Linux Privacy - Page 39 - Results from #760

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The Newbie's Guide to Detecting the NSA

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It's not surprising that an expert hired by EFF should produce an analysis that supports the group's case against AT&T. But last week's public court filing of a redacted statement by J. Scott Marcus is still worth reading for the obvious expertise of its author, and the cunning insights he draws from the AT&T spy documents. An internet pioneer and former FCC advisor who held a Top Secret security clearance, Marcus applies a Sherlock Holmes level of reasoning to his dissection of the evidence in the case: 120-pages of AT&T manuals that EFF filed under seal, and whistleblower Mark Klein's observations inside the company's San Francisco switching center.

LinuxSecurity.com Team
Jun 29, 2006

Anti Spamming Techniques

In this article will we first look at some of the existing methods to identify an email as a spam? We look at the pros and cons of the existing methods and what are the current challenges in this domain. This article also needs a special mention to Paul Graham, for his wok in this field and putting up perhaps the most comprehensive tutorials in this domain on his homepage. I am sure that each one of us has faced this problem of spamming. Every morning when I open my inbox I spend most of the time either deleting the junk emails or reporting them as spam.

LinuxSecurity.com Team
Jun 28, 2006

E-mail Insecurity in a Litigious Society

I don't need to tell you that e-mail has changed the way the world communicates. I get more e-mails by far than I do letters delivered the old-fashioned way. That said, there's one aspect of e-mail that many of us overlook at our peril, and that's the information we put in our messages.

LinuxSecurity.com Team
Jun 27, 2006

Cyber-criminals Use P2P Tools for Identity Theft, Security Analyst Warns

Cyber-criminals are multiplying quickly and becoming more sophisticated in the ways in which they take advantage of unwitting Internet individual users and companies, a nationally recognized cyber-security specialist told an SD Forum seminar audience June 22. And peer-to-peer networks such as Limewire, Kazaa, Grokster and others aren't helping to quell the increase in crimes committed via the Internet, he said. "It used to be only burglaries from people's homes and businesses," said Howard Schmidt, a former cyber-security adviser to the Bush administration, former chief information security officer at Microsoft and eBay, and now a principal in R&H Security Consulting in Issaquah, Wash.

LinuxSecurity.com Team
Jun 26, 2006

Phone Phishing Attack Hits US

Criminals have launched a blended attack which attempts to lure users to a malicious Web site via text message. IT managers have been warned to alert their staff to the attack, which uses social engineering techniques to try to trick users to the phishing site, according to security vendor Websense. Users are sent an SMS text message to their mobile phone, thanking them for subscribing to a fictitious dating service. The message states that they will be automatically charged a subscription fee of $2.00 per day, which will be added to their phone bill, until their subscription is cancelled at the online site.

LinuxSecurity.com Team
Jun 26, 2006

As threats to privacy grow, many fight back

Brian Nguyen has a GPS tracker on his cell phone in case he needs help, but he always turns it off. "If I want the government to know where I am, I'll let them know," he says.

LinuxSecurity.com Team
Jun 23, 2006

EFF and Government Face Off Over 'State Secrets' in San Francisco Courtroom

On Friday, June 23, at 9:30 a.m., a federal judge in San Francisco will hear oral arguments on the U.S. government's motion to dismiss the Electronic Frontier Foundation's (EFF's) class-action lawsuit against AT&T. EFF's suit accuses the telecom giant of collaborating with the National Security Agency (NSA) in illegal spying on millions of ordinary Americans. The government contends that even if the NSA program is illegal, the lawsuit should not go forward because it might expose state secrets.

LinuxSecurity.com Team
Jun 23, 2006

Skype To Address Identification Concerns

Skype plans to address the concerns of some IT managers by improving its identity authentication process. Part of Skype's "wish list" for further expansion into the business market is to enhance username authentication for business customers, the voice over Internet Protocol company said Wednesday. "There's a lot of leverage space in the identity segment," Kurt Sauer, chief security officer for Skype, told ZDNet UK.

LinuxSecurity.com Team
Jun 22, 2006

AT&T rewrites rules: Your data isn't yours

AT&T has issued an updated privacy policy that takes effect Friday. The changes are significant because they appear to give the telecom giant more latitude when it comes to sharing customers' personal data with government officials.

LinuxSecurity.com Team
Jun 21, 2006

How to Build a Low-Cost, Extended-Range RFID Skimmer

Radio-Frequency Identifier (RFID) technology, using the ISO-14443 standard, is becoming increasingly popular, with applications like credit-cards, national-ID cards, E-passports, and physical access control. The security of such applications is clearly critical. A key feature of RFID-based systems is their very short range: Typical systems are designed to operate at a range of 5-10cm. Despite this very short nominal range, Kfir and Wool predicted that a rogue device can communicate with an ISO-14443 RFID tag from a distance of 40-50cm, based on modeling and simulations. Moreover, they claimed that such a device can be made portable, with low power requirements, and can be built very cheaply. Such a device can be used as a stand-alone RFID skimmer, to surreptitiously read the contents of simple RFID tags. The same device can be as the ``leech'' part of a relay-attack system, by which an attacker can make purchases using a victim's RFID-enhanced credit card--despite any cryptographic protocols that may be used.

