Network Lighthouse

A couple of days ago I got a comment on one of my posts that struck me as unusual, it was marked as spam (thanks to akismet), but didn’t read like your standard spam. Here’s the text:

Good points raised here, (well, what I could read of it). I am afflicted with color blindness (tritanopia to be exact). I use Chrome browser (unsure if that matters), and a lot of your site is a little difficult for me to read. I don’t wish to whinge, and I know it is my problem really, nonetheless it would be cool if you could bear in mind color blind visitors when carrying out the next site re-working.

After a first glance I almost approved it without further thought, however something struck me as odd.   The comment linked to p_l_a_y_n_i_c_e .c_o .u_k, which backs up the post, still not convinced I did some googling and found a number of blogs with almost identically worded comments.   There was some differences in the wording, the browser changes, I’ve seen Chrome, Konqurer and Safari and there are a couple of different introductions.

The only thing I am sure of now is that this isn’t a legitimate comment, but is meant to serve some other purpose.   It may be just for self promotion, grandfathering links for search eangines, or potentially preparation for a drive by download attack.  I’ll keep track of the page and report any changes.

-Daniel

It’s been a while since I’ve done any writing on InfoSec topics, but it’s my new years resolution to take it up again, so expect more articles on info sec stuff from now on.

DataBreaches.net have updated their list of the top 10 Data breaches of all time.   What I find most disturbing about the list, isn’t the volumes (although that’s still concerning), is that 4 of the top 10 were due to poor information management and/or lack of encryption.   The causes for the other breaches (such as insiders leaking information) are harder to solve, and as such a little more (not a lot though) understandable.

• National Archives (70 Million)
• Department of Veterans Affairs ( 26 Million)
• HMRC (25 Million)
• T-Mobile (17 Million)

With the exception of Veterans Affairs, all of these have occured in the last 2 years, when the use of disk/tape encryption technology came into the mainstream.  There really is no excuse for these type of breaches anymore, if companies made it standard practice to encrypt sensitive data where ever it lives, then that would mean that over the past 2 years there would have been 128 Million less records breached. That’s almost as many were revealed in the Heartland hack!

Of course the top 10 doesn’t include breaches that go unnoticed and unreported, and if you start thinking about that you start to wonder how bad the problem really is.

-Daniel

Online privacy and the implications of data aggregation is a bit of a passion of mine, that’s part of what inspired me to write the thunderbird plugin.

Here’s an interesting story about one journalists discovery of what he found out about himself.

What the Web knows about you.

People wonder why identity theft happens, so much of our personal data is available online these days that it’s possible to build a fairly complete profile of anyone you want.  Just one of the reasons everyone needs to be careful needs to be careful of what they post on social networking sites.

-Daniel

Here’s an interesting twist on an old scam.   In a town in the US someone has been issuing fake parking tickets.   The fake tickets instruct the victim to go to a website to pay their fine, the website in turn says that you have to download a ‘toolbar’ to see the details and pay their fine.

Needless to say the toolbar is really a trojan infested piece of malware, which will continue to spawn popups including the notorious Antivirus 2009.

Viruses: Hackers Using Fake Parking Tickets to Infect Computers.

Yet another example of how the bad guys are changing their tactics to stay ahead of the curve.

Data Loss Prevention is one of the hot topics in Information Security at the moment, largely brought about by the numerous accidental losses of sensitive information that have been in the press over the last few years.

Here is a decent article that covers what it is and how it works:

What You Really Need To Know About Data Loss Prevention – insider threats/Management – DarkReading.