Archive for February 12, 2024

IRS Struggles With Poor Taxpayer Data Protections Says Report

Posted in Commentary with tags on February 12, 2024 by itnerd

In response to a report issued by the Treasury Department Inspector General for Tax Administration (TIGTA), the IRS failed to revoke access to sensitive tax systems from contractors and didn’t have protections for some of those systems to prevent unauthorized removal of taxpayer data.

Melvin Lammerts, Hacking Lead at Hadrian had this comment:

“The IRS’s lax practices of neglecting to revoke access for unqualified contractors and lacking sufficient data protection measures expose serious security risks; while acknowledging the problem is a start, concrete actions like strict access controls and enhanced data security are imperative to safeguarding taxpayer information.”

This example should be noted by businesses and organizations of all sorts to make sure that their access control policies are solid and are actually followed. Otherwise they risk a major event that would have the potential to harm many.

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Guest Post: Consumers deserve ISP choice, no matter where they live

Posted in Commentary with tags on February 12, 2024 by itnerd

By Todd Hofley

More than half of Canadian consumers likely think about switching their internet companies, but a fast-growing number of condo and apartment residents are prevented from changing suppliers because of “bulk arrangements” between big telcos and building developers. 

A 2019 Competition Bureau Canada survey showed more than half of Canadians had considered switching telecom providers. Thirty per cent did switch. Since then, complaints about big telcos have grown substantially. But, over the same time, a tsunami of bulk agreements has locked more families into an internet service agreement they didn’t ask for, know about or participate in.

With a bulk agreement or arrangement, a large telco ­­— such as Rogers, Bell, or Telus —negotiates to pay a developer a significant up-front payment (e.g. $425-$500 per unit: for a 500-unit condo in a 12-condo master planned community with 6,000 homes, it would be about $2.5M-$3M) in return for providing internet services to all the units in a multi-dwelling unit building (MDU) for a period of five to 10 years. Residents are automatically enrolled in this incumbent’s service and the cost is included in their condo fee or rent. There is no ability to opt out, cancel or negotiate on price.

A whole new class of captive consumer can now be defined by their type of housing. In a nutshell, despite their thoughts about shifting providers, tens of thousands of building residents are no longer able to exercise choice. Additionally, these consumers have lost their power and leverage. After all, it’s the consumers’ ability to choose that creates competition and forces companies to lower costs and improve services.

Bulk agreements were in limited practice until about five years ago because “end-user choice” was supposed to have been guaranteed by the CRTC in a seminal 2003 decision. Since then, despite this, hundreds of agreements have locked more and more residents into bulk arrangements, removing the competitive market within these buildings and substituting it with a monopoly.

Because of the nature of how these agreements are structured, the public — including the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) itself ­­— has had little insight into this practice, allowing it to grow exponentially in the shadows.  

While “access” to a building is guaranteed through regulation, if that building’s market has already been locked down and turned into a defacto monopoly, the value of that “access” is zero. In some instances, the very nature of this monopoly is protected even further as the bulk agreement forbids marketing or promotion of services that compete with the bulk provider.

It makes no sense for a competing ISP to install facilities when an incumbent telco already controls all the customers in a building. It would be like the government of Canada saying that all Canadians must use Air Canada to fly between cities, and then being surprised when WestJet doesn’t. 

Incredulously, the large telcos have said that an ‘end user’ wanting another service can simply pay twice. Once for the incumbent’s service and a second time for their provider of choice. As ridiculous a suggestion as that is, double paying isn’t even an option most of the time because there is no other network or provider to move to – because they haven’t built in – because there is no market to compete for. 

Almost every high rise built in the last 25 years has at least two incumbents along with      several other ISPs including third party wholesale competitors in the building. It’s because of this fiercely competitive market that prices for internet service in high rises are less than half of what someone in a house will pay and less than half of what they were only five years ago at speeds that are 4x. This is a perfect example of competition at work.

Today, bulk arrangements have locked in close to 50 per cent of Greater Toronto Area’s new and planned MDUs. By our estimation, over the last two years, more than twice as many residents than in the previous five years were forced into bulk arrangements. Every month, five to seven new developments are signed on to these agreements in favour of lone incumbent providers. The numbers are escalating fast.    

