“Three may keep a secret if two are dead.” — Ben Franklin
Month: February 2015
More insecurity
This time it’s Anthem.
The good news about Anthem’s loss of 80 million customer records is that no personal health information was stolen. Were I an Anthem customer, I’m quite sure I’d be thinking to myself, “All the thieves can do is steal my identity. Thank heavens they didn’t find out what I’m allergic to!”
Look forward to the usual rehashing of what Anthem should and shouldn’t have done. KJR won’t pile on, because there’s really no point.
Forget that. Of course KJR will pile on because really, how am I supposed to resist the temptation?
And so:
In Anthem’s official statement on the subject its CEO, Joseph Swedish, described what happened as a “… highly sophisticated external data attack.” Some aspects of the attack probably were highly sophisticated. But it also turns out the stolen “personally identifiable information” (PII), including customers’ social security numbers, was not encrypted in Anthem’s databases.
While I’ve never claimed to be an authority in information security, I know enough to give this advice: Don’t make it easy.
This is why you lock your car. It won’t stymie a professional car thief. It will, however, keep it out of the hands of amateur joy-riders while making stealing someone else’s car the easier choice for the professionals, and, by the way, satisfy your insurance company.
Anthem’s defenders point out that, like many other companies, it has to connect its customers’ data to data in external sources, and especially data in government databases. The social security number is the only choice for JOINing data about individuals when you don’t control the data design.
To encrypt it or not to encrypt it, that is the question.
No, I won’t go all Hamlet on you. Here there’s only one answer: Encrypt.
At this stage of the game, there really is no excuse for any company to use social security numbers as the primary identification key for customer and employee records. Assigning a sequential or randomly-generated identification number when first creating a customer master record is routine. It isn’t “best practice.” It’s the minimum standard of basic professionalism.
This way, JOINing records from internal databases doesn’t have to rely on social security numbers, so the inconvenience and difficulties associated with encrypting social security numbers, as pointed out in a Wall Street Journal story on the subject, doesn’t apply to processing that involves no external data.
But medical information doesn’t stay within any single corporation. For both treatment and payment purposes, medical records, including insurance information, has to be shared externally, and right now the social security number is, in the United States, the single universal identification key.
Whether used by an insurance company to add external information to its internal records for analytics purposes, or used by healthcare providers to link medical records from multiple sources so as to improve treatment, at some point in the proceedings, unencrypted social security numbers have to make an appearance.
Security professionals, along with those of us who like to pretend to more sophistication in the field than we actually have, differentiate data in motion from data at rest. Anthem encrypted its data in motion but not its data at rest, on the theory that hardening its perimeter constituted sufficient protection of its information assets.
This gets it exactly backward. For several years now it’s been understood by security professionals that just about every major trend affecting systems and information access, but in particular the rise of the cloud, more off-premises computing, and the increasing reliance of cyber-attackers on phishing attacks and Trojan horses, all result in a decrease in effectiveness of perimeter hardening and an increase in the importance of hardening assets.
When it comes to hardening information assets, encryption might not be the whole story but it certainly is the starting point. And JOINing two tables based on encrypted social security numbers isn’t all that hard. Properly authorized individuals can be given access to the decryption function, through which they can create temporary tables that have unencrypted social security numbers. They can use these tables for whatever analysis they like, destroying them as soon as they’re finished with them.
But hard, I’ll bet, isn’t the issue. Here’s what is: Converting decades of accumulated reports, queries and other computing flotsam and jetsam, combined with organizational habits built up over the same span of decades, that all rely on having access to unencrypted PII.
Tracking them all down and replacing them with more-secure alternatives would cost a lot of time and money, with an unmeasurable payoff. It’s a risk management issue mentioned in this space from time to time: Successful prevention is indistinguishable from absence of risk.
Sadly for the Anthems of the world, failed prevention is not.