3 Steps to Internet Security and Privacy

Every day since my last post I am compelled to share a new media or insider report about the state of our internet security and privacy today. Of course I do just that through Twitter and LinkedIn but one report especially struck me and energizes today's blog. The article
was published yesterday by Bloomberg News and exemplifies the rapidly increasing levels of risk mounting in cyberspace today. It's a call to action.



Thanksgiving Day, Bloomberg News;

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-11-27/zurich-s-kerner-says-matter-of-time-until-dramatic-cyber-attack.html




Stay with me a moment here and let's look at the choice of words by #MichaelKerner, who oversees property-casualty coverage at Zurich Insurance Group AG (ZURN) #ZURN  -

"... said computer threats are escalating and may soon cause “dramatic” disruptions for businesses and individuals."

Some serious words here; "soon", "dramatic", "disruptions for business and individuals."

INDIVIDUALS - Yes, I am shouting for emphasis. In my last blog on #offshoreemailaccounts I explained how and why we, as individuals, are the next high-value target for the most sophisticated and aggressive criminals on the internet.

"... he said yesterday in an interview at Bloomberg’s headquarters in New York. “You’ll look back and say, ‘We should have seen this coming.’” 

I differ here; anyone that is awake will have to say "I saw this coming." And yes YOU should see this coming. You, as the head-of-household, leader, protector, and if not for you, then who? Protecting yourself is not rocket-science and it is extremely affordable, especially from a risk vs. reward standpoint. The purpose of today's blog is to show you how in 3 steps you can pull yourself off the radar from the criminal, commercial and state actors that are stealing your digital assets every day. The three-pronged approach I describe here will prevent them from targeting you for the likes of financial extortion, ID theft, revenge, ... you know the gig, and give you the ability to seize back the control of your personal information, identity and digital assets.



The real challenge in doing this is in the "when" and "how" you will decide it's time to suit-up and insulate yourself from the risk. Attaining and retaining control of your online security and privacy is the subject matter of this week's post. It's 3 Steps. Three important steps so you can stop thinking about it, feel really smart, and position yourself for control and success in a digital world.


Step #1 - Secure Your Email. It's easy. You will want to domain your email offshore and out of the hands of the NSA and the public services. The information they are aggregating about you and your life is at the stage where it absolutely is surveillance. A simple inquiry by an ambitious federal employee can spin out of control, take on a shape never originally intended and completely upend and disrupt your life for a very long time to come. Witness the Op-Ed piece from the Wall St Journal, #howthegovernmentspiedonme, where a routine email check led to the resignation of the Director of the CIA (I wish I could make this up).

 http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702303482504579179670250714560

At #totaldigitalsecurity we use real servers and base them in Zurich, Switzerland. Our partners are at #kolab  where #georggreve  http://linkedin.com/in/GeorgGreve   is CEO. There is no better email solution today. And, it's open-source. That's a really big deal when it comes to security. Switzerland's constitution is very clear in terms of the rights individuals have to privacy and the country really is the antithesis to the U.S. today. For more on "Why Switzerland" see my last blog and refer to the chart:

We are actively setting up family and business domains that include email, calendar, contact and to-do and is an Exchange-like experience, but without the bugs and transparency of the public email services like  #gmail and #yahoomail .

  
Step #2 - Secure Your Online Presence. 

First, a couple of definitions.

Privacy - #onlineprivacy is when they know who you are, but not what you are doing.
Anonymity - #onlineanonymity is when they see what you are doing but not who you are.


Ideally, you want both, every step of the way. Tor, for example, provides anonymity and a VPN, for example, provides privacy. But there are many more links in the chain and each must be as robust as the last.


Securing your online activity also includes anti-virus and malware, intrusion prevention, a firewall, anti-spam engine, and browsing protection. And, very importantly, immediate updating of operating system and 3rd party software applications. The fact is, most intrusions could have been prevented with current software patches and updates. With Microsoft, this is practically a full-time job but with our system, it's monitored and automated, never skipping a beat.

