Essays Tagged "Guardian"
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The Meaning of Trust
Security technologist and author Bruce Schneier looks at the age-old problem of insider threat
Rajendrasinh Makwana was a UNIX contractor for Fannie Mae. On October 24, he was fired. Before he left, he slipped a logic bomb into the organisation’s network. The bomb would have “detonated” on January 31. It was programmed to disable access to the server on which it was running, block any network monitoring software, systematically and irretrievably erase everything, and then replicate itself on all 4,000 Fannie Mae servers. Court papers claim the damage would have been in the millions of dollars.
Luckily, another programmer discovered the script a week later, and disabled it…
Virus and Protocol Scares Happen Every Day—But Don't Let Them Worry You
An SSL security flaw got bloggers hot and bothered, but it's the vendors who need to take action
Last month, researchers found a security flaw in the SSL protocol, which is used to protect sensitive web data. The protocol is used for online commerce, webmail, and social networking sites. Basically, hackers could hijack an SSL session and execute commands without the knowledge of either the client or the server. The list of affected products is enormous.
If this sounds serious to you, you’re right. It is serious. Given that, what should you do now? Should you not use SSL until it’s fixed, and only pay for internet purchases over the phone? Should you download some kind of protection? Should you take some other remedial action? What?…
Reputation is Everything in IT Security
In the past, our relationship with our computers was technical. We cared what CPU they had and what software they ran. We understood our networks and how they worked. We were experts, or we depended on someone else for expertise. And security was part of that expertise.
This is changing. We access our email via the web, from any computer or from our phones. We use Facebook, Google Docs, even our corporate networks, regardless of hardware or network. We, especially the younger of us, no longer care about the technical details. Computing is infrastructure; it’s a commodity. It’s less about products and more about services; we simply expect it to work, like telephone service or electricity or a transportation network…
Why Framing Your Enemies Is Now Virtually Child's Play
In the eternal arms race between bad guys and those who police them, automated systems can have perverse effects
A few years ago, a company began to sell a liquid with identification codes suspended in it. The idea was that you would paint it on your stuff as proof of ownership. I commented that I would paint it on someone else’s stuff, then call the police.
I was reminded of this recently when a group of Israeli scientists demonstrated that it’s possible to fabricate DNA evidence. So now, instead of leaving your own DNA at a crime scene, you can leave fabricated DNA. And it isn’t even necessary to fabricate. In Charlie Stross’s novel Halting State, the bad guys foul a crime scene by blowing around the contents of a vacuum cleaner bag, containing the DNA of dozens, if not hundreds, of people…
The Battle Is On Against Facebook and Co to Regain Control of Our Files
Our use of social networking, as well as iPhones and Kindles, relinquishes control of how we delete files -- we need that back
File deletion is all about control. This used to not be an issue. Your data was on your computer, and you decided when and how to delete a file. You could use the delete function if you didn’t care about whether the file could be recovered or not, and a file erase program—I use BCWipe for Windows—if you wanted to ensure no one could ever recover the file.
As we move more of our data onto cloud computing platforms such as Gmail and Facebook, and closed proprietary platforms such as the Kindle and the iPhone deleting data is much harder.
You have to trust that these companies will delete your data when you ask them to, but they’re …
People Understand Risks—But Do Security Staff Understand People?
Natural human risk intuition deserves respect -- even when it doesn't help the security team
This essay also appeared in The Sydney Morning Herald, and The Age.
People have a natural intuition about risk, and in many ways it’s very good. It fails at times due to a variety of cognitive biases, but for normal risks that people regularly encounter, it works surprisingly well: often better than we give it credit for.
This struck me as I listened to yet another conference presenter complaining about security awareness training. He was talking about the difficulty of getting employees at his company to actually follow his security policies: encrypting data on memory sticks, not sharing passwords, not logging in from untrusted wireless networks. “We have to make people understand the risks,” he said…
Facebook Should Compete on Privacy, Not Hide It Away
Reassuring people about privacy makes them more, not less, concerned. It’s called “privacy salience”, and Leslie John, Alessandro Acquisti, and George Loewenstein—all at Carnegie Mellon University—demonstrated this in a series of clever experiments. In one, subjects completed an online survey consisting of a series of questions about their academic behaviour—”Have you ever cheated on an exam?” for example. Half of the subjects were first required to sign a consent warning—designed to make privacy concerns more salient—while the other half did not. Also, subjects were randomly assigned to receive either a privacy confidentiality assurance, or no such assurance. When the privacy concern was made salient (through the consent warning), people reacted negatively to the subsequent confidentiality assurance and were less likely to reveal personal information…
Raising the Cost of Paperwork Errors Will Improve Accuracy
It’s a sad, horrific story. Homeowner returns to find his house demolished. The demolition company was hired legitimately but there was a mistake and it demolished the wrong house. The demolition company relied on GPS co-ordinates, but requiring street addresses isn’t a solution. A typo in the address is just as likely, and it would have demolished the house just as quickly. The problem is less how the demolishers knew which house to knock down, and more how they confirmed that knowledge. They trusted the paperwork, and the paperwork was wrong. Informality works when everybody knows everybody else. When merchants and customers know each other, government officials and citizens know each other, and people know their neighbours, people know what’s going on. In that sort of milieu, if something goes wrong, people notice…
Be Careful When You Come to Put Your Trust in the Clouds
Cloud computing may represent the future of computing but users still need to be careful about who is looking after their data
This year’s overhyped IT concept is cloud computing. Also called software as a service (Saas), cloud computing is when you run software over the internet and access it via a browser. The salesforce.com customer management software is an example of this. So is Google Docs. If you believe the hype, cloud computing is the future.
But, hype aside, cloud computing is nothing new. It’s the modern version of the timesharing model from the 1960s, which was eventually killed by the rise of the personal computer. It’s what Hotmail and Gmail have been doing all these years, and it’s social networking sites, remote backup companies, and remote email filtering companies such as MessageLabs. Any IT outsourcing – network infrastructure, security monitoring, remote hosting – is a form of cloud computing…
We Shouldn't Poison Our Minds with Fear of Bioterrorism
Terrorists attacking our food supply is a nightmare scenario that has been given new life during the recent swine flu outbreak. Although it seems easy to do, understanding why it hasn’t happened is important. GR Dalziel, at the Nanyang Technological University in Singapore, has written a report chronicling every confirmed case of malicious food contamination in the world since 1950: 365 cases in all, plus 126 additional unconfirmed cases. What he found demonstrates the reality of terrorist food attacks.
It turns out 72% of the food poisonings occurred at the end of the food supply chain – at home – typically by a friend, relative, neighbour, or co-worker trying to kill or injure a specific person. A characteristic example is Heather Mook of York, who in 2007 tried to kill her husband by putting rat poison in his spaghetti…
Sidebar photo of Bruce Schneier by Joe MacInnis.