News in the Category "Text"
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Schneier Calls for Societal Pressure to Fight Cyber Crime
Security guru Bruce Schneier calls for societal pressure to convince would-be hackers that their actions are not in their own interests
Cyber crime will not be resolved with technology alone, security guru Bruce Schneier warned at the RSA conference in London today. Societal pressure is also need to discourage people from becoming cyber criminals, he argued.
Security experts will always be catching up with criminals when it comes to technological exploits, argued Schneier, who is BT’s chief security technology officer. “Attackers have a natural advantage because they can make use of innovations faster and have no procurement pressure or institutional inertia,” he said.
Society therefore has a role to play in discouraging individuals from becoming ‘defectors’, Schneier argued. There are four potenital mechanisms for this, he explained…
Liars & Outliers: A Book Review
Anthropology was one of my college majors. I preferred physical to cultural anthropology. The history of primates, as told by fragments of bones or teeth, was more interesting to me than was the glue that held societies together. I preferred learning about Zinjanthropus boisei to reading about the customs of the Yanamami people of the Amazon rainforest or the !Kung bushmen of the Kalahari Desert.
I was unenthusiastic about cultural anthropology until I read the monograph, Deciphering a Meal, by the anthropologist Mary Douglas. The article dissected meal rituals and their purposes. She looked at how being invited over for drinks meant something different than sharing leftovers at the kitchen table. There is a lengthy discussion about kosher rituals. The article had a profound effect on my thinking, particularly about human behavior…
Layers of Security
Bruce Schneier, the well-known American cryptographer and security specialist, gives an interview to Radio New Zealand’s Bryan Crump during his visit to the country, discussing real-world security issues and whether anti-terror measures done by the authorities worldwide are as effective as expected.
(Bryan Crump):—Bruce Schneier is a security specialist who seems to be trying to talk himself out of a job. His point is a lot of what we do to protect ourselves against terrorism is pointless. The best weapons against terror are, in his opinion, good intelligence and refusing to be terrorized. Bruce is based in the United States of America, was in New Zealand for a conference on identity and identity theft. Recently I spoke to him while he was here and began by asking what attracted him to this seemingly dry topic of airport X-rays baggage checks and the like…
Liars and Outliers: Enabling the Trust that Society Needs to Thrive
Some years ago, I participated in a meeting of academic members and associates of the then recently-founded Jill Dando Institute of Crime Science at University College London (UCL). The aim was to define what exactly was meant by ‘crime science’, a new term challenging conventional criminology. In attendance was one of the originators of the term and the Institute, Professor Ron Clarke of Rutgers.
The consensus definition quickly centered on an interest in the near or proximal causes of criminal events such as opportunities and provocations, rather than traditional concerns with criminality and even more remote societal causes; a readiness to draw on evidence, theory and scientific method; an interest in multidisciplinary applications of other sciences ranging from physics to microbiology; and a practical focus on reducing risks of crime. Then I posed a seemingly straightforward question: surely, to be fully scientific, we need a scientific definition of crime itself? Otherwise, at the heart of crime science is a mushy core of”we all know what crime means…don’t we?”…
You Can’t Trust Airport Security
But don't worry: It has always been easy to cheat, steal or kill, and few people do
Excerpt
When the plumber knocks at your door, why do you let him in? He’s probably bigger and stronger than you. And he has a wrench. He could easily kill you and steal your money and your stuff, which would certainly be a better deal for him than receiving a moderate payment and having to fix your toilet.
But you trust that he won’t; and trust, that mysterious and invaluable substance, is the subject of Bruce Schneier’s ambitious “Liars and Outliers: Enabling the Trust That Society Needs to Survive,” which starts with the homely parable of the plumber and builds into a treatise on every aspect of trust, from marital fidelity to transnational terrorism…
Trust: Ill-Advised in a Digital Age
Las Vegas
Bruce Schneier ordered a Coke, no ice, at the Rio casino on a Saturday afternoon. I ordered Diet Coke, also no ice, and handed the bartender an American Express card. He said he needed to see proof of identity. Credit cards are often stolen around here, and eight casino workers had recently been fired for not demanding ID, he quietly explained. The bartender wanted to keep his job.
Mr. Schneier, 49, is a student of interactions like this, offline and on. He is a cryptographer, blogger and iconoclast in the world of computer security, and his latest subject of inquiry is trust: how it is cultivated, destroyed and tweaked in the digital age…
Security Tips from Bruce Schneier
Bruce Schneier knows a thing or two about security. The author of multiple books on cryptography, Schneier is widely considered to be an expert on the subject of encryption as well as the broader topic of information security. So we jumped at the opportunity to sit down with him for an in-depth interview at the Black Hat 2012 conference in late July. Here are some of the highlights of what he had to say.
The State of Encryption: “Not that great, and getting worse”
Asked to share his view of the state of encryption in this new age of cloud computing, Schneier says: “It’s not that great, and it’s getting worse.”…
Can Morality Improve Security?
This year, more than $22 billion in enterprise security products and services is expected to be sold worldwide. But according to Bruce Schneier, well-known cryptology expert and security luminary, technology alone isn’t the answer to better security.
In an in-depth interview with eSecurity Planet at the Black Hat 2012 conference in Las Vegas last week, Schneier argued that looking at security solely from a technology perspective is to take a too narrow view of the problem.
“If you look at broader society, there is a lot of security that happens at a much more personal level,” Schneier said…
Bruce Schneier’s Book: The Internet Has Created ‘the Largest Trust Gap’ in History
'Liars and Outliers' takes swings at NSA, U.S. government, Facebook, Microsoft and others
Technology, often made possible through networks, grants new powers to communicate and learn, to travel, to make decisions of critical importance, to make things, provide services, sell them and buy them. In a modern society, it’s all done against a backdrop of trust not only that the technology is reliable and secure, but that the people involved in every process, whether we meet them face-to-face or not, are trustworthy. That trust is largely created by societal pressures—ranging from codes of moral behavior and laws, plus worries about reputation, for example…
Book Reviews: Liars and Outliers
I want to tell you that this book is amazing and I loved every moment of it. It’s smart, I agree with most of what he says, and I very much appreciate Bruce Schneier’s candidness when he’s making statements more on gut instinct and doesn’t yet have full scientific work to back it up, or the work he has isn’t actually very convincing. He could have written a compelling book without those admissions (and many authors of pop non-fiction do exactly that) but I found his insights much more interesting when he acknowledges where they’re more speculation than anything else. The anecdotes, stories and analogies are interesting and work with the ideas contained therein, and the applications to social structures and laws and whatnot were clear and convincing…
Sidebar photo of Bruce Schneier by Joe MacInnis.