If a phone is lost or stolen, your natural reaction may be to change your password. This is not a good idea, because changing the password will make it impossible to do a “remote wipe” of the phone. Fortunately, Kerio Connect offers a solution called “remote wipe”. A “remote wipe” will erase all data on the phone completely resetting all accounts, and in the case of most phones, erasing all apps and completely resetting the phone. Remote wipe is much more effective than changing a password because it protects the user’s privacy, and should be used instead. More information regarding the remote wipe feature can be found at ZZ Servers.

In the past, it was though Linux servers were safe from viruses but recently hackers have been taking advantage of this false sense of security. Some researchers point out that 70% of attacks on Linux honeypots were infected with a 6 year old virus (RST-B)* and used as command and control points for botnets.

ZZ Servers now offers affordable F-Prot anti-virus software for Windows, Linux, Exchange, BSD and Solaris. Protect your servers, desktops and critical infrastructure today. Contact ZZ Servers at 800-796-3574 or email support@zzservers.com to arrange for installation of anti-virus software today.

*RST-B is a backdoor malware runs on Linux/UNIX platforms and infects ELF files in the current and /bin directories. This Linux backdoor and virus compromises system security by allowing remote users to manipulate and access infected machines. If executed as root, it will start processes listening on two network interfaces which provide a remote root shell.

I was able to spend a good 1/2 an hour with the now new customer and help them understand how our approach meets the intent of PCI and is not focused only on trying to “make the sale.”  However, for those that we do not know what questions to ask of a hosting provider I have started a new project where I will be “shopping” for a new hosting provider and will post the communications I have with them, along with some additional comments on what their answers would mean to me if I was in my QSA role evaluating their solutions.  I will keep the communications anonymous to prevent any liability issues, but feel free to use any of the questions or comments I have when discussing hosting solutions with any providers you may be examining; and feel free to use my questions against us when you call and ask about PCI or Compliant based hosting with ZZ Servers.

With that in mind, here is the first discussion with a decent data-center with multiple data-centers fully owned and operated by their staff in the northern midwest.  I have highlighted items that caused me to be concerned about their understanding of PCI and what it takes for merchants or service providers to be hosted with managed PCI solutions.  Please note, anyone can take a rack of hardware and managed / deploy it in a compliant manor.  But that is not what these hosting providers are selling.  They are selling compliant solutions, leading customers who do not fully undersand the requirements to think they are meeting all of the requirements.

