An e-mail from the Gawker CTO (Tom Plunkett) has been posted online and it outlines the security improvements that Gawker are planning to implement after the recent massive breach of user passwords from their database.<\/p>\n
As we mentioned recently, the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation is looking into the Gawker breach<\/a>, which just goes to show how serious this case is.<\/p>\n The improvements are pretty standard security practice, but it just shows in these days of rapid development and the focus being on features rather than security – bad things can happen.<\/p>\n Gawker Media’s CTO has outlined a series of security changes designed to shore up the company’s IT operations following an attack last week that compromised up to 1.4 million accounts.<\/p>\n The company was unprepared to respond to an attack in which user data and passwords were posted to peer-to-peer file-sharing networks, wrote Tom Plunkett in an e-mail memo to Gawker staff on Friday. The e-mail was reposted on Jim Romenesko’s blog on the Poynter journalism site. A group called Gnosis claimed responsibility for the hack, which exploited a flaw in the source code of Gawker’s Web servers.<\/p>\n “Our development efforts have been focused on new product while committing relatively little time to reviewing past work,” Plunkett wrote. “This is often a fatal mistake in software development and was central to this vulnerability.”<\/p>\n As a result, Gawker has done a security audit of the sites affected, which include Lifehacker, Gizmodo, Gawker, Jezebel, io9, Jalopnik, Kotaku, Deadspin and Fleshbot.<\/p>\n Gawker is now mandating the use of SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) encryption for employees with company accounts using Google Apps. Also, if those employees have access to sensitive legal, financial or account data, two-factor authentication must be used, Plunkett wrote. <\/p><\/blockquote>\n Most of the things would have been picked up if they had ever done any kind of internal ISMS audit (based perhaps on something like ISO27001<\/a>) – which bans all chat applications except for Skype as that encrypts the chats.<\/p>\n Using things like SSL<\/a> are pretty obvious and should be forced on all login pages on all web applications – with FireSheep<\/a> bring that issues to the forefront recently.<\/p>\n I’d say the most sensible move would be considering moving away from the local database model and using something like OAuth – that would make sense.<\/p>\n