Here's how;

Large institutions have long recognized the value and potential liability of their digital assets and have invested vast sums of money to protect themselves from the associated risks. It's still a whack-a-mole game at that level and always will be, and this is precisely the point;  this tension between the institution and the hackers is an amazing and energizing force that has created remarkable innovation and solutions that become evermore robust and inexpensive. It is a fact of physics that technology gets better at an exponential rate and cheaper just as quickly. If you don't know Moore's Law, honestly, it's time you do because not only is the rate of change getting faster but so is the rate of the rate of change. When it comes to math, that's a huge phenomenon.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moore%27s_law


Check this graph out;






The graph illustrates computer performance from 1975 to 2011. The crucial point here though is that we are now in the zone of the "hockey stick". That's where the line starts to go vertical. Since the computer chip was invented it has been evolving at a rate previously unheard of in any activity. The accumulation of these exponential gains (think compound interest rates) put us at a point, right now today, where the rates of change are literally going vertical, like straight up. That's the hockey stick piece. If you take one thing away, take this; you ain't seen nothin' yet. This is not "bad" news, it just is what it is but it could be tragic if you don't recognize it. And, what Step #2 is all about is using this awesome progress in technology by leveraging it's performance and ridiculously low prices to your advantage in the realm of your personal security and privacy.

OK, so, back to securing your online presence; it is all about taking the solutions provided at the institutional level and engineering them for the individual consumer. That's you and me and our families and our offices. This is precisely what we do for our customers.  At this level of protection security is operated as a service, as opposed to a product.  "Products" are installed and expected to go to work. Today's cyber-environment requires a more dynamic process of monitoring, assessing and adapting. For this we use a network ops center in Helsinki, Finland, (another country that is maniacal about privacy rights) operated by the F-Secure company. They are the real deal, check them out. The monitoring is 24/7/365 and defenses are automated, including software patches and updates, anti-virus and malware, intrusion prevention, a firewall, anti-spam engine, vulnerability testing and browsing protection.


Step #3 - Secure Your Digital Assets.  
Have you noticed the price of a bitcoin? In less than a year it's gone from $10 to $1,000, in round numbers. I don't know if this tulip-mania and I don't really care because it's a symptom. The cause of this phenomenon is the rapidly increasing value to anonymity. It's supply and demand all over again. Anonymity is so valued now because their is so little of it left. The inherent value to anonymity is the information behind the curtain. Everyone wants it. Your government is just taking it, the corporation is suckering you into giving it to them and the criminal is stealing it from you. All at the same time. The scarcity of today and the foreseeable future is privacy and anonymity.  This makes me laugh because it used to be so valuable to be famous! Perhaps one day we will all have our 15 minutes of pure anonymity. Like a surreal bliss I suppose.

So the point is to secure your stuff. All your digital stuff, because it's becoming more valuable to someone somewhere more and more every day. And this can be tricky.
This is why so much is "free" on the internet. Free social media, email, storage, and the rest. You name it and the billionaires of silicon valley want you to give it to you. Because they are nice guys you suppose? Maybe they are, some seem like it, but we know they aren't "giving" you something without coming out the winner in the exchange. That's what billionaires do really, really well. Remember; if you aren't paying for the product, you are the product. The billionaires made in silicon valley over the last several years have done it faster than ever because they have figured out how to get you to work for them, everyday, and to have you pay them for doing it. No wonder they got so rich so fast. Imagine having millions of others doing your work for you, giving you their stuff, and then paying you for the privilege. That's the dominant business model for the time.

Do what I did and what I do for others; create a digital "Family Vault". Base it in on real servers, offshore, Switzerland or Finland preferably, and encrypt the hell out of it. Create access and user permissions and you then have a family that collaborates around their digital assets. Decades of photos, scans, movies, financial records, legal documents, passwords, ... you get it. Sync and backup is a cinch, legacies are assured and future generations will always have their "digital fort" because we do it in open-source. Like our email solution, our storage solution is open-source and this means you are always portable and format compatible.

You know, at first draft I was going to say 3 "Simple" or "Easy" Steps to Online ... as the title but I couldn't get honest with the words "Simple" and "Easy". We simply, aren't there, yet. That's why we are here, do it for you. And I see our entire service operation as open-source too. We only apply the best-in-breed technology to our solutions and when the title of "best" changes hands, well we do too. We have put together an amazingly robust, effective and affordable system that will not just survive the challenges of change but will thrive on them as well. With our service, the awesomeness that is the nature of technology will be leveraged for the sake of protecting you and those around you, 24/7/365. This is effective risk management for the digital age.