***Chat Information*You are now chatting with ‘Paul’
*Paul: *Greetings, my name is Paul. Welcome to <HOSTING PROVIDER> Sales. With
whom am I speaking? How may I be of assistance?
*you: *Hello, i saw your VPS servers have a $50/mo PCI certification?
what does that provide? Does that mean i’ll be compliant? do i need
anything else? does that include my scanning, pen test,
internal/external? log monitoring?
*you: *hello?
*Paul: *Hello, sorry about that
*Paul: *the PCI certification will include all scans for your server to
be entirely compliant
– This is common, many people belive that if you get your ASV scanning & answer questionairre you are compliant..if it was only that simple
*you: *so it is only the scans?
*you: *not the rest of the compliance needs?
*you: *internal & external scans then?
*Paul: *it covers all services needed
*you: *external logging/monitoring, firewalls, IDS, 2 factor remote
access, pen-testing (internal/eternal), asv scanning & internal scanning
(& other stuff i can’t remember atm)??
*Paul: *Yes, it is the complete service
– how can he say it’s scanning, then a complete service? At this point I really believe the sales guy does not know what he is selling
*you: *applicatoin & network penetration testing? how do you have that
for $50/mo? the best quote I have from a professional pen-testing
company is 5000/year
*Paul: *let me double check
*Paul: *yes, it does, I have confirmed
– confirmed? if you can’t tell by now that I am asking questions above his knowledge level; why not conference in someone who knows the answer..
– Many hosting providers want you to email or fill in a form so they can manage their response, if they can’t answer your quetions at all hours
– then are you sure they can manage your compliance needs at any hour?? Get them to bring the expert on the phone while you are asking questions!
*you: *interesting, do you have a detailed whitepaper or pdf on the
complete services offereed?
*you: *and i assume i’ll have to get more than 1 server
*Paul: *No, you can have PCIC with one server
– big big red flag!! If you are only using paypal/google for payments then yes this is right but if you are not then the requirement for “single use” is pretty important
*you: *and that includes firewalls too right? do i have a dedicated
rfc1918 address space?
*you: *you can?
*you: *how do you satisfy the “single purpose” requirement?
*you: *where a server can not be a web & database server
*Paul: *we do not require a cluster for pcic
– I wasn’t asking about a cluster. This is a typical issue, the sales team is use to selling hosting of servers but does not understand PCI. I guess they have not had
– any PCI training (which you merchants & service providers are required to have annually)
*you: *you do not, but PCI requires that
*you: *pci has something somewhere that requires each server have a
single function
*you: *do you have any documentation? or details about what is included
in your PCI services?
*Paul: *I do not have a detailed outline, but I know these are the
standards we follow
– Another warning…PCI is documentation heavy, if they do not have documentation, have they really done all thats required?
*Paul:
*https://www.pcisecuritystandards.org/security_standards/pci_dss.shtml
*you: *yes i am familiar with that
*you: *our QSA has ingrained tht into us
*you: *i was just curious because some of your answers do not jibe with
what the PCI-DSS requires
*you: *ok i think i have enough for now; thank you for your time
*you: *Have a great night..oh one last question; where are your
data-centers located?
*Paul: *My pleasure, they are in <LOCATION>
*you: *any other geographic areas?
*Paul: *they are all located in <ONE LOCATION>
*you: *thank you have a great night
*you: *oh one other questoin
*you: *what technology do you use for your remote 2 factor auth & vpn
technology?
*you: *rsa/certificates/?
*Paul: *The only vendors I have info on at the moment are control scan,
security metrics, trustkeeper, and clone systems
*you: *so it’s not included w/the pci service?
*you: *it’s a 3rd party vendor we have to engage?
*Paul: *Send me an email to <SALES-EMAIL> and I will find out for sure
– Remember earlier they said it included all required services? Again, lack of documentation & training lead me to think they just do not know what the requirements are or what they are selling
*you: *ok thank you, have a great night/morning

Merchant levels and Compliance Validation Requirements

Merchant Types

The “SAQ” is a self-validation tool for merchants and service providers who are not required to do on-site assessments for PCI DSS compliance. The SAQ includes a series of yes-or-no questions for compliance. If an answer is no, the organization must state the future remediation date and associated actions. In order to align more closely with merchants and their compliance validation process, the SAQ was revised and now allows for flexibility based on the complexity of a particular merchant’s or service provider’s business situation (see chart below). The SAQ validation type does not correlate to the merchant classification or risk level.

Service Provider Levels

Service providers are organizations that process, store, or transmit cardholder data on behalf of clients, merchants, or other service providers. Service provider levels are defined as:

By using the charts above, you should be able to easily determine your level and validation type. Knowing this details will go a long way in guiding you through your compliance but it is important to partner with other qualified businesses for your service. ZZ Servers provides PCI focused hosted infrastructure designed for PCI compliance and includes many of controls and measures required for your business infrastructure to be fully compliant.

In an update shortly after Webhostingtalk came back online, Dennis Johnson, an iNET Community Coordinator sent out a detailed post explaining all that was then known about the breech with a firm statement that “Absolutely no credit card or PayPal data was exposed.”

Today Inet Interactive, the owners of Webhosting talk relased the news no one wanted to hear.

ANNOUNCEMENT – 1:25pm est 04/07/09

This morning, the hacker who attacked WHT initiated further communication. He provided evidence that credit card information on one of our database servers was, in fact, compromised during that attack.

