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Sat, Apr 4 2009 18:15

US Senate: security through (more) bureaucracy

When I first read the news on the Washington Post web site, I thought this is a 1 April joke: Senate Legislation Would Federalize Cybersecurity . The April Fool's day has come and gone but all the signs are to that this is for real: the press releases...
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Sun, Feb 15 2009 20:50

Compliance is not security

Tim Holman comments on the latest card processing system breach : Heartland Payment Systems (HPY) on Tuesday disclosed that intruders hacked into the computers it uses to process 100 million payment card transactions per month for 175,000 merchants: http...
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Mon, Jul 30 2007 3:54

Virtually hopeless

I don't know if that's CIOs, or the press, or both. Recently Byte & Switch, CMP Technology's zine on storage networking, published a chef d'oeuvre on troubles with virtualisation . Some amazing thoughts by the captains of the industry...
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Fri, May 4 2007 17:50

How to prevent 1% of cybercrime?

An interesting picture appears on the PBS Shop Web site: Because of what it says I felt an urge to click on it. The first attempt (a right-click) resulted in the following message box: I think the law that prohibits copying the picture doesn't exist...
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Mon, Apr 30 2007 20:38

News: Web is dangerous

VoIP is scary , if you rememeber. Now, there's something else that is scary: WWW, the World-Wide Web. And thanks to Tim O'Reilly and his invention of Web 2.0, it's scarier than ever. As in: there's much more to FUD about. Here's a...
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Thu, Apr 19 2007 4:31

False sense of security

Anyone noticing security seals on the Web sites? If not, here's how they look like: This is how they work: you click on the seal, and a pop-up window opens telling you that the bearer of this is indeed who they claim they are. Plus some marketing material...
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Mon, Mar 26 2007 4:13

VoIP threats are seriously overrated

For over a hundred years, the public switched telephone network (PSTN) has gained reputation of stable and secure service. Even though it's neither: it is indeed very hard to bring down a whole telco network, but local outages are not unseen; and wiretapping...
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Sun, Mar 18 2007 12:24

Forbes on public Wi-Fi: You Get What You Pay For

Forbes , a respectable business magazine, writes about wireless security in the issue of 26 March 2007: Computer security firm Authentium in Palm Beach Gardens, Fla. warns about an emerging Wi-Fi fraud aimed at air passengers. What road warriors sitting...
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Sun, Mar 11 2007 23:43

Mobile banking is a bad idea

New mobile banking products are rolled out every so often. The latest example is www.takeyourbankwithyou.co.nz . That's a Java applet that Kiwis are to download on their Java-compatible mobile phones (but not BlackBerry handhelds; and not Windows Mobile...
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Fri, Mar 9 2007 11:53

A new cult of personality

Inspired by Qantas inflight entertainment. Devil Wears Prada is about a despotic CEO who turns out to be kinda cool - after transforming somebody to someone else, more to her standards. The Queen is not about a CEO. Well, not only. It's about a chairwoman...
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Sun, Mar 4 2007 3:37

Analysing phishing white noise

Phishing is a big problem, and it grows in both volume and sophistication. Nothing new. The sky is falling. You've been warned. There's one thing that was bothering me for a while: why the absolute majority (at least four out of five) of the phish that...
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Sat, Feb 24 2007 3:57

Resist googlisation!

I don't use Google Search . That's because I see dangerous thing going on: googlisation of everything. Too often people say "just google for it" referring to the way to get facts, without realising that Web search is only going to return the most popular...
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Fri, Feb 23 2007 1:17

The most secure modern OS, Part I

It's in wide use, it's mature yet modern (a new version was released just recently), and it's the most secure consumer OS out there. It's a Microsoft product. The OS in question is Windows Mobile. Formerly known as Windows CE, it became nameless power...
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Wed, Feb 21 2007 21:19

Life without firewall and antivirus

I don't run firewall or antivirus software on my personal computer. And the operating system there isn't Mac OS. And I work logged on as the Administrator. The reason is simple. I want to know if the intruders out there will outsmart me - by coming up...
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Wed, Feb 21 2007 1:30

Kashrut, Sarbanes and Oxley

This is about interpretations, and how they transform law into something unrecognisable. The first example is karshrut, the orthodox jewish diet. Its origins can be traced mostly to the eleventh chapter of the third book of Bible (or Torah, if you like...
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