard the transfer of PII • Do not e-mail PII unless it is encrypted or in a password protected attachment • Alert FAX recipients of incoming transmission • Use services that provide tracking and confirmation of delivery when mailing or shipping PII offsite Dispose of PII Properly • Delete/dispose of PII at the end of its retention period or transfer it to the custody of the National Archives, as specified by its applicable records retention schedule

42. Reduce Your Exposure • Enforce a clean desk policy • Conduct PII “amnesty” days (shred paper PII/eliminate PII from local and shared drives) • Protect data at the endpoints • USB drives, paper, laptops, smartphones, printers • Destroy your data securely • Do not keep records forever • Limit access to only those with a need to know • Enforce role-based access, least privilege • Practice breach prevention: • Analyze breaches from other organizations • Learn from their mistakes • Adjust your policies and procedures accordingly • Please—THINK before you post/send/tweet!

43. Lost Laptop

44. Teleworking Security • Ideal Situation: Separate home office with door; Dedicated files/cabinets;GFE laptop, VPN/Citrix • Not-So-Ideal Scenarios: Home Computer; Kiosk; Firepass; Local Hard Drive/USB • Non-government issued computer or portable storage device (eg, a USB flash/thumb drive), make sure it has ED-equivalent security controls (eg, antivirus/malware, full disk encryption, session lock, strong passwords) • To the extent possible, do NOT copy data from the VPN to your hard drive, or to a removable storage device: If you must copy data, make sure the data is encrypted. • Keep your computer in a secure location at all times; do not leave it unattended/unsecured • If you are teleworking from a public location, make sure no-one else can see what is on your computer screen (consider a privacy screen) • Continue to encrypt PII/sensitive data when emailing such data (eg, using WinZip encryption)

45. So, What Can I Personally Do? • Only collect and use information that is absolutely necessary, and only share with those who absolutely need the information • “Review and reduce”—inventory your PII and PII data flows, and look for ways to reduce PII • Follow all Departmental policies and procedures • Think before you hit the “send” button (E-mail is by far the #1 source of breaches) • “Scramble, don’t gamble”—encrypt, encrypt, encrypt • Minimize (or eliminate) the use of portable storage devices—they are breaches waiting to happen • FREE USB/thumb drives are not free • Protect PII on paper—enforce a clean desk policy, use secure shredding bins, locked cabinets, etc. • Never carry anyone’s social security card

46. Preventing ID Theft Online: • Keep anti-virus software up-to-date • Speak to your child about: • strong passwords • phishing schemes • providing personal information on shared computers (e.g., libraries) • sharing information on social networks (e.g., Facebook) or with strangers in chat rooms • Downloading games, apps, and software from unknown sources

47. Pop Quiz If a college has a data breach do they need to notify the U.S. Department of Education or Federal Student Aid?

48. Summary • Never forget the network and data you connect to • YOUR actions are critical for everyone’s continued security • Follow all security policies and procedures • If you THINK something is wrong, call the help desk or Security, DON’T HESITATE Breach Investigations average $300 per user impacted

49. QUESTIONS?

50. Contact Info Dr. Linda Wilbanks Chief Information Security Officer Federal Student Aid Linda.Wilbanks@ed.gov Kathleen Styles Chief Privacy Officer Department of Education Kathleen.Styles@ed.gov