While it is surprising that a hacker who has done that much damage would contact the victim, especially with this level of damage but there were apparent motives.  What is currently being done is even more shocking.  A post at Web Host Industry Review mentions the hacker may have been motivated after the hack to release the cardholder data to the web because they “had downloaded and looked through the database files, and raised some concerns about the manner in which the credit card information was being stored.’ and that the file allegedly includes stored CVV/CVC information.

Now, I don’t belive mentioning PCI compliance here will be necessary but it is quite obvious that based on the details so far, the data was not stored in a PCI compliant manner.

One of the largest and possibly most hard hitting change is how the the certification process is placing an increasing amount of scrutiny on level 3 and 4 merchants. If you process credit cards and have not received any notification from your merchant bank regarding PCI DSS compliance, you will soon.

I will not attempt to cover all of the details of the new standard but will say if your company handles any cardholder data, it is important to get your infrastructure into compliance with PCI DSS.

PCI DSS 1.2 specifies 12 requirements for compliance, organized into 6 logically related groups, which are called “control objectives.”

The control objectives and their requirements are:

• Build and Maintain a Secure Network
  1. Requirement 1: Install and maintain a firewall configuration to protect cardholder data
  2. Requirement 2: Do not use vendor-supplied defaults for system passwords and other security parameters
• Protect Cardholder Data
  1. Requirement 3: Protect stored cardholder data
  2. Requirement 4: Encrypt transmission of cardholder data across open, public networks
• Maintain a Vulnerability Management Program
  1. Requirement 5: Use and regularly update anti-virus software
  2. Requirement 6: Develop and maintain secure systems and applications
• Implement Strong Access Control Measures
  1. Requirement 7: Restrict access to cardholder data by business need-to-know
  2. Requirement 8: Assign a unique ID to each person with computer access
  3. Requirement 9: Restrict physical access to cardholder data
• Regularly Monitor and Test Networks
  1. Requirement 10: Track and monitor all access to network resources and cardholder data
  2. Requirement 11: Regularly test security systems and processes
• Maintain an Information Security Policy
  1. Requirement 12: Maintain a policy that addresses information security

Each control objective contains additional details on what is required to meet the objective and requires a detailed study to fully understand them and their impact on your existing infrastructure. Smaller companies have the option to use a self-certification questionnaire but even this can be difficult and time consuming.

ZZ Servers has fully qualified security assessors and partnerships with PCI ASV/QSA’s for all levels PCI certification, required security scans and full level 1 PCI audit validation. Contact us today so we can can assist with your adaption of PCI DSS in your environment and ensure your full compliance with these comprehensive regulations. Let us help you prepare and prevent the damaging costs of a data breach.

Peter Zendzian
Managing Partner
ZZ Servers, LLC
www.zzservers.com
800-796-3574

One of the most valuable commodities in this day and age is your own personal information. The more we make purchases over the Internet or over the phone, in other words: not in person, the more important that information becomes.

However, as security breaches receive more coverage and are more well known to the public, trust in the current security measures is coming into question, and the need for stronger security and standardized tools and controls became necessary.

Enter the PCI DSS, or Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard. This was created by the five major credit card companies as a guideline to help merchants and other companies implement the necessary hardware, software, and other procedures to guard sensitive credit card and personal information.

The encouragement to achieve PCI compliance comes in a couple different forms: benefits and mandates. The mandates are the requirements of PCI compliance, and attached to them are some very strict and specific penalties. These could include fines as high as $500,000 per incident, and the loss of the ability to accept credit cards at all.

On the other hand, there are a number of PCI compliance benefits that should be as much of an incentive, if not more so, than the penalties. It merely requires a proactive understanding of the long term benefits of compliance. Some of these benefits, you will find, are somewhat more intangible than others, but that doesn’t make them any less valuable.

The first and most obvious benefit of PCI compliance is a simple matter of trust. What if your company was the one that recently suffered a major security breach? What if you had to live with the stigma of “the company that lost thousands of credit card number”? Could you ever live it down? Could you survive the fallout?

