October 28, 2006

The quest for the Holy Grail

Ross Anderson posted a comment regarding an idea that the British banking system is studying as a solution to eliminate phishing attacks. Anderson's comments are greatly precise but I got myself thinking:

Is the search for an ideal strong authentication a quest for a new holy grail?

posted by Andre Fucs @ 00:54 0 comments links to this post

October 27, 2006

It’s a wild world

Recently Pedro Dória, a journalist friend of mine posted some interesting results about this new toy, Google Trends. I was doing some tests when I got surprised by one of the query results.

Bellow we can se the results for volume of search of three different queries: exploit, windows exploit and linux exploit.


exploit



linux exploit



windows exploit


Although I tend to agree that Google is not the best reference for exploit distribution, this drop of queries is at least an interesting phenomenon. Any guess? Would this an evidence of the change of the electronic crime profile from the teenager non motivated cracker to the electronic criminal groups?

posted by Andre Fucs @ 15:04 0 comments links to this post

October 25, 2006

Laptop seizure, a reality not so distant from you

Not a long time ago, Bruce Schneier posted on his blog a note regarding Laptop seizures by the Sudanese government and mentioned rumors about this practice in Israel. After few days he edited the post observing that currently this is a legal practice within USA borders. Let's say it was a quite funny repercussion.

Now, circa one month after the International Herald Tribune published an article about this issue. The article mentions that "an informal survey by the Association [of Corporate Travel Executives], which has about 2,500 members worldwide, indicated that almost 90 percent of its members were not aware that customs officials have the authority to scrutinize the contents of travelers' laptops and even confiscate laptops for a period of time, without giving a reason".

Still, according to the article, "the law is clear. They don't need probable cause to perform these searches under the current law. They can do it without suspicion or without really revealing their motivations."

Sounds like a great reason to use and encrypted flash disk to carry private or sensitive information!

posted by Andre Fucs @ 12:52 0 comments links to this post