Wire-Free, Mobile First And Data Rich? The Future Of Access Control Is Within Almost Anyone’s Reach

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The 2020s will be a wireless decade in access control, says Russell Wagstaff from ASSA ABLOY Opening Solutions EMEA. He examines the trends data, and looks beyond mobile keys to brand new security roles for the smartphone.

The benefits of wire-free electronic access control are well rehearsed. They are also more relevant than ever. A wireless solution gives facility managers deeper, more flexible control over who should have access, where and when, because installing, operating and integrating them is easier and less expensive than wiring more doors.

Battery powered locks

Many procurement teams are now aware of these cost advantages, but perhaps not their scale. Research for an ASSA ABLOY Opening Solutions (AAOS) benchmarking exercise found installation stage to be the largest contributor to cost reduction. Comparing a typical installation of battery-powered Aperio locks versus wired locks at the same scale, the research projected an 80% saving in installers’ labor costs for customers who go cable-free.

Battery powered locks all consume much less energy than traditional wired locks

Operating costs are also lower for wireless: Battery powered locks all consume much less energy than traditional wired locks, which normally work via magnets connected permanently to electricity. Wireless locks only ‘wake up’ when presented with a credential for which they must make an access decision. AAOS estimated a 70% saving in energy use over a comparable lock’s lifetime.

Find out more about wireless access control at ASSA ABLOY's upcoming June webinar

Deploying wireless locks

In short, every time a business chooses a wireless lock rather than a wired door, they benefit from both installation and operating cost savings. A recent report from IFSEC Global, AAOS and Omdia reveals the extent to which the advantages of wireless are cutting through.

Responses to a large survey of security professionals — end-users, installers, integrators and consultants serving large corporations and small- to medium-sized organizations in education, healthcare, industrial, commercial, infrastructure, retail, banking and other sectors — suggest almost four locations in ten (38%) have now deployed wireless locks as a part or the whole of their access solution. The corresponding data point from AAOS’s 2014 Report was 23%.

Electronic access control

Electronic access control is less dependent than ever on cabling

Without doubt, electronic access control is less dependent than ever on cabling: Even after a year when many investments have been deferred or curtailed, the data reveals fast-growing adoption of wireless locks, technologies and systems.

Is mobile access control — based on digital credentials or ‘virtual keys’ stored on a smartphone — an ideal security technology for this wire-free future? In fact, the same report finds mobile access is growing fast right now. Among those surveyed, 26% of end-users already offer mobile compatibility; 39% plan to roll out mobile access within two years. Before the mid-2020s, around two-thirds of access systems will employ the smartphone in some way.

Among those polled for the new Wireless Access Control Report, almost half (47%) agreed that ‘Mobile was more flexible than physical credentials

The smartphone is also convenient for gathering system insights

Driving rapid adoption

What is driving such rapid adoption? The convenience benefits for everyday users are obvious — witness the mobile boom in banking and payments, travel or event ticketing, transport, food delivery and countless more areas of modern life. Access control is a natural fit. If you have your phone, you are already carrying your keys: What could be easier?

IBM forecasts that 1.87 billion people globally will be mobile workers by 2022

Less often discussed are the ways mobile management makes life easier for facility and security managers, too. Among those polled for the new Wireless Access Control Report, almost half (47%) agreed that ‘Mobile was more flexible than physical credentials, and 36% believe that mobile credentials make it easier to upgrade employee access rights at any time.’ IBM forecasts that 1.87 billion people globally will be mobile workers by 2022. Workers in every impacted sector require solutions which can get the job done from anywhere: Access management via smartphone offers this.

Site management device

The smartphone is also convenient for gathering system insights. For example, one new reporting and analytics tool for CLIQ key-based access control systems uses an app to collect, visualise and evaluate access data. Security system data could contribute to business success. The app’s clear, visual layout helps managers to instantly spot relevant trends, anomalies or patterns. It’s simple to export, to share insights across the business.

