We all know about tracking cookies and privacy. However, according to EFF it isn't necessary to use cookies to do a fair job of tracking your browser activities. According to their research browsers give 10.5 bits of identifying information in the userAgent string, which is supplied to the web server with every request. This is around a third of the information required to uniquely identify you. They have set up a website to gather more data and give you a 'uniqueness' indicator for your browser, which you can find here . This data set is growing quite rapidly and will tell you how many of the userAgent strings they have received that are the same as yours. I managed to find a machine to test that was unique amongst the 195,000 machines they have tested. This means that someone could potentially track that machine even if cookies are disabled. Even if you come out with the same userAgent string as others, you can be narrowed down by using geolocation of your IP, browser ...

We all use (or at least we should all use) an Anti-Virus (AV) product on our computer to protect it from malware (yes, that includes you Mac and Linux users as well). Rogue Anti-Malware is on the increase and users should be wary of what they install, but if we do choose a big vendor and pay money for it, does it protect our machine from all threats? Well the answer is no. No security product can be 100% secure, but how secure are they actually? There have been a number of recent surveys and their results show that things are probably improving, but there's still a significant gap. AV-Comparatives.org showed that in their tests, G Data was the best with a 99.8% detection rate of known malware, with Norman being the worst of the 16 at 84.8%. Known malware was taken to be malware from a period of one year that ended 8 months prior to the test. This is important to stress; these weren't new malware instances, these were old known malware that all vendors will have seen and had...

When dealing with security, we must be pragmatic. The resources that an organisation can dedicate to security are limited in terms of time, staff, budget, expertise, etc. Also, perfectly secure systems do not exist - accidents, attacks and penetrations will happen in the end, so plan to deal with them at the outset. Recovery after a breach must be just as much of the planning as the mitigation of the breach in the first place. We all insure our cars, hoping never to call on it, and then try desperately to avoid having any accidents, getting the car stolen or vandalized. However, in the end, a lot of us will end up claiming on the insurance at some point, no matter how careful we are. The same is true of security. We have to see the bigger picture and align the use of resources with the company's mission. There comes a point when a small amount more security costs a lot more money, time, management effort and is much less user-friendly. Wouldn't it impact the business less i...