Tuesday, February 17, 2009
Inspired in part by concerns raised by the Conficker worm the New York Times posed a question in Sunday’s Week in Review: Do We Need a New Internet? The issues are not new to anyone who has read Larry Lessig’s Code (either the original or Code 2.0) or Jonathan Zittrain’s The Future of the Internet–And [...]
I read a few reports today about the Conficker (or Downadup) worm that in recent weeks has infected as many as nine million PCs around the world. Particularly disturbing is that his worm “seems to be the first step of a multistep attack,” waiting quietly in infected host computers for instructions to combine into a [...]
Thursday, January 15, 2009
Bruce Schneier wrote a terrific piece about impersonation and identity authentication at http://www.schneier.com/crypto-gram-0901.html#1. He uses the various “physical tokens” we carry in our wallets to argue that “[d]ecentralized authentication systems work better than centralized ones:” loss or compromise of your credit or health club membership card does not compromise your driver’s license or library card. [...]
Saturday, December 6, 2008
An article from Friday’s NY Times underscores concerns about the increasing virulence of Internet malware. “Thieves Winning Online War, Maybe on Your PC” opens with this sentence: “Internet security is broken, and nobody seems to know quite how to fix it.” It follows with sobering data: Data theft, credit card fraud, and Internet scams are [...]
Saturday, December 6, 2008
Another report about employers, employees, and network usage, of 200 corporate IT folks in the U.S. and Canada. The good news: Employees under 30 “tend to be computer savvy and are brimming with new ideas.” The bad news: 50% of those surveyed said that Gen Y employees were either “a major security concern” or “somewhat [...]
Today’s flurry of posts is the product of two weeks of focus elsewhere: grading hundreds of papers, cooking for Thanksgiving, spending time with friends and family. Now it is back to clearing out the inbox. . . Internet Attacks Are Growing More Potent and Complex presages the type of cyber 9/11 that Jonathan Zittrain has [...]
Sunday, November 16, 2008
Bruce Schneier wrote recently about airport security after a screener seized a 6-oz jar of past sauce from his luggage: “the official confiscated it, because allowing it on the airplane with me would have been too dangerous. And to demonstrate how dangerous he really thought that jar was, he blithely tossed it in a nearby [...]