Reinvented for learning — not just as a ‘key’ or site management device — the phone will help businesses make smarter, data-informed decisions. The smartphone will also play a major role in security — and everything else — for an exciting new generation of smart buildings. These buildings will derive their intelligence from interoperability. Over 90% of the report’s survey respondents highlighted the importance of integration across building functions including access control, CCTV, alarm and visitor management systems.

Genuinely seamless integration

They offer greater peace of mind than proprietary solutions which ‘lock you in’ for the long term

Yet in practise, stumbling blocks remain on the road to deeper, genuinely seamless integration. More than a quarter of those polled felt held back by a lack of solutions developed to open standards. ‘Open standards are key for the momentum behind the shift towards system integration,’ notes the Report.

As well as being more flexible, open solutions are better futureproofed. Shared standards ensure investments can be made today with confidence that hardware and firmware may be built on seamlessly in the future. They offer greater peace of mind than proprietary solutions which ‘lock you in’ for the long term.

Open solutions and mobile management are critical to achieving the goals which end-users in every vertical are chasing: scalability, flexibility, sustainability, cost-efficiency and convenience.

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Russell Wagstaff Product Manager - Shared Technologies, ASSA ABLOY

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Strengthening The Physical And Cyber Barriers Around Critical Infrastructure

It has long been recognized that no one is safe from cyber-attacks, but some sectors face a much higher level of threat than others. Critical infrastructure sectors such as utilities, energy and industrial manufacturing are some of those that face an intense level of interest from cyber criminals and nation-state groups across the globe. The impacts of a successful attack can have detrimental consequences, for both the cyber and physical side of the business, in terms of business disruption, economic dips and other real-life consequences. Compromise of ICS and SCADA systems One of the greatest risks to these critical infrastructure sectors is the compromise of ICS and SCADA systems inside operational technology environments (OT environments). Attackers can move laterally from IT networks to OT environments, with the potential to cause even greater damage or disruption. But even those attackers, who solely focus on compromising IT environments, are still able to trigger major disruption, by disabling day-to-day processes that are involved in the production and roll-out of solutions and services. Rise in cyber-attacks on utility and energy sector Recent events have shown that attacks on the utility and energy sector are ramping up Recent events have shown that attacks on the utility and energy sector are ramping up. The attack on the US Colonial Pipeline, for example, was one of the most high-profile breaches in the industry’s history, particularly when considering the secondary, physical consequences. The decision to shut down the Colonial Pipeline, while considered necessary, triggered a wave of disruption, leading to gasoline shortages and inflated costs. This is just one example of the serious effects that a successful cyber breach can have on an organization. Ransomware-based attacks Often financially motivated, one of the most common methods that cyber criminals increasingly opt for is ransomware-based attacks, as they are an effective way of blackmailing organizations into handing over valuable credentials or completing financial transactions. Once armed with the company credentials, threat actors can then post a sale of access to compromised networks on underground criminal forums. Armed with stolen credentials and therefore, access to the network, adversaries can then move laterally across the IT systems in OT environments. The ability to travel laterally is a sign of poor network segmentation on the business side between IT and OT networks. Malicious links in phishing emails If files are encrypted by criminals within both environments, businesses are faced with double the amount of disruption. This can lead to companies having to shut down operations, even if just as a precaution, just like in the case of the Colonial Pipeline. Malicious links included in phishing emails are another simple and highly effective method used by criminals to compromise company networks. While there are many security solutions that defend against common phishing attempts, criminal activity is becoming far more advanced, to the point where they are able to bypass standard security systems and gain access to the most sensitive of files. Why critical infrastructure is targeted Common forms of attack involve theft of