Thanks,

Brad



 

Offshore Email Accounts

Welcome back,

If you are reading this then you probably know that the new Snowden documents show that the NSA is scanning all of the major, public providers of email and internet services. This activity is without warrant, there is no consent nor due process and it is not reported. In fact according to U.S. law if you report the activity you are subject to criminal charges. The NSA scanning harvests data that includes incredibly personal detail like address books and IM lists. The word for it is metadata. This activity is well beyond even that of PRISM, and is better defined as surveillance.

As security-guru Bruce Scheiner says,
"Metadata equals surveillance; always remember that."  

https://www.schneier.com/crypto-gram-1311.html

How prevalent is this?  Well, in one day the NSA's Special Source Operations branch collected 689,246 individual email addresses from the major providers like Gmail, Yahoo and others. The administration tells us not to worry as there are "checks and balances". The problem is that there is no due process for the "checks and balances", just some secret something in the government that decides what is legal and constitutional. This is the shady platform from which massive amounts of information about you, your family and your business, are being collected, analyzed, "interpreted" and acted upon, every day.

Besides the audacity of the activity is it's recklessness. Already we have insulted the world and its leaders, much less ourselves. The damage to date is incalculable, and the potential for future damage is unfathomable. The government has unleashed the ultimate software virus and it's target is you and everything about you. The virus will live forever, or at least as long as you're concerned with, and it will mutate through the hands of the hacker-mega-machine until it becomes something far from what it was originally meant to be.

I founded Total Digital Security on the notion that cybercrime was going to be a significant problem for more than just the institutional entities. We read every day about hacks into DropBox, Apple, the big banks, the Pentagon, and other entities recognizable enough to merit a story covering the breach. But what about individuals, like us? Not so much. Why? Well, for some time we (that's you and me)  haven't been considered "high-value" targets. Whether you are a criminal syndicate, a vigilante hacker, or a commercial or government entity you want bang for your hacking buck. These large, "high-value" institutional targets, are referred to as "verticals". Once you've hacked in to a "vertical" the potential "value" extraction can be very high. Cyber-attacks have traditionally been focused on a single, "high-value", "vertical" in order to satisfy their agenda for any particular attack.

Yes, there are plenty of individuals and families that are victims of cyber-crime too. Some of the consequences are life-altering, all of them are damaging. Still, 99% of the press is about the institutional level crimes. One guy getting hacked by a teenager in a hoodie isn't going to make you pick up the newspaper and read the story. As cyber-criminals see it we as individuals are "horizontal" targets; broad in scope and shallow in value. Not worth their effort. Well guess what? The game is changing and "horizontal" has just become the new "high-value" target for any hacker or spy in the game.

Let's face it, since the Snowden revelations we now know we are all victims of serious intrusions to our security and privacy. And, in that, lies the point. We have all become "high-value" targets. If you can get enough of us with any one cyber-attack, then we're fair game. Collectively, any group of us is a "high-value" target. The safety of being bunkered in a "horizontal" is no more. Though we are not server-centric in our technology at the home and personal level, we are now vulnerable as a result of two primary forces. On one hand is the massive aggregation of individual traffic at places like Gmail, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and Yahoo, among many others. And, on the other hand, is the power of "big data" software that can make sense of all that metadata. Combined, the intimate details of our everyday lives are being collected, analyzed and "interpreted". On behalf of the NSA the interpreter of your information is a secret body of unknown officials in cahoots with one another somewhere deep in the federal government that requires no due process and operates entirely in the dark. And that's when the good-guys are at work on us.

We cannot conceive of the ways this will go terribly wrong, but we can take action because there are effective and affordable solutions that are available today. You can significantly reduce the risk of cybercrime with inexpensive technology and services that effectively  mitigate most all of your online risks. As a result of software the NSA and others have built along with the natural performance curve of technology, you can expect these metadata-based cyber-attacks to pick up in frequency, effectiveness and potential consequences for not just the big institutions, but for you and those around you. Digital assets are becoming more valuable by the day, witness bitcoin. Every day the value of you becoming a target goes up, and the ease of which to victimize you goes down. It's no longer "if" but "when" you or someone close to you has a serious problem with cyber-crime and the time is exactly now to get in front of it while you can.