LinuxSecurity.com Team
Jun 21, 2006

U.S. Police Using Data Brokers

Police and government officals in the U.S. have been bypassing the need for subpoenas and warrants by gathering personal information made available through private data brokers. The data brokers, which advertise heavily on the Internet, have at times admitted to using deception and illegal practices themselves, according to a new report by the Associated Press. Law enforcement agencies including the FBI, the Department of Homeland Security, the U.S. Justice Department, the U.S. Marshal's Service, and local police in various states have been using data brokers to obtain detailed personal phone records, credit histories, and other information on their suspects. The records are often obtained much faster and more easily than using the standard subpoena and warrant process - often taking hours rather than days or weeks. While the data brokers normally charge customers for the information, it is believe that law enforcement agencies are rarely charged for this service.

LinuxSecurity.com Team
Jun 20, 2006

More of your information than you think might be online

If you are worried about a thief stealing your identity, it's not your wallet that needs guarding - it's your state and local governments. That's the alarm Betty "BJ" Ostergren, the self-proclaimed Virginia Watchdog, has been sounding for the past four years from her rural Virginia home.

LinuxSecurity.com Team
Jun 14, 2006

Reading Email Headers

This document is intended to provide a comprehensive introduction to the behavior of email headers. It is primarily intended to help victims of unsolicited email ("email spam") attempting to determine the real source of the (generally forged) email that plagues them; it should also help in attempts to understand any other forged email. It may also be beneficial to readers interested in a general-purpose introduction to mail transfer on the Internet. Although the document intentionally avoids "how-to-forge" discussions, some of the information contained in it might be turned to that purpose by a sufficiently determined mind. The author explicitly does not endorse malicious or deceptive falsification of email, of course, and any use for such purposes of the information contained in this document is contrary to its purpose.

LinuxSecurity.com Team
Jun 14, 2006

How to eliminate spam

Industry analysts estimate that spam currently accounts for close to 80 percent of email messages sent and causes close to £5 billion in economic losses annually. The problem with spam is very similar to that of pollution: spammers profit from their activity at the expense of the rest of the population, just like polluters of the environment profit while annoying or endangering others.

LinuxSecurity.com Team
Jun 13, 2006

Destroying the drives

Can you imagine getting your identity stolen because of information left behind on a hard drive? It doesn't take that much to completely wipe a hard drive. There are several Linux Live CDs that have the tools to perform a military-grade wipe of your hard drive. They overwrite the whole thing in random 1's and 0's enough times that it would require an electron microscope to recover any of the data.

LinuxSecurity.com Team
Jun 12, 2006

When data walks

The recent theft of data on 26.5 million veterans sends agencies a chilling message: Lock down your own data security and privacy policies immediately or you might wind up with confidential data walking out your own door. The Veterans Affairs Department probably is not the only agency whose security and privacy policies have gaping holes, government and industry experts agree.

LinuxSecurity.com Team
Jun 07, 2006

Personal Displays Keep Data Private

The dueling needs for privacy and data sharing played out here at the annual SID (Society of Information Display) International Symposium. Vendors showed new technologies that can keep neighbors on a flight from getting a glimpse of the corporate secrets on a laptop screen and new ways to share video on an iPod or handheld.

LinuxSecurity.com Team
Jun 07, 2006

Browsers, Phishing, and User Interface Design

Occasionally a criminal is so, well, clever that you have to admire him even as you wish that he spends the rest of his life in jail. Take Arnold Rothstein, for instance. One of the kingpins of organized crime in New York City during Prohibition and before, the "Great Brain," as he was termed, was more than likely behind the infamous Black Sox scandal, in which the 1919 World Series was fixed in favor of the Cincinnati Reds. He is also widely credited with inventing the floating crap game immortalized in Guys and Dolls. Like some character out of a Damon Runyon story, Rothstein's "office" was outside of Lindy's Restaurant, at Broadway and 49th Street, and he associated with gangsters whose names still trip off the tongue three-quarters of a century later: Meyer Lansky, Legs Diamond, Lucky Luciano, Dutch Schultz. When it comes to colorful, clever criminals, Rothstein is at the top of the heap. And then, on the other end of the scale, today we have the phishers. Scumbags of the Web, phishers vomit out emails to as many millions of people as they can possibly reach, hoping that a tiny few will respond to their fraudulent request to update their account information at PayPal, eBay, or CitiBank (or just about any other bank you can imagine). This is an enormous problem, and it's not getting any better. I recently read a fascinating study that shows just why that's the case.

LinuxSecurity.com Team
Jun 06, 2006

The growing challenge of identity management

Identity management is a security issue which is becoming increasingly challenging as the perimeter of the network crumbles. This is well illustrated by the DTI Information Security Breaches Survey of 2006, which shows that one in five larger businesses had a security breach associated with weaknesses in their identity management, with the number of incidents being less for smaller companies.

LinuxSecurity.com Team
Jun 02, 2006

Stolen YMCA Computer Contains Members' Personal Information

The Y-M-C-A of Greater Providence is reporting that one of its two missing laptop computers contains members information. The non-profit organization that provides a range of educational, social and recreational services says it discovered last week that the computers were missing.

LinuxSecurity.com Team
Jun 02, 2006

Linux Privacy - Page 39

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