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When Blacklisting Goes Bad

Monday, March 6th, 2006

UPDATE: This has been fixed Earlier today I ran across a post at Brian Krepp's security blog at the Washington Post about an add-on called "SiteAdvisor" which claims to provide helpful feedback when browsing as to whether a specific site is secure or not, whether it carries spyware, etc. First, I tried ...

Tracking security advisories for specific products via RSS

Thursday, March 2nd, 2006

A recent problem that I have been having is the need to constantly monitor security advisories for the software I use on this site, my personal computers and the servers at work. So far I have been doing that by reading CERT's twice-a-month Security Bulletins and SANS's twice-a-week RISK newsletters. ...

How (Not) to Run Background Checks

Wednesday, May 4th, 2005

USA Today is running a story about new guidelines on background checks from the Transportation Security Administration: The federal government plans to begin collecting the full names and birth dates of air travelers this summer in its latest effort to screen passengers for possible links to terrorism. In a few weeks, ...

New Focus for Blog Spam: Spreading Spyware

Tuesday, March 15th, 2005

Historically, blog spam has been used to raise search engine rankings. However, with the recent introduction of the "nofollow" directive this avenue of profit has been essentially killed off. So now comment spammers are moving over to a new area of profit: spyware (phishing and other similar stuff will probably ...

Genealogy as a Security Risk

Saturday, March 5th, 2005

One would think that putting up genealogy information would be a good thing. However, while working on it I came across a rather interesting security risk - most genealogy programs will hide details for living individuals but will still keep their names open. This MAY be a security problem since ...

Private Data in Public Webspace

Saturday, March 5th, 2005

I have been recently playing around with some geneology utilities for my website and came across an interesting problem. One of these programs, PHP GedView, requires a directory with full write access in order to work. Their documentation recommends that "for optimal security, you should move the "index" directory to ...

Port Blocking: A Slippery Slope?

Thursday, March 3rd, 2005

The CEO of Vonage has been arguing that port blocking of SIP traffic is censorship: Port blocking of VoIP traffic, he opined, is a step down a slippery slope that could lead to network owners blocking content or Web sites they disagreed with. Mr. Citron fails to notice that at least ...

The Value of Commercial Database in Fighting Terrorism

Tuesday, March 1st, 2005

There has been quite some talk on the 'Net and in the media about whether giving permission to the government for the use of commercial database services will help with fighting terrorism. I recently ordered a report from one of these companies, Axciom and frankly the results that I got ...

When Spyware (authors) Strike Back

Wednesday, February 23rd, 2005

Slashdot is running an interesting story about a piece of spyware called "iSearch" which blocks all attempts to uninstall it, and even its own uninstall program still leaves it installed. Now it seems that the company behind this obnoxious piece of spyware called "iDownload" is sending cease and desist letter ...

A Google Honeypot?

Monday, February 14th, 2005

Someone send me an email about a new project called the "Google Hack HoneyPot". Its a set of PHP scripts that essentially constitute a honeypot for hackers trying to find private information via Google. It would be interesting to see how it will develop.