Consumer Archives

Consumer

One Reason Security Is So Hard? Really Bad Reports.

March 29, 2013 Paul Roberts

Security is hard. Everyone knows that. The question is: why? After all, our understanding of cyber threats improves with each day. The tools we use to secure our systems have also improved over time – antivirus software, firewalls, application firewalls, intrusion detection, data leak prevention, and so on. And yet, when we look at the data, there’s not much evidence that better understanding and better tools are leading to better security. According to Jonathan Grier, an independent security consultant, the answer to the question ‘Why aren’t we getting better at stopping attacks and protecting data?’ is that we’re not doing a good job of learning from the data we have. In a conversation with The Security Ledger, Grier, the founder of Grier Forensics, said that, despite a wealth of security data, the security industry’s approach to analyzing it is immature. Grier likes working on the cutting edge of computer forensics and application security. […]

Mobile Phone Use Patterns: The New Fingerprint

March 26, 2013 Paul Roberts

Mobile phone use may be a more accurate identifier of individuals than even their own fingerprints, according to research published on the web site of the scientific journal Nature. Scientists at MIT and the Université catholique de Louvain in Belgium analyzed 15 months of mobility data for 1.5 million individuals who the same mobile carrier. Their analysis, “Unique in the Crowd: the privacy bounds of human mobility” showed that data from just four, randomly chosen “spatio-temporal points” (for example, mobile device pings to carrier antennas) was enough to uniquely identify 95% of the individuals, based on their pattern of movement. Even with just two randomly chosen points, the researchers say they could uniquely characterize around half of the 1.5 million mobile phone users. The research has profound implications for privacy, suggesting that the use of mobile devices makes it impossible to remain anonymous – even without the use of tracking […]

Welcoming A New Sponsor: The Trusted Computing Group!

March 19, 2013 Paul Roberts

The Security Ledger is a new, online publication that’s serious about reporting on security and “The Internet of Things.” While we’ve had tremendous success in our first six months of operation, any new endeavor involves some risk. That’s why I’m thrilled to have had the backing of some forward-looking sponsors: Qualys and Veracode. And today, I’m happy to add a new name to that list: The Trusted Computing Group (TCG). For those of you who aren’t familiar with TCG, its best known as the group behind the Trusted Platform Module (TPM) secure, cryptographic chip that ships with almost every modern desktop and notebook PC. The TPM assures a hardware-based root of trust on compliant system, allowing TPM-equipped systems to securely generate cryptographic keys that can authenticate each endpont for use in secure, online transactions and communications. But TCG actually does a lot more. As a security beat reporter, for example, I […]

Twenty ISPs Responsible For Half Of All Spam

March 17, 2013 Paul Roberts

One of the lessons we’ve learned in recent years is that online attacks can come from anywhere. Viruses and spyware were more common to pornography and pirate download web sites five years ago. Today, even the most reputable web sites might be the source of online mayhem. In fact, so-called “watering hole” attacks that exploit legitimate web sites and use them as honey pots to lure the intended victims are all the rage among sophisticated attackers. (For evidence of this, see our recent story on the compromise at the web site of The National Journal, a publication for Beltway policy wonks.) But the Internet still has its dark alleys and bad neighborhoods. And they’re still the source of a lot of malicious activity – especially in connection to run of the mill crimes like spam and phishing attacks. That’s the conclusion of research done by students at the University of Twente’s […]

The End Of Privacy: Facebook ‘Likes’ Reveal Sensitive Personal Data

March 12, 2013 Paul Roberts

We all know that, to online marketers, we’re just the sum of our Facebook Wall posts and “Likes” – the ubiquitous, virtual “thumbs up” that we attach to all manner of online ephemera. But all those ironic comments and votes of approval may be revealing a lot more about us than we’re willing to share, according to a new report from researchers at the University of Cambridge and Microsoft Research in the UK. In a paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science (PNAS), the researchers demonstrated that it is possible to use knowledge of an individual user’s “Likes” on Facebook to “automatically and accurately predict a range of highly sensitive personal attributes including: your age, and gender, you sexual orientation, ethnicity, religious and political views. The list of guessabl`e information goes on to include other less quantifiable characteristics like your personality traits, intelligence, happiness, your preference (or not) […]