A 2023 Beanfield survey of new multi-dwelling unit developments turned up 54 projects, comprising almost 40,000 units, with bulk deals ready to be rolled out. Rogers led with 29 buildings and 13,000 suites locked into bulk agreements between 2017 and 2022 with expiry and renewal dates ranging from the present to 2028.

Similar practices have started taking place in rural and suburban communities with single-family housing subdivisions. We are already seeing the snowball effect, rolling across Canada.

During the July 2022 national outage, many Canadians living in MDUs were cut off for hours, unable to share neighbours’ internet because entire buildings were locked in with a single ISP. One point of failure is bad for resiliency, safety and security for residents. The Canadian Internet Registration Authority recently stated, “As Canadian networks grow in tandem with the housing supply, internet access resilience must be made a priority. Decision-makers at ISPs and in the government must prioritize an environment with multiple network providers, mixed technologies and resilient configurations to ensure that Canadians can access the internet 24/7, 365 days —no matter where they live.” 

At upcoming CRTC hearings in February, we’ll raise bulk agreements as a critical issue for the regulator and for independent ISPs where MDUs represent over half of the market. It’s part of how we can create a vibrant, sustainable, and competitive telecommunications market. 

MDUs make up over a third of existing Canadian dwellings and 77 per cent of all new housing starts across the country. These buildings typically house younger Canadians and new immigrants — groups most in need of choice and consumer power. 

CRTC Commissioners will be asked for a clear and timely ruling against Rogers’ bulk agreement practices that will set a precedent to end all network providers’ anti-competitive bulk agreements with developers.Consumers — whether they live in a house or a condo/apartment ­­ — should have the same right to choose. 

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Todd Hofley is VP, Policy and Communications at Beanfield, an independent telecom operating in Toronto, Montreal, Vancouver and Ottawa. Visit Beanfield’s Linktree page for sources to help Canadians learn more about the issue and help change the Canadian telecom landscape: https://linktr.ee/changetelecom. 

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Call2Recycle Canada launches North America’s first ‘smart’ battery recycling container

Posted in Commentary with tags on February 12, 2024 by itnerd

 Call2Recycle, Canada’s leading battery collection and recycling program, today announced the launch of its innovative smart battery recycling container under its new consumer brand, Recycle Your Batteries, Canada!. As the first to bring this cutting-edge ‘smart’ solution to North America, Call2Recycle is leading the charge in redefining the battery recycling experience for Canadians. 

The new smart battery recycling containers were developed by Call2Recycle in consultation with leading global recycling organizations. The new devices merge innovation and sustainability to minimize risk and significantly enhance program safety, operational efficiency, and collection site convenience. The vivid new Recycle Your Batteries, Canada! logo and graphics are employed to improve public education and battery recycling awareness, which will ultimately lead to an increase in critical metals recovered from these batteries contributing to Canada’s circular economy.

The smart containers surpass the capabilities of traditional battery recycling containers, marking a significant advancement in safety and environmental impact throughout the battery collection process. By integrating advanced technology to create an intelligent system, the containers elevate battery safety through remote monitoring capabilities. This feature alerts collection sites to any increases in temperature, mitigating the risk of a thermal event. 

Sensors in the containers remotely monitor the fill level and notify program managers when a pick-up is required. This makes transport and the support of collection sites seamless and efficient. Designed with a focus on reusability, these containers reduce the need for the manufacturing, shipping, recycling, and disposing of individual boxes and materials, significantly reducing waste and the program’s overall environmental footprint.

The new smart battery recycling containers will be strategically placed in public locations throughout Canada starting in February, providing greater accessibility for individuals to collect, protect, and drop off their household batteries responsibly and safely. With the prominent inclusion of the “Recycle Your Batteries, Canada!” brand, vibrant design, and a distinctive QR code, Canadians will gain access to safety and program information, creating a more interactive and engaging recycling experience.

For more information about Recycle Your Batteries, Canada! and the smart battery recycling containers, please visit RecycleYourBatteries.ca. 

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Guest Post: Is Your SIEM a Hotel California?

Posted in Commentary with tags on February 12, 2024 by itnerd

By Ken Westin, Field CISO at Panther Labs

You may know the classic Eagle’s song “Hotel California,” about greed and excess in America with the final lyrics, “You can check out any time you like, but you can never leave!”

