Monthly Archives: October 2012

3 Lessons from the MSD kiosk breach

If you live in NZ, or follow the IT Security press, you are probably aware of a security flaw recently discovered on public kiosks at the MSD (Ministry for Social Development). The story has really gained traction, spreading quickly across Twitter and the International press.

In short, it was possible to open sensitive files across the organisation using the Open File dialog in an application, on public kiosks, in Work and Income NZ offices. This sort of problem is as old as network file shares, and trivial to do. For more information I highly recommend reading the original Blog post and the follow-up posts by Keith Ng.

Not all of the facts are available, but it seems there are three good lessons we can all take away from this breach:

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