personally identifiable information (PII) of customers and employees Businesses within the utilities and energy sectors often hold data deemed highly valuable by threat actors, including both basic criminal gangs and advanced nation-state operatives. Common forms of attack involve theft of personally identifiable information (PII) of customers and employees, either for further exploitation or to sell on the dark web. However, motivations can develop far beyond the usual common criminal. Nation-states have also taken great interest in these industries to steal competitive intelligence, in order to gain market advantages over foreign competitors. States including Russia, Iran and China, have all been suspected of targeting competitor countries in the critical infrastructure markets. Cyber threats posed by nation-states Aside from gaining a competitive edge, nations have also been known to engage in these cyber battles as forms of retaliation for previous attacks, or to get one-over on rivals. For example, it’s been recognized that motivations behind Iranian actions on the energy sector are due to the value of oil and gas in being central to the Iranian economy, and international efforts against their nuclear program. Other Iranian actors have focused their efforts on water infrastructures and attempted to compromise chlorine levels in Israeli water supplies back in 2020. The chlorine levels would have been reset to toxic levels, which could have had devastating physical consequences. On the other hand, motivations in China have revolved around competitive intelligence and intellectual property for cyber espionage. The data is subsequently used to advance economic growth in different industries. Physical and digital disruptions Due to the nature of these industries, in addition to companies facing business disruption and loss of customer trust, consequences could span beyond the digital side of the business. As outlined above, these attacks on utilities and other industrial organizations can result in physical damage, as well as digital disruption. Unlike other markets, utilities are directly involved in people’s lives, and any attack on a company will impact individuals through a domino effect. The incident with an Iranian actor attempting to sabotage chlorine levels in an Israeli water supply is a prime example of this. While the attack was against the water provider itself, the consequences could have been harmful to the wider population, who rely on the water supply. Again, the Colonial Pipeline attack had consequences that expanded beyond the targeted company. Inflated prices and fuel shortages impacted all customers at the end of the supply chain. Attacks on any critical infrastructure could cause both short and long-term physical impacts, including blackouts, disrupted energy supply, and even physical harm to individuals. Need for a multi-layered defense solution The best way to deal with these forms of cyber-attacks is to bring everything right back to basics The best way to deal with these forms of cyber-attacks is to bring everything right back to basics. In most cases, criminals carry out their attacks by first gaining access to IT networks through the usual means of phishing emails and malicious links. Organizations should, therefore, ensure they have a multi-layered defense solution implemented, including advanced email security. There are a number of features that these solutions should deploy, including spam filters to prevent malicious emails from actually making it to the inbox. Sandbox analysis is also critical for scrutinizing email attachments, especially for external senders and emails containing suspicious file formats. These solutions should feature rules that block the execution of macros in Microsoft Office attachments to emails from senders outside the organization. Enhancing cyber security with encryption and authentication Additional features to help prevent lateral movement through the network are also worth considering. Demilitarized zones (DMZs) are also often used to divide IT and OT networks, as part of segmentation efforts and have proven to be highly effective. Further solutions such as encryption and authentication requirements will help restrict adversaries’ access to different areas of the network, should they be successful in breaching the defense line. Everyone should be involved in maintaining an organization’s line of defense. Education and training are vital, as employers can arm workers with the tools to spot and remove malicious emails, should any make it through the line of defense. Educating employees on enterprise security Human workers are often considered the weak point in a company’s cyber security, often due to lack of understanding of the risks. Keeping employees informed and educated will prove beneficial to the security of an organization in the long run.

What You Need To Know About Open Source Intelligence (OSINT) For Emergency Preparedness?

