05/30/08 01:59 PM
Posted in cool by Nick Staples
Google has recently allowed users to see why it may flag a site as “suspicious.”
The service will show any information Google has about potentially harmful websites, including sites that have been compromised and sites that host malicious programs or malware. This is good in two ways— first, users can take advantage of this service whenever they question a site’s legitimacy; and second, website administrators may be alerted if their site gets compromised without their knowledge and starts serving up harmful content.
Of course, this assumes the compromise results in something that catches the attention of the Google application.
Although this is FAR from a 100% reliable test to determine if a website is safe to visit, it does provide an extra layer of protection just in case.
Example:
http://www.google.com/safebrowsing/diagnostic?site=http://badsite.com
Just replace the value of the “site” variable with whatever website you want to check out.
I think its good that Google is allowing this— they have an enormous amount of information at their disposal. Offering some of it to help keep people away from malicious sites definitely fits their motto— “Don’t be evil.”
05/28/08 11:11 PM
Posted in cool by Peter Hesse
Just stumbled upon some javascript code for determining what social networking sites you visit.
What are you to do if you want readers to promote your content? ... You have to decide on which bookmarking site, if any, to dedicate your precious screen real-estate. It’s a hard choice. If you choose poorly your reader won’t vote—it’s not a single click coupled and out-of-sight means out-of-mind—and your content losses its chance to make it big. You have to choose your horse wisely.
If you could detect which social bookmarking sites your reader uses, on a per-reader basis, you could display only the badges they care about. But you can’t know that because the browser secures the user’s history, right? Wrong.
Let's try it. You have visited: .
So, is this a cool capability, or a creepy violation of your privacy? I think it is the former; since the code all runs client-side and can be disabled using a tool such as NoScript, and it benefits the user with a cleaner interface. Provide your comments below!
05/08/08 10:26 AM
Posted in cool by Laura Bowser
I’m sure many people have already seen that data was recovered from a Columbia (shuttle) hard drive. Yes, this was the shuttle that blew up on reentry back in 2003. Needless to say, the drive would be expected to be quite physically destroyed. There was some quite important research data on the drive, and the drive was sent to OnTrack Data Recovery Services for an attempt at recovery. Well, they were able to recover 99% of the data off of the drive.
Now, admittedly, the details on the actual data recovery were slim. How well was it protected inside the shuttle’s hull? What kind of temperatures was it exposed to? What kind of impact did it have? How much did it cost (both in time and money)? But, that’s just impressive. (And it just confirmed that I will continue to buy Seagate drives!)
What does that mean for us mere mortals? Bashing a Seagate drive with a hammer is not enough for “Data destruction”. Incineration may not even be enough for complete and total data destruction. Some of the things we’ve taken for granted about destroying hard drives have been turned on their head. I used to recommend that people open up their hard drives and leave fingerprints all over the platters as a method of making them unreadable. Maybe this isn’t the case any more.
This type of article makes the case for disk encryption, whether full disk or at least the data. Then even if the drive does survive re-entry, the only data that’s recovered is garbage to anyone without the key. On the flip side – remember that the full disk encryption will probably render your data unrecoverable should you actually need it recovered. (That’s what backups are for people!)
04/27/08 05:12 AM
Posted in cool by Nick Staples
I thought this was interesting:
The pathogen disguises itself as waste material and tricks cells into digesting it, just as they normally would with the remains of dead cells. As the immune response is simultaneously suppressed, the virus can be ingested as waste without being noticed.
...
As soon as they impinge upon the cell membrane, an evagination forms, a bleb. The virus itself is the trigger for the formation of the evagination. Using a messenger substance to “knock on the door”, the virus triggers a signaling chain reaction inside the cell so that the bleb forms, catches the virus and smuggles it into the cell.
Apparently, the vaccinia virus is able to disguise itself as cellular waste which other cells readily ingest, causing them to become infected without setting off any alarms. The parallels with computer malware/trojans is apparent— they work in much the same way. If a computer user can be tricked into executing what appears to be an innocent or trusted program/application, they could inadvertently let in all sorts of nasties.
As Jean-Baptiste Alphonse Karr once said, “Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose…”
“The more things change, the more they stay the same…”
04/09/08 01:53 AM
Posted in cool by Peter Hesse
I’ve been “tweeting” interesting developments and quotes using Twitter. This link will take you to the relevant entries.
Unfortunately I haven’t had much success with the classroom sessions yet this week. I’ll keep you informed on good ones I go to see. Best one I saw today was entitled “Case Notes from a Vulnerability Assessment of a Bank’s Web Services” by Mark O’Neill from Vordel.
03/19/08 02:22 PM
Posted in software by Peter Hesse
Project Dogtag, the Red Hat Certificate System which was born from the Netscape Certificate Server (acquired from AOL), has been released as open source under a number of licenses.
A customized version of Dogtag is the certification authority system which manages the entire U.S. Department of Defense CAC card system. I believe I heard once before that they issue on the order of 50,000 CAC cards a day. It is a real system with real users, and real good performance.
This could be a tremendous event in the PKI industry. By open-sourcing Dogtag, lesser-known open efforts such as OpenCA will probably be pushed out. Microsoft’s PKI Services are available free with a Server operating system license, which is countered by Dogtag’s completely open sourced and free solution for both operating system and certification authority. How do expensive certification authority software products such as Entrust and UniCERT plan to compete now?
03/03/08 09:16 AM
Posted in cool by Peter Hesse
After a lot of hard work, we are today unveiling our new website and logo to the world at http://geminisecurity.com.
Also stay tuned later today for a press release involving the SAFE-BioPharma Association.
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