Linux Privacy - Page 37 - Results from #720

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New Trick Adopted By Spammers To Harvest Email Addresses

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IT security firm Sophos has warned computer users to think before forwarding chain letters after discovering a new scam being used by spammers to collect email addresses. A spammed email campaign, seen by Sophos, poses as a research project into chain mail and joke messages that are frequently sent between email users around the world. Chain letters and jokes can easily be sent to a person's full contact list or an entire company department, resulting in all the valid email addresses of everyone who received the message being contained in the body of the message.

LinuxSecurity.com Team
Sep 14, 2006

Six Tips To Protect Online Search Privacy

The Electronic Frontier Foundations, an advocacy group for online privacy, has released six tips for consumers who would prefer to remain as anonymous as possible when using search engines.

LinuxSecurity.com Team
Sep 14, 2006

Surfing anonymously has its drawbacks

It makes some of us nervous that Google and other Web companies are building huge collections of data about our surfing habits. But doing something about it means dealing with a lot more inconvenience than most of us are willing to abide by. That is what I learned in my week of trying to be invisible, at least online.

LinuxSecurity.com Team
Sep 14, 2006

When Relationships End, So Does Security

When "Lucy" and "Ricky" exchanged wedding vows, they said nothing about email privacy. During their marriage, Lucy found it easy to guess Ricky's email password. After all, she was his wife and knew how his mind works. One day Lucy began to suspect that Ricky was being unfaithful to her, and reading his email confirmed her suspicion. She never told him that she was intercepting his email, and he never suspected that's how she discovered his infidelity. Even after their divorce, she still keeps tabs on him by reading his email: he still doesn't know.

LinuxSecurity.com Team
Sep 13, 2006

Beijing Big Brother gets bigger

Beijing today attempted to defend sweeping new powers which gag foreign media and bar citizens from subscribing to news from abroad. The laws were published Sunday and went into effect immediately. The government says its new rules are designed to "promote the dissemination of news and information in a sound and orderly manner".

LinuxSecurity.com Team
Sep 12, 2006

New Spam Technique Uses Subliminal Messages To Manipulate Users

PandaLabs has detected a spam message that uses subliminal advertising techniques. At first glance, it is an advertisement that gives the user the opportunity to buy certain stocks online. However, the user not only sees a static image, but also a sequence of images that are displayed extremely rapidly. To be more specific, there are four images, three of which show the word Buy in different positions. Subliminal advertising techniques have been used for a long time and are based on composing images that users perceive, even though they are not aware of it. In the case of this email message, the word Buy appears on screen for a maximum of 40 milliseconds, and in some cases, for only 10 milliseconds.

LinuxSecurity.com Team
Sep 12, 2006

Google Hacking for Cryptographic Secrets

Interesting perspective, for sure could prove handy on a nation-wide scale. The concept of googling for private keys has been around for quite a while, and here's an informative paper emphasising on how Google can Reveal Cryptographic Secrets taking the topic even further :

LinuxSecurity.com Team
Sep 11, 2006

Seek and Ye Shall Be Found

During a recent panel discussion, Jennifer Mardosz, Qwest's (Q) chief privacy officer and corporate counsel, told the audience she was skeptical of congressional mandates laying out requirements for data retention. She argued that there was no need for legislative interference because "companies were already doing the right thing." Google (GOOG) CEO Eric Schmidt also addressed the privacy issue at another conference this month, noting that he was more afraid of government (U.S. or other) trying to get access to Google's data than an accidental release of confidential customer information. When asked why Google doesn't purge their search information, Schmidt replied that they didn't need to because security protections would make it difficult, if not impossible, to steal customer data.

LinuxSecurity.com Team
Sep 07, 2006

Suit to Proceed Against Law Firm for Hacking Into Internet Archive

A Philadelphia-based patients' advocacy company agreed last week to settle its claim that a West Coast Web page archivist improperly secured copyrighted pages and thereby made them vulnerable to a third party's hacking.