Have you ever stopped to consider the volume of new data created daily on social media? It’s staggering. Take Twitter, for instance. Approximately 500 million tweets are published every day, adding up to more than 200 billion posts per year. On Facebook, users upload an additional 350 million photos per day, and on YouTube, nearly 720,000 hours of new video content is added every 24 hours. While this overwhelming volume of information may be of no concern to your average social media user posting updates to keep up with family and friends, it’s of particular interest to corporate security and safety professionals who are increasingly using it to monitor current events and detect potential risks around their people and locations—all in real-time. Meet the fast-paced and oft-confusing world of open-source intelligence (OSINT). What is Open Source Intelligence (OSINT)? The U.S. Department of State defines OSINT as, “intelligence that is produced from publicly available information and is collected, exploited, and disseminated promptly to an appropriate audience to address a specific intelligence requirement.” The concept of monitoring and leveraging publicly available information sources for intelligence purposes dates back to the 1930s. The British Broadcast Corporation (BBC) was approached by the British government and asked to develop a new service that would capture and analyze print journalism from around the world. Monitoring and identifying potential threats Originally named the “Digest of Foreign Broadcast, the service (later renamed BBC Monitoring which still exists today) captured and analyzed nearly 1.25 million broadcast words every day to help British intelligence officials keep tabs on conversations taking place abroad and what foreign governments were saying to their constituents. OSINT encompasses any publicly accessible information that can be used to monitor and identify potential threats Today, OSINT broadly encompasses any publicly accessible information that can be used to monitor and identify potential threats and/or relevant events with the potential to impact safety or business operations. The potential of OSINT data is extraordinary. Not only can it enable security and safety teams to quickly identify pertinent information that may pose a material risk to their business or people, but it can also be captured by anyone with the right set of tools and training. OSINT for cybersecurity and physical threat detection Whether it be a significant weather event, supply chain disruptions, or a world health crisis few saw coming, the threats facing organizations continue to increase in size and scale. Luckily, OSINT has been able to accelerate how organizations detect, validate, and respond to these threats, and it has proved invaluable in reducing risk and informing decision-making – especially during emergencies. OSINT is typically shared in real-time, so once a situation is reported, security teams can then work on verifying critical details such as the location or time an incident occurred or provide the most up-to-date information about rapidly developing events on the ground. They can then continue to monitor online chatter about the crisis, increasing their situational awareness and speeding up their incident response times. OSINT applications OSINT can help detect when sensitive company information may have been accessed by hackers Severe weather offers a good example of OSINT in action. Say an organization is located in the Great Plains. They could use OSINT from sources like the National Weather Service or National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) to initiate emergency communications to employees about tornado warnings, high winds, or other dangerous conditions as they are reported. Another common use case for OSINT involves data breaches and cyber-attacks. OSINT can help detect when sensitive company information may have been accessed by hackers by monitoring dark web messaging boards and forums. In 2019, T-Cellphone suffered a data breach that affected more than a million customers, but it was able to quickly alert affected users after finding their personal data online. OSINT is a well-established field with countless applications. Unfortunately, in an ever-changing digital world, it’s not always enough to help organizations weather a crisis. Why OSINT alone isn’t enough? One of the core challenges with leveraging OSINT data, especially social media intelligence (SOCMINT), is that much of it is unstructured and spread across many disparate sources, making it difficult to sort through, manage, and organize. Consider the social media statistics above. Assuming a business wanted to monitor all conversations on Twitter to ensure all relevant information was captured, it would need to both capture and analyze 500 million individual posts every day. Assuming a trained analyst spent just three seconds analyzing each post, that would amount to 1.5 billion seconds of labor—equivalent to 416,666 hours—just to keep pace. While technology and filters can greatly reduce the burden and help organizations narrow the scope of their analysis, it’s easy to see how quickly human capital constraints can limit the utility of OSINT data—even for the largest companies. 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Adding to the complexity, collecting OSINT data isn’t easy. OSINT data collection includes both passive and active techniques, each requiring a different level of effort and skill. Passive vs Active OSINT Passive OSINT is typically anonymous and meant to avoid drawing attention to the person requesting the information. Scrolling user posts on public social media profiles is a good example of passive OSINT. Active OSINT refers to information proactively sought out, but it often requires a more purposeful effort to retrieve it. That may mean specific login details are needed to access a website where information is stored. Lastly, unverified OSINT data can’t always be trusted. Analysts often encounter false positives or fake reports, which not only take time to confirm accuracy, but if they act on misinformation, the result could be damage to their organization’s reputation or worse. 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In a world with a never-ending stream of information available, learning how to parse and interpret it becomes all the more important. OSINT is a necessary piece to any organization’s threat intelligence and monitoring system, but it can’t be the only solution. Paired with external threat intelligence tools, OSINT can help reduce risk and keep employees safe during emergencies and critical events.

