Linux Privacy - Page 36 - Results from #700

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Phishing gang arrested in eastern Europe and USA

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More than 20 FBI offices are said to have been involved in the investigation into the global identity theft ring, which is claimed to have carried out a phishing attack against a major financial institution between August and October 2004.

LinuxSecurity.com Team
Nov 06, 2006

'Extreme Big Brother fears to become a reality'

UK citizens will be tracked by RFID tags embedded in their clothes and have their movements monitored by unmanned "flying eyes in the sky" using facial recognition systems within 10 years, the nation's data protection watchdog has claimed. In a new report entitled A Surveillance Society, information commissioner Richard Thomas predicts a world in 2016 where technology is extensively and routinely used to track and record people's activities and movements.

LinuxSecurity.com Team
Nov 02, 2006

On The Privacy Risks of Publishing Anonymized IP Network Traces

Networking researchers and engineers rely on network packet traces for understanding network behavior, developing models, and evaluating network performance. Although the bulk of published packet traces implement a form of address anonymization to hide sensitive in-formation, it has been unclear if such anonymization techniques are sufﬁcient to address the privacy concerns of users and organizations. In this paper we attempt to quantify the risks of publishing anonymized packet traces. In particular, we examine whether statistical identiﬁcation techniques can be used to uncover the identities of users and their surﬁng activities from anonymized packet traces. Our results show that such techniques can be used by any Web server that is itself present in the packet trace and has suﬃcient resources to map out and keep track of the content of popular Web sites to obtain information on the network-wide browsing behavior of its clients. Furthermore, we discuss how scan sequences identiﬁed in the trace can easily reveal the mapping from anonymized to real IP addresses.

LinuxSecurity.com Team
Nov 01, 2006

Anti-Spam Protection in the Network Perimeter

The word spam comes from a gag in a comedy series in which all the dishes in a restaurant include a brand of canned luncheon meat called spam as the main ingredient. By way of comparison, this term started being used to describe the huge number of unwanted messages received by any email account. Although it is not usual, spam may contain viruses or other malicious codes, or email addresses which lead to web pages equipped to download programs in an unauthorized manner. This was presumably the method used by the famous worm Sobig.F which was granted the title

LinuxSecurity.com Team
Oct 25, 2006

Anti-Malware Perimeter Protection

Latest data indicates that one in every 204 e-mail messages contains a virus, and that 99 percent of viruses enter companies via SMTP mail or HTTP web-browsing. And its not just viruses that cause problems. For example, the SQL Slammer worm hit thousands of servers around the world, exploiting buffer overflow vulnerability and causing denial of services in SQL servers which resulted in losses estimated, according to Computer Economics, at 705 million euros. Due to the increasing sophistication of Internet-borne threats, Panda Software proposes a layered protection strategy in which the Internet gateway plays a vital role, as is the strategic network point used to send and receive e-mails, all type of content... and 99 percent of viruses.

LinuxSecurity.com Team
Oct 25, 2006

Researchers warn over RFID credit cards

Contactless credit cards, which allow data to be read without swiping through a reader, pose a serious privacy and security risk because some information is not stored encrypted, according to a paper written by five university and industry researchers. The researchers claim that nearly 20 million radio-frequency identification (RFID) credit cards in circulation today could be vulnerable to skimming attacks, which could harvest names and credit-card details from the cards of passers-by. A skimming attack uses a normal reader, or one that has been enhanced to read cards from a greater distance, to grab unencrypted data from the card.

LinuxSecurity.com Team
Oct 25, 2006

Google: Security Mishaps and User Trust

Google is pushing full steam ahead with their office strategy, and their hope is to convince a lot of individuals and businesses to trust Google enough to store their documents on Google's servers instead of their own computers, or servers under their control. The fact that unauthorized document access is a simple password guess or government "request" away already works against them. But the steady stream of minor security incidents we've seen (many very recently) can also hurt Google in the long run. Running applications for businesses is serious stuff, and Google needs to be diligent about security.

LinuxSecurity.com Team
Oct 19, 2006

The Ultimate Guide to Identity Theft Prevention

In the last year alone, nearly 10 million Americans became victims of identity theft, a crime that cost them approximately $5 billion total. It is the fastest growing crime in the United States, and if you're not careful, it could happen to you, or perhaps it already has. On average, it takes identity theft victims 12 months [PDF] to realize that they have been victimized. So what are the best ways to prevent identity theft? Firstly, you must understand what personal information of yours should be kept private. While some personal information is inevitably going to be made public, there are some items with high sensitivity that should never be made public.

LinuxSecurity.com Team
Oct 17, 2006

Privacy Under Attack, But Does Anybody Care?

Someday a stranger will read your e-mail, rummage through your instant messages without your permission or scan the Web sites you

LinuxSecurity.com Team
Oct 17, 2006

Spam Campaign Attempts To Phish MySpace Music Fans

There is an aggressively distributed spam campaign that uses the MySpace name in an attempt to phish information from music lovers. The emails have been spammed out to hundreds of thousands of computer users around the globe in the last week, luring them into clicking on links to a website posing as an online music store.