LinuxSecurity.com Team
Sep 05, 2006

Fighting Spam

Have you ever had an e-mail account that hasn

LinuxSecurity.com Team
Sep 05, 2006

Using Statistics to Cause Spammers Pain

Ever since Paul Graham published "A Plan for Spam" in August 2002 (prerequisite reading for this article), a lot of people have spent a great deal of time applying statistical methods to automatically classify email messages as spam. Generally, spam identification is a hard problem to solve given that the definition of spam can differ from person to person. Messages erroneously classified as spam, known as "false positives," are pretty much intolerable, which further compounds the problem. Statisitical classifiers show great promise in this area as they are able to automatically adjust to handle personal definitions of spam. The odd false positive shows up from time to time, but these become few and far between as the local statistical model continues to improve.

LinuxSecurity.com Team
Sep 05, 2006

Steganography and Cyber Terrorism Communications

Following my previous post on Cyber Terrorism Communications and Propaganda, I'm continuing to summarize interesting findings on the topic. The use of encryption to ensure the confidentiality of a communication, be it criminals or terrorists taking advantage of the speed and cheap nature of Internet communications, is often taken as the de-facto type of communication. I feel that it's steganographic communication in all of its variety that's playing a crucial role in terrorist communications. It's never been about the lack of publicly or even commercially obtainable steganographic tools, but the ability to know where and what to look for. Here's a brief comment on a rather hard to intercept communication tool - SSSS - Shamir's Secret Sharing Scheme :

LinuxSecurity.com Team
Aug 31, 2006

Anonymous No More

In early August, officials at America Online released information about searches being conducted by AOL members and users of the AOL search tool. This historical data was released onto the Internet by several AOL officials, to demonstrate how useful such data could be for tracking patterns, uses and interest of AOL members. The data was anonymized, with members being assigned random ID numbers instead of userid

LinuxSecurity.com Team
Aug 30, 2006

Protect your web searches

AOL's recent "doh!" release of more than 500K user search records has prompted many people to examine their search methods. While no one approach is absolutely foolproof, using a combination of common sense searching strategies will make it harder for engines (or anyone else) to put together a detailed profile of you. Keep reading today's feature for a few ways to protect yourself from search engines.

LinuxSecurity.com Team
Aug 30, 2006

USBDumper Poses New Endpoint Security Threat

A new

LinuxSecurity.com Team
Aug 25, 2006

Microsoft: Unlock work internet or risk losing staff

Jobseekers will think twice about employers who lock down work internet access, a senior Microsoft executive said today. "These kids are saying: forget it! I don

LinuxSecurity.com Team
Aug 24, 2006

What Do They Know About You

America's top four Internet companies -- Google, Yahoo, AOL and Microsoft -- promise they will protect the personal information of people who use their online services to search, shop and socialize. But a close read of their privacy policies reveals as much exposure as protection. The massive amounts of data these companies collect -- which can include records of the searches you make, the health problems you research and the investments you monitor -- can be requested by government investigators and subpoenaed by your legal adversaries. But this same information is generally not available to you.

LinuxSecurity.com Team
Aug 23, 2006

Look At All Of These Passwords!

If you use any number of popular web forums or even some commercial services like classmates.com, amazon.com, netzero.com or your provider's webmail service, you may not be aware that you're sending your credentials over the internet in the clear.

LinuxSecurity.com Team
Aug 22, 2006

AOL Active Virus Shield Permits Adware

I was recently contacted by an America Online (AOL) vice president, Ted Hopper, about our BHO listing of "AOL Security Toolbar" which was described as having adware functionality. That phone call set into motion what ultimately is presented here.

LinuxSecurity.com Team
Aug 22, 2006

Smart card vendors talk privacy

A group of smart card and smart chip vendors are launching a campaign to talk up the security and privacy features of their products, even as researchers raise questions about their use in passports.

LinuxSecurity.com Team
Aug 16, 2006

Linux Privacy - Page 37

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