Zurich fined for losing customer data

On Tuesday Zurich Insurance was fined $3.5 million for losing customer confidential data, BusinessWeek reports.

The data in question was identity, bank and credit card information belonging to 46,000 customers. It was lost last year on an unencrypted backup tape misplaced by Zurich’s South African operations.

Despite the fact that there was no proof that the data has been misused or even that has been stolen in the first place, the FSA’s director of enforcement and financial crime, Margaret Cole, said “Zurich U.K. let its customers down badly“.

The FSA is Britain financial overseer, or at least it was until last month when the new government announced it was going to wind it down and place the regulatory power back in the Bank of England’s hands (see this article on the Washington Post).
The fine comes also after years of criticism leveled against the FSA (see this Telegraph article from 2005 and countless articles on the satirical magazine Private Eye)

That was a very expensive backup tape.

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Lebanon is in an official state of war with Israel and the countries are locked into a covert espionage.

Yesterday there was an arrest of an “Israeli spy” and what is relevant is that he was a consultant to mobile phone companies and had access to sensitive information.

Path of least resistance:

Mobile phone networks are designed to accommodate lawful interception capabilities and sometimes to prevent external access. That architecture does not take into account the insider threat from a privacy perspective, usually only the billing system is secure.

A rogue employee could get privilege access to sensitive information such as call pattern and even the content of a call. Given their size telecom networks cannot be secured without securing their endpoints.

BBC NEWS: Lebanon arrests ‘Israeli spy’ from mobile phone company

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Big news today as AT&T certified Cellcrypt for BlackBerry on their network. It’s a big step for us and below an extract of our press release:

“We are delighted to achieve AT&T solution certification, which gives further assurance to governments and enterprises seeking to protect confidential conversations that key executives and employees make on their cell phones,” said Kathleen Peters, General Manager (US) at Cellcrypt, “We are honored that Cellcrypt has been selected in this way for use on the largest GSM network in the United States, offering customers the benefit of an additional layer of voice call security for those all important confidential calls.”

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If the recent news of Wikileaks acquiring all the US diplomatic communications sent from the ambassadors in the Middle East were not enough, it is now emerging, in a report by the London Telegraph, that some of the phone calls made by US Secretary of State Hilary Clinton, as well as Pope Benedict XVI, have been wiretapped.

It is understood that in both cases these recordings happened as a result of an ongoing investigation into the other caller for alleged procurement corruption. It is worthy of note that the wiretaps were authorized and perfectly legal under lawful interception legislation. The issue here is that is was Italian lawful interception, so I am sure the US Secretary of State might still not be impressed.

This highlights the murky aspects of cross-border interests and jurisdiction especially in countries where there is a vast number of authorized wiretaps (in this case Italy, where wiretap estimates for the last 10 years are over 3 million) or countries under a dictatorial regime where the rule of law is well, more of a recommendation.

Read more about it on the London Telegraph and the Daily Mail.

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A nice roundup from the Financial Times on the scandal that rocked India earlier this month. Long story short turns out that the whole infrastructure is being abused left and right to snoop on politicians, businessmen, regulators and the odd sportsman. All it all began to unravel with a tweet.

Read all about it on the Financial Times.

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A scandal is brewing in the UK: a model named Vanessa Perroncel unleashed her lawyers over phone-tapping of a live call.

Perroncel was romantically involved with some of the footballers in the English team, it cause quite a stir in the country, and that turned the attention of the press on her life. She is now alleging that her voicemails and calls were being tapped by members of the British press, The Guardian has the exclusive article.

On a completely different scale is what happened in China last week. The Register reports that a glitch diverted all the net traffic of several ISPs through China.

There is an underlying feature on Internet traffic routing that can be a liability: whereby one cannot easily control where your traffic will be routed.
So if you are exchanging sensitive information everything should be encrypted: emails, files, web, and yes voice calls as well.

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The Cellcrypt Blog took a small break to be on the road at several security conferences. We were at RSA in San Francisco, FOSE in Washington DC and several others. We’re back so expect to hear from us soon. (In the picture a highlight from the RIM VIP event at the Spy Museum).

Make sure to follow us on twitter as the stream is updated more frequently.

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Happy to report that Secure Computing Magazine has selected Cellcrypt for its SC Awards in the “Best Encryption Product” category.

Below the full press release:

London, UK – 24th February –Cellcrypt, (www.cellcrypt.com), the leading provider of secure mobile voice calling, has been voted by panel of industry experts representing both major European and global brands a finalist in the highly prestigious 2010 SC Awards for the Best Encryption Solution. The category aims to highlight encryption solutions that answer a specific market need or application, as well as providing a clear business advantage to enterprises or SME’s who invest in the product or service.

Now entering its third decade, the SC Awards Europe is without peer. The awards are universally recognised as the most coveted and prestigious for the European information security industry. The SC Awards honour professionals working to secure enterprises and the vendor and channel communities that deliver innovative security technologies.

Cellcrypt Mobile™ leads the industry in providing an easy-to-use multi-layered security solution for standard smartphones that allows high-performance encrypted voice calls between trusted wireless devices. Cellcrypt’s R&D innovation resulted in the creation of Encrypted Mobile Content Protocol (EMCP), an Internet Protocol (IP) based technology that optimises the delivery of encrypted data between mobile devices delivering unparalleled voice quality, low voice delays, global coverage and intercontinental calling capability.

“We are honoured that Cellcrypt has been selected as a finalist for Best Encryption Solution in the 2010 SC Awards and congratulate the other finalists,” said Simon Bransfield-Garth, CEO of Cellcrypt. “In the light of recent disclosures in the press, this SC Magazine Awards nomination recognises the increasing industry awareness surrounding the risk of mobile voice interception as well as Cellcrypt’s leading ability to deliver comprehensive mobile voice security.”

Winner of this year’s SC Awards will be announced at a gala dinner and award ceremony to be held in London on Tuesday 27th April.

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Do not forget to sign up for Dr Larry Ponemon’s webcast on cell phone calls vulnerabilities with Cellcrypt and other leading industry experts.

Larry is best known for the annual reports on the Cost of Data Breach and he his now looking at the vulnerabilities in the cellular networks as well.

You can register for the event here, the webcast is on February 24th 2010 @ 1100EST.

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Interesting article from IEEE Spectrum on steganography and VoIP.

Now steganography has entered a new era, with stupendously greater potential for mischief. With the latest techniques, the limitations on the length of the message have basically been removed. Consider our example involving the use of Skype. Whereas the first two examples each required a carrier—an MP3 song and a video—there was no such requirement for the transmission of that nude photo. The data were secreted among the bits of a digital Voice over Internet Protocol conversation. In this new era of steganography, the mule that coconspirators are using is not the carrier itself but the communication protocols that govern the carrier’s path through the Internet. Here’s the advantage: The longer the communicators talk, the longer the secret message (or more detailed the secret image) they can send. Most strikingly, the concealment occurs within data whose inherent ephemerality makes the hidden payload nearly impossible to detect, let alone thwart.

The article is quite long but certainly worth reading.

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