One of the most effective things you can do to protect you and those around you is to establish Swiss-based email accounts. This slide distinguishes the reasons why:

 There is a really good reason the world's smartest people keep their money in Switzerland. It's because the Swiss constitution extends extraordinary rights of privacy to individuals. Their is no warrantless activity by the government in Switzerland. And, if there is a warrant, you must be notified and the warrant's activity must be reported. While in the U.S. it is a criminal act to report a warrantless offense by the NSA, in Switzerland it is a criminal act NOT to report the activity even for a warranted action. That's the environment I choose in which to operate my online life, safeguard my digital assets and to protect my privacy and personal security.


This blog's focus is personal online security and privacy. I founded Total Digital Security not just on the expectation that things were going to get ugly soon but also on the view that counter technology is effective, affordable and becoming more so all the time. Institutionally developed counter-measures are at a point economically where they can be introduced to the individual, home and small office environments. You don't need a server to operate them and they are 24/7 vigilant and adapting. The landscape will be even more dynamic in the future but we have the opportunity now to shore-in the leakage of our identity and privacy and to preserve and protect our digital assets for generations to come.

I hope you will stay tuned,

Brad

It's my first.

Mark the moment, it's time for my first ever blog. I'm not sure why it took me so long, other than simply not making the time for it. I like to write, been told I'm an OK writer, and I have lots to say some times. I read more than any one I know, follow many, many diverse subjects and interests, and maybe have a knack for seeing what might be interesting and important to others. With my latest endeavor, Total Digital Security, it's time to get out there and share information about what I think are some of the most important and broadly relevant topics of today and the next 10 years; online security, privacy and the hockey-stick performance curve that technology is now ramping upon, and it's influence on the lives of us all.

The purpose of the blog is to inform, educate and enlighten, primarily around technology and IT security and privacy. My audience is intended to be individuals and their application of technology toward their personal and family lives, their offices, and their lives as they operate in small groups. The content will be relevant to consumers of technology and their desire to leverage the awesome innovations of our time while maintaining a secure and private environment for themselves and those around them. We will review, critique, opine and share what we think is important, right now, as we conduct our lives as individuals and small groups with the shared understanding that technology provides a cornucopia of content and experiences and will leverage the performance and efficiency of our efforts as long as we retain control over security, privacy and our own identification.

This Tuesday's Wall Street Journal included a letter in it's op-ed section; "How the Government Spied on Me". It is a must-read for anyone that wants to understand the risk at hand in cyber-space today. This is a story that explains with real-life examples, of what can happen with just one simple breach of security and how it can domino-effect toward a complete disruption in one's life and cause life-long repercussions. The good news is that almost all of the risk that this person exposed herself to can be avoided, simply and economically. The readers of this blog will have heightened awareness, access to the best solutions, and with some effort, will mitigate almost entirely their risk and potential consequences inherent in the use of technology.

Here is the article but fair warning, it's a horror story;
WSJ - "How the Government Spied on Me"


Yes, a horror story, and so many think the solution has to look like this;

Well, that just isn't the case anymore. We know that technology gets better and cheaper, every year. And not by just a little, but a lot! It all stems from the actual physical nature of technology and is expressed best by Moore's Law; the doubling of chip performance with a halving of price, every 12-18 months. Wikipedia on Moore's Law  This is an unprecedented phenomenon and it will be increasingly difficult for us ol' biological humans to keep up. The chasm between the increasing rate of change in technology and our ability to take it all in, much less while it becomes a bigger and bigger piece of our lives, is going to make for some daunting challenges unless we are informed, educated and, frankly, led by a force that will run interference for us while we go about our real lives. Consider this blog and my work to be the interference you need to run on your behalf through the coming maze of innovation and risk, opportunity and potential consequences. We will be constantly vigilant, informed and proactive (perhaps even provocative). We will guide you toward sustaining the increasingly advantageous position of leveraging technology and future innovation. We will show you how to minimize the friction in implementing, operating, and maintaining your systems, all-the-while retaining exceptional security and privacy controls. 

My efforts will be coordinated between this blog (http://brad-tds.blogspot.com/),
my firm, The Total Digital Security Corporation, and it's website www.totaldigitalsecurity.com  The "real" website is in production but the "starter" site you see now is reasonably informative and is the launching pad for much more to come soon. I appreciate your reading and hope you will stay in touch. Remember, the time is now, and perhaps only now, as it is now longer "if" but is "when" you will become a victim of cyber-crime. Your technology is too important to give up and the risks to real to ignore so stay tuned, keep your switch "on" and subscribe to peace of mind with total digital security.

Brad