A giant company may be able to weather the storm (as has been seen in some recent cases), but most companies need to focus on building lasting trust from the beginning. Being PCI compliant can help you achieve this.

More tangibly, merchants who are PCI compliant are offered protection from the fines if you should happen to be breached. If you are compliant at the time you suffer an attack, you can have a sort of safe harbor.

At the moment, these “carrots and sticks”, or mandates and benefits, are assumed to be enough to encourage merchants to gain PCI compliance. But if it turns out, in fact, to not be enough, the PCI Security Standards Council will likely change the measures of encouragement. The reason for these measures is that trust is the only thing that will propel the online industry forward. If customers lose their trust in the system, they will find alternate methods to do business.

It is a difficult thing in the naturally competitive environment of online business to consider something as nebulous as “the greater good”, but in a world where personal information is so valuable, creating an environment where that information is utterly secure should be a top priority.

Andy Eliason is a writer for Main10, Inc. If you’d like to learn more about PCI compliance, or how to become PCI DSS compliant, visit Braintree Payment Solutions today and find out what they have to offer.

This vulnerability only affects operating systems which (like Ubuntu) are based on Debian. However, other systems can be indirectly affected if weak keys are imported into them. We consider this an extremely serious vulnerability, and urge all users to act immediately to secure their systems.

The following Ubuntu releases are affected:

• Ubuntu 7.04
• Ubuntu 7.10
• Ubuntu 8.04 LTS
• Debian Etch 4.0
• Debian Lenny 5.0

For more details visit these links:

• Ubuntu: http://www.ubuntu.com/usn/usn-612-2
• Debian: http://www.debian.org/security/2008/dsa-1571

We consider this an extremely serious vulnerability, and urge all users to act immediately to secure their systems.

With the advent of multiple core processors and Xen, it is possible to virtualize an entire data center and fit 50 or more independent servers into one Xen server.  There are a number of third-party tools or known as management consoles have been developed to facilitate the common tasks of administering a Xen host, such as configuring, starting, monitoring and stopping of Xen guests. Examples include Enomalism, Xen Tools, Google’s Ganeti, MLN, HyperVM, FluidVM, ConVirt (formerly XenMan) and Red Hat’s Virtual Machine Manager, virt-manager.  Unfortunately, all of them fall short in one area or another in a distributed, secure and automated environment.

I will not get into how each of these management programs work but with few exceptions, they require complex installations into the Domain-0 or privileged domain and require incoming connections to it, or require a local desktop tool.  While this is convenient, it is not completely secure and can potentially lead to vulnerabilities.  If Domain-0 is ever compromised, all other guest domains running in it are vulnerable as well.  As a basic for security, the following should be required:

1. Run the smallest number of necessary services on Domain-0.

2. Use a firewall to restrict the traffic Domain-0.

3. Do not allow users to access Domain-0.

4. Do not allow any incoming connections to Domain-0.

So, How do you manage a Xen server remotely if you cannot directly access Domain-0 you say?  The answer is almost too simple, Domain-0 will use outgoing connections to a remote server.  This not only allows the server to be more secure, it can potentially reduce memory and load requirements of the management domain.

Currently, we have working scripts that can provision and manage guest domains as well as send statistics to a remote server.  These scripts are only just beginning but are currently working in a production environment.  Each are released using GPL licensing in hopes that others will gain some use and provide feedback so we can make managing xen servers easier and more secure.

The IT Governance Data Breaches Report identifies that spectacular data breaches, such as the UK’s HMRC CD-Rom fiasco and the prolonged theft of TK Maxx credit card records, are not caused by the misdemeanor of a junior employee but arise, rather, from systemically inadequate information security arrangements at the organizations where the incident occurs.

A data breach is ‘the unauthorized disclosure by an organization of personally identifiable information, where that disclosure compromises the security, confidentiality, or integrity of the data that has been disclosed.’

