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...

This news post was brought to my attention, showing a steel-woven wallet to keep RFID credit cards safe. To some this may sound a bit far fetched and to others nothing new or to worry about, but hear me out. With new contactless credit cards you can make small purchases without resorting to the Chip-and-PIN transaction that is most common. Instead, you just 'touch' your card on the reader and away you go. The problem with this is that you cannot turn your card off. I can bring the reader to you; I just need proximity. These readers are small and pocketable, and I can read your card without you taking it out of your pocket. The more high-powered my reader, the further away from you I can be to read your card. Initially, the cards gave out the name on the card, the card number and the expiration date. After people showed that it was easy to skim this information off the card, most have removed the cardholder's name from this list. They have also introduced transaction IDs ...

It is quite common in Information Systems to use pseudo code to describe a process. I have often thought that the same principle can be applied to the process of hacking an organisation, which may help people understand the process and how to protect themselves. Below is my proposal for this pseduo-code for the hacking process. This is very much a work in progress. I would welcome feedback on it and I will update it as suggestions are made or as I feel it needs revising. organisation = proposed target organisation. footprint (value, effort, risk) profit = value - (effort * risk) if profit > 0 then   organisation. enumerate ()    select attack_type      case DoS        engage_botnet (myBotnet)       myBotnet. launchDDoS (organisation)      case Access       organisation. gainAccess (myAccount)     ...

The University recently recently paid for a vulnerability assessment and penetration test, which came back saying that, apart from a few minor things, everything was fine and secure. I take issue with this finding for several reasons, most of which I won't go into here. Now, I haven't actually seen the report produced by the company, but I have had verbal reports from the IT technicians that 'nothing serious' was found. The University uses a hateful product called Blackboard as a Virtual Learning Management System. This is a web-based application allowing access to learning materials, grades, etc., from anywhere in the world. The problem is that it doesn't use an encrypted connection and uses a simple Session ID cookie to assert that you are an authenticated user. There are two problems with this. Firstly, if I capture your cookie and send it with my HTTP request, then I will be treated as you and can see or do anything as you. Secondly, and much more importantly...

Data stored in the cloud can be compromised or lost (see my previous post ). So, we have to come up with a way to secure those files. We can encrypt them before storing them in the cloud, which sorts out the disclosure aspects. However, what if the data is lost due to some catastrophe befalling the cloud service provider? We could store it on more than one cloud service and encrypt it before we send it off. Each of them will have the same file. What if we use an insecure, easily guessable password to protect the file, or the same one to protect all files? I have often thought that secret sharing algorithms could be employed to good effect in these circumstances instead. What are secret sharing algorithms? They are algorithms that will share a secret between several parties, such that none of them can know the secret without the help of others. Either all or a subset of them will need to get together and put their parts together to obtain the original secret. A simplistic solution can...

I was asked recently to look at the security of the PhoneFactor 2-factor authentication solution. If you don't know what it is, then you can find out more here , but essentially you enter your username and password, then they phone you on your pre -defined number and press the # key to validate the authentication. The problem with just pressing the # key is obvious, but they allow you to configure entering a PIN number rather than just pressing the # key. To my mind, there should be no other option than having to type in the PIN number. However, this isn't necessarily a brilliant idea. As I've said before in this blog , a lot of phones log the digits dialled, in which case that PIN isn't secure. I was also told that the PSTN and GSM networks are secure, so this is a good solution. I'm not sure I agree that PSTN and GSM networks have good security. Analogue PSTN is easy to listen in to with proximity and GSM can theoretically be cracked, and probably will ...