Yeah, I am an old timer, and I was listening to this track lately, and it hit me how many security vendors have a “Hotel Califonia” business model. Not only do security vendors try to lock customers into increasingly expensive licensing, but they also make it challenging to integrate with other tools within the security ecosystem, requiring additional tools with different licensing if they provide integrations with other tools at all. Here are a few things to watch out for when selecting a SIEM to ensure it’s not a Hotel California where you can never leave.

Beware the SIEM Ransomware Business Model

One way some SIEM vendors get their foot in the door with a new account is to offer an “all-you-can-eat” license for data ingest. The idea here is that the vendor provides an amazing deal to consume as much data into their SIEM as they want for a long time, usually three years. The vendor will then help onboard data across multiple organizations within a company and ensure that the organization becomes heavily dependent on this tool.

The trick is that this is often a one-time deal rather than something that can be renewed. The customer is then hit with sticker shock when their sales rep provides a “true-up” license renewal based on the data they are ingesting. The vendor then feels they can hold the customer’s security data for ransom if they don’t pay the higher license cost; you have to reduce the amount of data you ingest or switch to a different SIEM. Vendors are aware both of these prospects are painful endeavors and not something that can be done overnight and will require the customer to pay at least another year of licensing before they can migrate.

Leveraging a SIEM that can decouple the detection engine and ingest from the Security Data Lake helps organizations not be held hostage by a single vendor. Being able to filter data is critically important for a SIEM, mainly if that SIEM’s pricing model is based on data ingest volume. Being able to filter, redirect, or bifurcate data based on various parameters is critical to a modern SIEM architecture.

Getting Data In and Out

One challenge I have seen with customers leveraging SIEM tools provided by cloud platforms is that they, by design, need to play better with others. Trying to ingest logs from another cloud platform, for example, can be quite painful to get working, as data egress methods differ across platforms. The ingest of external data often comes with a higher price tag where you are often double dipped, one by the vendor for data egress and again by the SIEM platform for data ingest.

Getting data in is one challenge, but also getting data out, whether it is to export to a different platform, can be a challenge, notably when the SIEM leverages a proprietary storage format; if you want to convert the data to another format, there are often additional costs associated with this process.

The ability to send alerts to multiple destinations, not just within the SIEM, has become critically important to modern SIEM use cases. Panther is unique in the SIEM space for providing multiple methods out-of-the-box to send alerts to various collaboration tools such as Jira, Slack, GitHub and even integrates with other SIEMs such as Splunk. In addition to out-of-the-box alert destinations, Panther also provides custom webhooks to send to internal tools and applications. Empowering detection engineers also to send alerts to different destinations depending on the data source, severity, or even within the logic of their detection puts the power of SIEM into the hands of detection engineers.

More Use Cases Often Means More Money

Another trap many security vendors lay for their customers with “surprise pricing” is to nickel and dime them on use cases. For one SIEM vendor, you may pay one price for data ingest and basic search capabilities. Still, suppose you want their security features for correlation rules, risk-based alerting, anomaly detection, and other use cases. In that case, there is an additional premium that you will need to pay, whether a percentage of the ingest price, a completely different licensing model based on company size, or other strange calculus.

Many SIEMs also operate on a “black box” model when it comes to their detections, where the customer can’t see the actual logic; this becomes problematic in many cases as the customer has a difficult time tuning false positives and may not provide the context to identify the source of a given threat. Leveraging modern approaches to managing detections, such as detection-as-code, provides not only open access to detection logic but also provides detection engineers a platform to develop and manage detections more efficiently.

Modern SIEMs Provide Flexibility and Integrate with the Security Ecosystem

Modern SIEMs need to be able to integrate any data source regardless of the platform, even if it is a competing tool. Security leaders are tired of vendor lock-in and want to be able to pick the best-of-breed when it comes to their tools. Ingesting data from any source and filtering only relevant fields has become a critical capability for modern SIEMs. Storing this data for long-term searchable retention well beyond 90 days is also becoming increasingly important; at Panther, we provide one year of data retention with high-performance search for threat hunting, investigations, and dashboarding. Panther also allows sending alerts to any destination, whether it is a ticketing system, collaborative tool, another SIEM, or a custom webhook. When your SIEM provides flexibility and plays nicely with your existing tools, you may never WANT to leave.

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