Recently, at a local coffee house meeting with one of my clients, I quickly realized I was under attack. As we were going through a power point presentation, all of a sudden my HP:NTA alerted me by a simple traffic light. First going to yellow, letting me know someone was probing my machine with a message to me…..make sure your firewall is running and that your anti-virus is up-to-date. Then seconds later turning to red, letting me know that I needed to unplug immediately and to notify my security team. The alerting system gave me real time alerting capability to let me know someone was doing something they shouldn’t be.

A few things that I think are important to point out.

1. If I didn’t have NTA on my lap top I would have never known someone had launched a web browser attack on my computer.

2. More important they could have taken control of my computer without having any knowledge of the occurrence.

3. Neither my firewall nor antivirus caught the probe/attack

4. Forensics – I took the incident back to my security team and they were able to see what type of attack occurred, where did the attack originate, and etc.

5. Continues to show the importance of how layering security is vital to protecting our assets. Layering is crucial in safe computing both personally and professionally.

6. How easy NTA is to comprehend and understand what my next immediate steps needed to be.

With all that being said an incident where someone could have easily hacked into my computer was stopped by installing NTA. At $10 per license doesn’t it makes sense that everyone should have this installed on their computer?

In the last year and a half we have all been affected or know someone who has been affected by leaked information.  We have begun to hear this message over and over….…Information stolen, Personal Information Compromised, Social Security Numbers Lost, etc.

We begin to ask ourselves, what can we do?  How do we protect ourselves in both our professional and personal lives and be more proactive? There are several things you can do to protect yourself and PGP/GnuPG (GPG) is one of them.

At MicroSolved, Inc. (MSI) our team uses a variety of tools and applications, PGP and GPG are just a few.  PGP/GPG are used to encrypt confidential data using public-key encryption. For example, you might use them to protect E-Mail and Data Files. They allow you to exchange files or messages with privacy, authentication and convenience.

So what is PGP?  “An abbreviation for Pretty Good Privacy; PGP is an electronic privacy program which helps you ensure privacy by letting you encrypt files and e-mail. The encryption technology employed by PGP is very strong. PGP was created by Phil Zimmermann, and depends on public key cryptography for its effectiveness. Public key cryptography is a procedure in which users exchange “keys” to send secure documents to each other. For more on PGP, go to http://www.pgp.com.”

Source:  www.redhat.com/docs/manuals/linux/RHL-7-Manual/getting-started-guide/ch-glossary.html

What is GnuPG?  “GPG is the GNU project’s complete and free implementation of the OpenPGP standard. GPG allows you to encrypt and sign your data and communication, features a versatile key management system as well as access modules for all kind of public key directories. GPG is a command line tool with features for easy integration with other applications. A wealth of front end applications and libraries are also available.”

Source: http://www.gnupg.org/

So you ask what does privacy, authentication and convenience mean?

v     Privacy means only those intended to receive a message can read it.

v     Authentication means that messages that appear to be from a particular person can only have originated from that person.

v     Convenience means that privacy and authentication are provided without the hassles of managing keys associated with conventional cryptographic software.

Whether we are protecting confidential data stored on our computers, communicating with clients or a remote office, these tools can help.

Where should you use PGP/GPG?

v     Email Security

v     File & Disk Security

v     Secure File Transfer

v     Secure Storage

v     Removable Media

v     Instant Messaging Security

Costs for the different modules and toolsets from the two products vary, but range from FREE to a few hundred dollars. They likely make for an excellent investment, either personally or for companies of any size.

Stay tuned for additional tools and ways to a more secure Internet experience.  Remember everyone has a responsibility to protect confidential data and be safe online!