Security News

Defense deputy calls for identity chief

New!…

At times, the features used to help secure browsers and keep communications private are less effective than users think — and may even be a detriment to privacy. Joshua “Jabra” Abraham and Robert “RSnake” Hansen, in their talk “Unmasking You”, used techniques to yield some juicy tidbits about a target’s browsing habits, installed software, and more. “Jabra” took a some time to chat with Zach about some of the things that were uncovered.

Black Hat Microcast 7 – Joshua Abraham

While many talks at BlackHat focus on security from a technical standpoint, James Arlen and Tiffany Rad presented on something a bit different — securing yourself. The talk, entitled “Your Mind – Legal Status, Rights and Securing Yourself”, focused on current and future legal, privacy, and data ownership issues that affect just about all of us. Zach snagged James in the hall to talk a bit more about his talk, and to find out if us privacy nuts still have a fighting chance.

Black Hat Microcast 6 – James Arlen

In cryptography, we’ve long used the term “snake oil” to refer to crypto systems with good marketing hype and little actual security. It’s the phrase I generalized into “security theater.” Well, it turns out that there really is a snake oil salesman….

Researchers examining cloud computing security issues presented a number of technical and legal hurdles that Software as a Service users could face.

Interesting TED talk by Eve Ensler on security. She doesn’t use any of the terms, but in the beginning she’s echoing a lot of the current thinking about evolutionary psychology and how it relates to security….

Mozilla is working on a fix for a new URL spoofing vulnerability, announced this week, that can result in a phishing exploit. The flaw, which affects all versions of the Firefox browser, can be taken advantage of if a user visits a website hosting malicious code that automatically prompts a window or tab containing a bogus URL to open, according to an advisory. A user, unable to tell if the URL is authentic because it has been manipulated to appear legitimate, may disclose personal information to the malicious site. Mozilla recommends users only share data with trusted websites. — DK

Gary McKinnon, the British hacker who broke into NASA and U.S. Department of Defense computers, has lost another appeal in his quest to avoid extradition to the United States.