St. Louis Police Department Victim Of Spyware Attack

Accord­ing to the St. Louis Globe-Democrat, KMOX.com, and FOX2now.com the Saint Louis Police Dept. has been under attack. It’s a very attrac­tive head­line until you pick apart the articles.

24 peo­ple may have had their per­sonal infor­ma­tion com­pro­mised fol­low­ing the cyber attack of one com­puter in the St. Louis Met­ro­pol­i­tan Police Depart­ment, author­i­ties said.

This more than likely means that the infected com­puter con­tained the per­sonal infor­ma­tion of 24 peo­ple. This was prob­a­bly not a direct attack, or a real attempt to gather information.

More than likely a staffer opened an e-mail attach­ment and got infected. This hap­pens every­day to com­mon peo­ple, and it does not make headlines.

Attacks usu­ally occurs against web­sites and net­works. It is usu­ally an attempt to hijack a web­site or over­load servers and net­work equip­ment to the point that they become unre­spon­sive, or become a real pain to use.

The attack came through an e-mail in Feb­ru­ary. The department’s web­site was not attacked in any way, accord­ing to police spokes­woman Erica Van Ross.

If the virus/spyware was meant to scan wit­ness lists, crim­i­nal lists, etc. It would be care­less to send it through e-mail. Most mail servers (Exchange, Lotus, etc.) has server spe­cific virus scan­ners on the com­puter that scans incom­ing and out­go­ing mes­sages for viruses embed­ded in the attachments.

One thing 90% of virus scan­ners can do is detect threats in e-mails, so a smart hacker would not enter­tain send­ing viruses through e-mail, because the rate of detec­tion is extremely high.

Com­pa­nies that can­not afford to main­tain a mail ser­vice should use Google Apps for domains, because all of the mail secu­rity you will ever need is pro­vided by Google, and main­tained on their servers.

The names, addresses and social secu­rity num­bers of the 24 peo­ple may have been viewed. They have been iden­ti­fied and will be noti­fied so they can take steps to pre­vent iden­tity theft.

All 24 were involved in inci­dents in 2002, 2003 and 2005. Police say some of the cases may already be closed.

The key­words are “may have been used.” 9 times out of 10, a dumb spy­ware pro­gram rid­ing on the back of an e-mail as an attach­ment will not be spe­cific enough to scour and inter­pret the infor­ma­tion stored on that computer.

A party who was truly inter­ested in that infor­ma­tion would not use this inef­fi­cient method, and espe­cially not to tar­get one par­tic­u­lar computer.

The depart­ment will assist the vic­tims in credit pro­tec­tion ser­vices. The depart­ment is also re-evaluating its secu­rity system.

Pretty assur­ing from a depart­ment who doesn’t have an ade­quate fire­wall, and or mail secu­rity sys­tem setup.

I am sure re-evaluating means fir­ing some­body on staff, or search­ing for another com­pany to setup and man­age their secu­rity sys­tem, who will push for a com­plete over­haul of the net­work and server envi­ron­ment, which would lead to retrain­ing staff on updated equip­ment, new servers, expen­sive secu­rity con­tracts, etc.

This is highly likely if they plan to act on their state­ment. How­ever, with the City of St. Louis finances as low as they are, I would not be sur­prised if noth­ing was done at all.

Pro­tect Your­self from Spy­ware and Viruses

Don’t let this be you! Get a good fire­wall. If you are a busi­ness check into
Watch­Guard Fire­wall, or some of the Juniper or Cisco solu­tions. Res­i­den­tial DSL sub­scribers should upgrade to a 2Wire Gate­way solu­tion. Cable Inter­net sub­scribers should pur­chase or request an Ambit Router from their provider.

Get your­self some pro­tec­tion. Busi­nesses should con­sider out­sourc­ing mail, but if you insist, look into  AVG Email Server Edi­tion. Res­i­den­tial cus­tomers will be ade­quately cov­ered with AVG Inter­net Secu­rity.

As always, if you need help for your own com­puter reach me at LivePer­son, if would like to upgrade the secu­rity of you busi­ness or out­source your e-mail chat with me on oDesk.

On a Humor­ous Note

Break­ing News: Some Bullsh*t Hap­pen­ing Some­where
If you are offended by curs­ing, cussing, pro­fan­ity, what­ever, do not view! How­ever, you will be miss­ing a very funny clip, that kinda sum­ma­rizes this evenings local news cov­er­age of the St. Louis Police Cyber Attack.