LinuxSecurity.com Team
Oct 16, 2006

Sending secret messages over public Internet Lines Can Take Place With New Technique

At this week's annual meeting of the Optical Society of America in Rochester, N.Y., Bernard Wu and Evgenii Narimanov of Princeton University will present a method for transmitting secret messages over existing public fiber-optic networks, such as those operated by Internet service providers. This technique could immediately allow inexpensive, widespread, and secure transmission of confidential and sensitive data by governments and businesses. Wu and Narimanov's technique is not the usual form of encryption, in which computer software scrambles a message. Instead, it's a more hardware-oriented form of encryption--it uses the real-world properties of an optical-fiber network to cloak a message.

LinuxSecurity.com Team
Oct 13, 2006

Group Warns Of More Junk E-mail

The anti-spam group Spamhaus Project warned more junk e-mail could be on the way as it prepares to lose its domain name thanks to a company it has accused of sending spam. Executives at the U.K.-based Spamhaus Project said Monday they expect a federal judge in Chicago will soon sign an order that would suspend the domain spamhaus.org because the group has refused to recognize the U.S. court and comply with a $11.7 million judgment. Spamhaus warned the order could unleash up to 50 billion junk e-mails a day on computer users worldwide, though legal and technology experts were skeptical the effect would lead to millions of clogged inboxes.

LinuxSecurity.com Team
Oct 11, 2006

Marketers Miss the Mark on Privacy Crisis Containment

Despite all of the press and political rhetoric regarding security concerns, only 29 percent of marketers say that their firm has a crisis containment plan in case of a security breach, according to the findings of a CMO Council report, "Secure the Trust of Your Brand: How Security and IT Integrity Influence Corporate Brands." Without such a plan and other security strategies in place, companies are at risk of losing hundreds of millions of dollars in market value and through loss of reputation and brand trust, according to Scott Van Camp, CMO council editorial director and author of the study.

LinuxSecurity.com Team
Oct 08, 2006

Learn Information Gathering By Example

Information Gathering is usually the first done when Penetration testing. It is indeed a very important part in Penetration testing, and no Penetration tester or Internet security enthusiast can be left with out the knowledge of not knowing how to successfully gather information on a target. This white paper goes through the steps and tools you can use in order to successfully gather information on a target web server.

LinuxSecurity.com Team
Oct 06, 2006

Interesting Anti-Phishing Projects

Seven anti-phishing projects, I especially find the browser recon and countermeasures one as a trendy concept, as phishers are already taking advantage of vulnerabilities allowing them to figure out a browser's history, thus establish a more reputable communication with the victim -- adaptive phishing.

LinuxSecurity.com Team
Oct 06, 2006

Moore's Law Is The Enemy Of Privacy

No stranger to controversy, security expert Bruce Schneier was happy to take a swipe at Moore's Law in front of an audience at the University of Southern California on Tuesday. Schneier, founder and chief technology offier of Counterpane Internet Security, argued that the biggest threat to privacy was the sheer ease with which information can be gathered to such an extent that data was now "a pollutant". This availability was down to a number of factors, he said. "To look at it, Moore's law is actually a friend of intrusive tools," Schneier argued.

LinuxSecurity.com Team
Oct 04, 2006

Stealing Search Engine Queries with JavaScript

SPI Labs has discovered a practical method of using JavaScript to detect the search queries a user has entered into arbitrary search engines. All the code needed to steal a user's search queries is written in JavaScript and uses Cascading Style Sheets (CSS). This code could be embedded into any website either by the website owner or by a malicious third party through a Cross-site Scripting (XSS) attack. There it would harvest information about every visitor to that site.

LinuxSecurity.com Team
Oct 03, 2006

Does Your Web Browsing Create a Unique 'Clickprint'?

Time Warner's America Online revealed that it had severed ties with its chief technology officer after the online service released three months of search queries from 658,000 subscribers which, although "anonymized" by removing user account details, still contained enough data to possibly identify some of the users. The privacy breach underscored the perils of supposedly "anonymous" Internet profiling and raised the hackles of privacy advocates such as the Electronic Frontier Foundation. The EFF, a week earlier, had urged the Federal Trade Commission to investigate AOL and force the company to change its privacy practices.

LinuxSecurity.com Team
Sep 27, 2006

Pod Slurping

Our dependency on technology has never ceased to grow. Increased portability, ease of use, stylish looks and a good dose of marketing hype are the perfect cocktail to entice the population at large! Suppliers of consumer electronics are registering an ever increasing demand for portable consumer electronics. Apple's iPod launch in 2001, Apple have sold almost 60 million units (CNNMoney.com, 2006). iPod has become a universally appealing source of audio entertainment - the eponym for MP3 players. Projections show that the demand for iPods and other MP3 flash-memory music players continue on a positive trend and will surge to nearly 124 million units in 2009 (Kevorkian, 2005).

LinuxSecurity.com Team
Sep 22, 2006

Mistakes in identity

No system works perfectly all the time, but for something as fundamental as being able to prove who you are and get access to what you

LinuxSecurity.com Team
Sep 15, 2006

Linux Privacy - Page 36

Navigating the Tails 6.8 Update: What It Means for Security-Minded Users

Google Chooses Passkeys Over Passwords: Examining the Security Benefits for Linux Users

Tails 6.6 Released: Unpacking Key Features & Updates