Hackers aren’t smart — people are stupid

The cliche is that hackers are geniuses. That's not true, hackers are generally stupid.

The top three hacking problems for the last 10 years are "phishing", "password reuse", and "SQL injection". These problems are extremely simple, as measured by the fact that teenagers are able to exploit them. Yet they persist because, unless someone is interested in hacking, they are unable to learn them. They ignore important details. They fail at grasping the core concept.


Phishing

Phishing happens because the hacker forges email from someone you know and trust, such as your bank. It appears nearly indistinguishable from real email that your bank might send. To be fair, good phishing attacks can fool even the experts.

But when read advice from "experts", it's often phrased as "Don't open emails from people you don't know". No, no, no. The problem is that emails appear to come from people you do trust. This advice demonstrates a lack of understanding of the core concept.

What's going on here is human instinct. We naturally distrust strangers, and we teach our children to distrust strangers.Therefore, this advice is wired into our brains. Whatever advice we hear from experts, we are likely to translate it Continue reading

So, You Want To Be A Manager

And so it was as a young man that I aspired to be a manager. Management looked like control to me. After all, I thought that as I acquired technical expertise in operating systems, security, and networking, I should be the one holding the reins. That’s logical, perhaps. But it’s naive.

Nothing says “establishment” as Vox’s attack on Trump

I keep seeing this Ezra Klein Vox article attacking Donald Trump. It's wrong in every way something can be wrong. Trump is an easy target, but the Vox piece has almost no substance.

Yes, it's true that Trump proposes several unreasonable policies, such as banning Muslims from coming into this country. I'll be the first to chime in and call Trump a racist, Nazi bastard for these things.

But I'm not sure the other candidates are any better. Sure, they aren't Nazis, but their politics are just as full of hate and impracticality. For example, Hillary wants to force Silicon Valley into censoring content, brushing aside complaints from those people overly concerned with "freedom of speech". No candidate, not even Trump, is as radical as Bernie Sanders, who would dramatically reshape the economy. Trump hates Mexican works inside our country, Bernie hates Mexican workers in their own countries, championing punishing trade restrictions.

Most of substantive criticisms Vox gives Trump also applies to Bernie. For example, Vox says:
His view of the economy is entirely zero-sum — for Americans to win, others must lose. ... His message isn't so much that he'll help you as he'll hurt them... 
That's Bernie's Continue reading

Bill filed in Congress would ban encryption backdoors

Four Congressmen are proposing that states be forbidden to ask manufacturers to install encryption backdoors on their products outfitted with the technology. U.S. Rep. Ted Lieu The four filed a short bill this week that would deny states or parts of states from seeking alterations to products for the purpose of enabling surveillance of the user. It would also block them from seeking the ability to decrypt information that is otherwise unintelligible. The representatives filing the bill are Rep. Ted Lieu (D-Calif.), Rep. Blake Farenthold (R-Texas), Suzan DelBene (D-Wash.) and Mike Bishop (R-Mich.).To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

U.S. intelligence chief touts IoT as a spying opportunity

In a brief aside during a Senate testimony on overall national security this week, U.S. director of national intelligence James Clapper justified the privacy and security advocates who have warned of the implications of the Internet of Things (IoT) since before it was a buzzword."In the future, intelligence services might use the [Internet of Things] for identification, surveillance, monitoring, location tracking, and targeting for recruitment, or to gain access to networks or user credentials," Clapper said, according to The Guardian.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Don’t touch the malware at this museum

Malware moments you wish to forgetImage by Jelene Morris (modified)Jason Scott, archivist and software curator for the Internet Archive, and Mikko Hypponen, chief research officer of F-Secure, have brought together this group of malware to mark some of the early viruses. Here are only a few, with another batch to be displayed soon.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Underhanded C contest winner’s code fools nuke inspectors into destroying fake nukes

What if Alice and Bob represented countries that agreed to a nuclear disarmament treaty, but neither trusted the other enough to scan a warhead and observe the test results because the scans revealed sensitive information about their nuclear program? In the end, the countries agree to build a fissile material detector that would output only a “yes” or “no” as to if each country dismantled real warheads and not fakes.In essence, that was the scenario for the annual Underhanded C Contest which tasked programmers with solving “a simple data processing problem by writing innocent-looking C code, while covertly implementing a malicious function. This type of malicious program, in the real world, could let states take credit for disarmament without actually disarming.”To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Healthcare CIO: Legal issues are most difficult cloud migration challenge