The Attrition database shows that the numbers of reported data breaches in the US increased from 22 in 2004 to 326 in 2006. The pattern in the UK and elsewhere is similar. Three developments in recent years make addressing this issue a real priority:

1. Identify theft is a low-risk, high return option for organized crime. Traditional crime, including violent robbery and theft, has clearly identifiable risks. It is easy to be recorded on video by CCTV, seen by witnesses or caught by means of DNA, and the returns are relatively low. High-tech crime, on the other hand, creates real problems for the police force and is, conversely, relatively low-risk for the criminal. Contributing factors include the perpetrator’s anonymity, the speed at which crimes can be committed, the volatility or transience of evidence, the trans-jurisdictional nature of cybercrime and the high costs of investigation.

2. Legal and regulatory compliance initiatives, such as the EU Data Protection directive and California’s data breach disclosure law, SB1386, have both formalized the concept that personal data must be legally protected, and introduced penalties for failing to do so.

3. The proliferation of mobile data storage devices has changed the boundaries of where we store our data and effectively eliminated "fixed fortifications" as an effective tool for preventing data breaches.

The number of data breaches reported both within the US and the UK has been steadily increasing since 2006. In the US, the introduction of California’s data breach disclosure law, SB1386, in July 2003 led to a greater awareness of data breaches and, as a consequence, greater reporting of them. Within the UK, the numbers of reported data breaches has also been steadily rising, with a large increase in the number of reported data breaches following the HMRC breach. The peaks in reported data breaches following the disclosure of the UK’s HMRC data loss, suggests that there were – and probably still are – many data breaches that go unreported and research suggests that organizations are reluctant to officially report data breaches unless they have already been exposed. The evidence suggests that waiting to be found out is not the best strategy.

12% of reported breaches in the UK were at regulated financial services organizations. Those reported in the unregulated private sector are much lower. An extrapolation from this behavior is that the likely scale and cost of data breaches in this sector in the UK is probably much bigger than has actually been reported – and at least as great as that in the public and regulated sectors.

The reported number of internally caused data breaches remains lower than external ones, but averages to around a third of those reported each year since 2000. Many data breaches are self-inflicted in that organizations adopt confidentiality regimes that make it difficult for people to actually do their job and, as a result, they bypass controls with unpredictable but inevitable data breach consequences.

The Ponemon report commented that "the investment required to prevent a data breach is dwarfed by the resulting costs of a breach" and " the return on investment (ROI) and justification for preventative measures is clear". Costs of data breaches – legal costs, the costs of restitution, brand damage, lost customers and so on – are significant; for financial services organizations, it was about £55 per compromised record.

Whilst not involving legal compliance, if an organization has a credit card-related data breach and is found not in compliance with the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS), there are potentially severe contractual and financial penalties, including a bar on the business accepting payment cards.

All these factors make the protection of personal data a key business and compliance responsibility; the information security management standard ISO27001 provides a best-practice specification for an information security management system that would meet the requirements of the Data Protection Act 1998.

The most important steps for Data Protection Act compliance are:

As a minimum:

1. Encrypt all personal data on laptops; whole disk encryption is a more secure solution than folder or file level encryption, and FIPS 140-2 is the recognized standard for encryption engines.

2. Encrypt all removable and portable media that might contain personal data, including USB drives, CD-Roms and magnetic backup tapes.

In addition:

3. Establish rigorous procedures to ensure the physical destruction of redundant computer drives, magnetic media and paper records prior to disposal, and ensure that disposals are made in line with a formal data retention timetable.

4. Organizations that accept credit and other payment cards should also comply with the PCI DSS.

5. Provide regular training and awareness on legal responsibilities for all staff that deal with personal data.

6. Deploy outward-bound channel (email, instant messenger) filtering software with customized dictionaries for relevant legislation such as DPA, PCI, etc

7. Establish a vulnerability patching program and implement anti-malware software.

8. Implement a business-driven access control policy, combined with effective authentication.

9. Develop an incident management plan that enables the organization to respond effectively to any data breaches.

Data Breaches Report
ISO27001
PCI DSS

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