The IT Security category contains posts that discuss security aspects of corporate and personal information systems. Also included are personal and corporate security policy issues, as well as operations security. Examples for topics that fall into this category are: malware detection, network firewalls and attacks prevention, deployment of encryption technologies, protection of privacy in deployed systems, etc.
I have just enjoyed reading “Evaluating Commercial Counter-Forensic Tools” by Matthew Geiger from Carnegie Mellon University. The paper presents failures in commercially-available applications that offer covering the user’s tracks. These applications perform removal of (presumably) all footprints left by browsing and file management activities, and so forth. To make a long story short: seven out of seven such applications failed, to this or that level, in fulfilling their claims.
It’s hard not to appreciate the long way we did in studying anonymity and pseudonymity. We know a lot and can do a lot. Each time I read on a zero-knowledge scheme or on another untraceable digital cash I am amazed by the amount of knowledge that the security community has gained and by its arsenal of mechanisms that can buy us any sort of anonymity or pseudonymity we want to deploy. But do we? In spite of our having the ability to establish anonymous surfing, have untraceable digital cash tokens, and carry out anonymous payments, we don’t really use these abilities, at large.
If you are not in the security business you are not even likely to be aware of these technical abilities.
About one week ago, a serious commercial espionage system was discovered in Israel. For years, several large-scale companies in Israel enjoyed inside information about their competitors using private investigators who were using a Trojan horse application that was planted on victims’ workstations. More details can be found in this Globes article.
Obviously, the topic made it to the national news primarily because it involved high-profile companies in Israel, companies that “everybody knows", and because it led to the arrest of several top executives. It’s the first time such a large scale espionage act is discovered in Israel, and this is new, but the rest is not.
Check out this news item:
Latest Mydoom shows hackers using search engines for attacks
It’s about Internet based worms making use of search engines to spread out. In the examples presented the worms search Google, Lycos, etc., for e-mail addresses and for vulnerable machines to hop to using specially-crafted search strings.
I was not aware of this trend of worms before so I agree it’s new. Yet, I don’t agree with any fear associated with this new brand of worms. These worms are somewhat novel in their approach. Yet, I think this approach is better for us (the good guys) rather than worse.
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