Boston healthcare organization CIO and longtime technology standards leader John Halamka has been quite open over the years about his organization's technology efforts and challenges. Back in 2002 he shared his hospital's 3-day struggle with network slowdowns. Last Year,  the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center CIO sounded the alarm that an FDA warning about a compromised medical device wouldn't be the last.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

CSO Online’s 2016 data breach blotter

Another day, another data breachImage by ThinkstockThere were 736 million records exposed in 2015 due to a record setting 3,930 data breaches. 2016 has only just started, and as the blotter shows, there are a number of incidents being reported in the public, proving that data protection is still one of the hardest tasks to master in InfoSec.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

How to build your Property Management System integration using Microservices

This is a guest post by Rafael Neves, Head of Enterprise Architecture at ALICE, a NY-based hospitality technology startup. While the domain is Property Management, it's also a good microservices intro.

In a fragmented world of hospitality systems, integration is a necessity. Your system will need to interact with different systems from different providers, each providing its own Application Program Interface (API). Not only that, but as you integrate with more hotel customers, the more instances you will need to connect and manage this connection. A Property Management System (PMS) is the core system of any hotel and integration is paramount as the industry moves to become more connected.

 

To provide software solutions in the hospitality industry, you will certainly need to establish a 2-way integration with the PMS providers. The challenge is building and managing these connections at scale, with multiple PMS instances across multiple hotels. There are several approaches you can leverage to implement these integrations. Here, I present one simple architectural design to building an integration foundation that will increase ROI as you grow. This approach is the use of microservices.

What are microservices? 

IDG Contributor Network: Drugs, guns, and hitmen more common on dark web than religious extremism

What many of us likely suspected, but possibly hadn't gone to the trouble—or had the inclination—of finding out for ourselves is that the dark web is full of illegal and dubious stuff, researchers have found. The researchers, who have been studying and writing about encryption policy, sniffed around with a Tor browser and found 1,547 out of 5,205 total websites live on the dark web engaging in illegal activity. Those illicit destinations, uncovered in early 2015, covered subjects relating to illegal drugs, money laundering, and "illegitimate" pornography, the Kings College London scientists write in their Cryptopolitik and the Darknet paper abstracted in Survival: Global Policy and Strategy, a journal.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

SAP slaps patch on leaky factory software

SAP's February round of critical software updates includes one for SAP Manufacturing Integration and Intelligence (xMII) that may be of interest to hackers and spies. The software is widely used in manufacturing industry, where it connects factory-floor systems to business applications for performance monitoring -- but a flaw in it meant that restrictions on who could see what were not enforced. The patch for xMII fixes a directory traversal vulnerability, SAP reported Tuesday in security note 2230978. The vulnerability could have allowed attackers to access arbitrary files and directories on an SAP fileserver, including application source code, configuration and system files and other critical technical and business-related information, security researchers at ERPScan said Wednesday.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Security ‘net 0x1339ED2: Security begins with you

I’m a couple of days late with this post for Data Privacy Day,, but not too late for Data Privacy Month (February). I wanted to highlight it anyway (and maybe I’ll put it on my calendar so I don’t forget next year). The point, of course (“you don’t need to have a point to have a point”) is that each and every one of us—that’s you and I, in case you’ve not gotten it yet—need to take security seriously. Security begins with you. To this end, the Cloud Security Alliance has a good post up on what you can do to improve data privacy.

Why are end users so mistake-prone? Because, frankly, most don’t care. They think data security is IT’s problem—that if IT does its “job” and filters out the threats, they have nothing to worry about. Moreover, when they do something stupid, they think it’s IT’s job to come to the rescue. They don’t understand the risks they create for the company or the fact that once rung they can’t unring the bell. So, they go on ignoring security policies and finding creative workarounds for security measures that inconvenience them—such as utilizing “shadow IT.”

Continue reading

Microsoft fixes 36 flaws in IE, Edge, Office, Windows, .NET Framework

Microsoft released its second batch of security updates for this year, addressing a total of 36 flaws in Internet Explorer, Edge, Office, Windows and .NET Framework.The patches are covered in 12 security bulletins, five of which are rated critical. There is also a thirteenth bulletin, also critical, for Flash Player. Although it's maintained by Adobe, Flash Player is included with Internet Explorer 11 and Edge, so Microsoft is distributing Adobe's patches through Windows Update.Researchers from security vendor Qualys believe that MS16-022, the Flash Player bulletin, should be at the top of users' priority list this month because it contains fixes for 22 critical vulnerabilities that could give attackers complete control over computers. Flash Player is a frequent target for attackers and can be exploited by simply visiting a malicious or compromised website.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

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