Baltimore Is The Latest U.S. City To Target Facial Recognition Technology

The city of Baltimore has banned the use of facial recognition systems by residents, businesses and the city government (except for police). The criminalization in a major U.S. city of an important emerging technology in the physical security industry is an extreme example of the continuing backlash against facial recognition throughout the United States. Facial recognition technology ban Several localities – from Portland, Oregon, to San Francisco, from Oakland, California, to Boston – have moved to limit use of the technology, and privacy groups have even proposed a national moratorium on use of facial recognition. The physical security industry, led by the Security Industry Association (SIA), vigorously opposed the ban in Baltimore, urging a measured approach and ‘more rational policymaking’ that preserve the technology’s value while managing any privacy or other concerns. Physical security industry opposes ban In such cases, it is local businesses and residents who stand to lose the most" “Unfortunately, an outright ban on facial recognition continues a distressing pattern in which the clear value of this technology is ignored,” said SIA’s Chief Executive Officer (CEO) Don Erickson, adding “In such cases, it is local businesses and residents who stand to lose the most.” At the national level, a letter to US President Biden from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce Coalition asserts the need for a national dialog over the appropriate use of facial recognition technology and expresses concern about ‘a blanket moratorium on federal government use and procurement of the technology’. (The coalition includes Security Industry Association (SIA) and other industry groups.) The negativity comes at a peak moment for facial recognition and other biometric technologies, which saw an increase of interest for a variety of public and business applications, during the COVID-19 pandemic’s prioritization to improve public health hygiene and to promote ‘contactless’ technologies. Prohibition on banks, retailers and online sellers The ordinance in Baltimore prohibits banks from using facial recognition to enhance consumer security in financial transactions. It prevents retailers from accelerating checkout lines with contactless payment and prohibits remote online identity document verification, which is needed by online sellers or gig economy workers, according to the Security Industry Association (SIA). At a human level, SIA points out that the prohibition of facial recognition undermines the use of customized accessibility tools for disabled persons, including those suffering with blindness, memory loss or prosopagnosia (face blindness). Ban out of line with current state of facial recognition Addressing the Baltimore prohibition, the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation reacted to the measure as ‘shockingly out of line with the current state of facial recognition technology and its growing adoption in many sectors of the economy’. Before Baltimore’s decision to target facial recognition, Portland, Oregon, had perhaps the strictest ban, prohibiting city government agencies and private businesses from using the technology on the city’s grounds. San Francisco was the first U.S. city to ban the technology, with Boston, Oakland; Cambridge, Massachusetts; and Berkeley, California, among others, following suit. Police and federal units can use biometrics Unlike other bans, the Baltimore moratorium does not apply to police uses Unlike other bans, the Baltimore moratorium does not apply to police uses, but targets private uses of the technology. It also includes a one-year ‘sunset’ clause that requires city council approval for an extension. The measure carves out an exemption for use of biometrics in access control systems. However, violations of the measure are punishable by 12 months in jail. The law also establishes a task force to evaluate the cost and effectiveness of surveillance tools. Transparency in public sector use of facial recognition Currently, the state of Maryland controls the Baltimore Police Department, so the city council does not have authority to ban police use of facial recognition, which has been a human rights concern driving the bans in other jurisdictions. A measure to return local control of police to the city could pass before the year lapses. SIA advocates transparency in public-sector applications of facial recognition in identity verification, security and law enforcement investigative applications. SIA’s CEO, Don Erickson stated, “As public sector uses are more likely to be part of processes with consequential outcomes, it is especially important for transparency and sound policies to accompany government applications.”