Spam

Yesterday, the Washington Post reported on the FBI’s “Operation Bot Roast,” which busted several criminal users of botnets: _James C. Brewer, of Arlington, Texas. He was indicted Tuesday on charges of infecting more than 10,000 computers globally, including two Chicago-area hospitals operated by the Bureau of Health Services in Cook County, Ill. The computers at the two hospitals were linked to the health care bureau’s mainframe system. They repeatedly froze or rebooted from October to December last year, resulting in delayed medical services, according to the indictment. Brewer was released on a $4,500 bond, court records show. ...

I received the unfortunate news this morning that Clark Adams has died, and that he took his own life. Clark was a long-time board member of the Internet Infidels (and for many years its public relations director) and a frequent speaker and attendee at atheist, freethought, humanist, and skeptical events. He was a jovial, funny man whose talks about atheism in popular culture were always crowd-pleasers. He was not particular about what label to put on his nonbelief, and was supportive of all groups that promoted rationality and critical thinking, including the “brights”–though he did not care for what he called “religion without the god stuff." In a recent posting in which he gave his opinion of last month’s celebration of 30 years of Humanist chaplaincy at Harvard University, he described himself as a “conference junkie,” noting that he attended “upwards of a half dozen atheist, humanist, skeptic and freethought conventions a year.” He frequently spoke to freethought and atheist groups on college campuses, and was an active promoter of student freethought groups like the Secular Student Alliance and the Campus Freethought Alliance. He was one of the founders of the Secular Coalition of America and regularly helped organize the annual July gathering at Lake Hypatia, which is where I first met him. The frequency of his speaking schedule can be seen in an April 2006 posting on the Internet Infidels Discussion Boards, which showed him giving six talks in April, June, and July, which included talks on “How to Prevent Your Freethought Group From Looking Like a Funeral” and “Godless Role Models." Suicide always provokes questions about the cause. Given Clark’s activism in support of atheism, I won’t be surprised to see opportunistic speculation on the part of some advocates of religion that Clark’s atheism was why he killed himself, but there’s no evidence to support that. He attended a performance by his favorite comedian, Doug Stanhope, on Sunday evening, and was found by a friend and his ex-wife in his apartment after the friend did not receive her expected daily call from him. She announced Clark’s death on the Internet Infidels Discussion Boards, where his friends have left their condolences. Clark has left a mark on the world in the lives of people he’s met at these conferences, and communicated with online. He’s left an extensive record of postings, which he usually closed with “THOUGHTfully Yours, Clark,” which includes the story of his deconversion to atheism in the south. If anyone has a video record of any of his presentations, it would be great to see them made available online. Clark will be missed. UPDATE: Cathe Jones has put up a tribute to Clark, with some links to some of his writings. She has put up a more extensive blog entry now, as well. UPDATE: Friends are also leaving tributes on Clark’s MySpace page, and there are blog tributes from Friendly Atheist and Mark Vuletic. UPDATE (May 24, 2007): The American Humanist Association has issued a tribute to Clark. UPDATE (May 25, 2007): Information about a memorial service for Clark will be posted at the Las Vegas Freethought Society website. His ashes will likely be scattered at Lake Hypatia at the June 30-July 2 event he was scheduled to emcee. UPDATE (May 27, 2007): Raul Martinez has put up a story about an amusing experience with Clark a few months ago. UPDATE (May 31, 2007): There will be a memorial service for Clark from 2-4 p.m. on Sunday, June 3 at the Unitarian Universalist Congregation of Las Vegas, 3616 E. Lake Mead Blvd. There will also be a memorial service at the Lake Hypatia event mentioned above, at 12 noon on Monday, July 2. UPDATE (June 7, 2007): Eric Pepke has put up a tribute to Clark. UPDATE (May 25, 2008): Clark’s MySpace account has been deleted, but this story in the Las Vegas Weekly reports what happened after Doug Stanhope heard about Clark’s death: — A few days later, he receives word that longtime fan Clark Adams killed himself the night after the Tommy Rocker’s performance. Not that it pushes him over the edge; more apparently, it provided a high note upon which to take his leave. In Adams’ MySpace “Heroes” box, he’d included Doug Stanhope under the heading, “People I Admire that I’ve Had the Honor of Meeting.” There’s a bit on 2002’s Die Laughing: “Life is like animal porn. It’s not for everybody. … Life is like a movie, if you’ve sat through more than half of it and it’s sucked every second so far, chances are it’s not gonna get great right at the very end and make it all worthwhile. No one should blame you for walking out early.” And there’s a new entry in Adams’ Comments box from one Doug Stanhope: ...

Ross Anderson and Tyler Moore have published a nice paper that gives an overview of recent research in the economics of information security and some open questions (PDF). The paper begins with an overview of the relevance of economic factors to information security and a discussion of “foundational concepts.” The concept of misaligned incentives is described with the now-standard example of how UK and U.S. regulations took opposite positions on liability for ATM fraud is given–the UK held customers liable for loss, while the U.S. held banks liable for loss. This led to U.S. banks having incentives to make their systems secure, while UK banks had no such incentives (and the UK has now reversed its position after this led to “an epidemic of fraud”). other examples are given involving anti-virus deployment (where individuals may not have incentives to purchase software if the major benefit is preventing denial of service attacks on corporations), LoJack systems (where auto theft plummets after a threshold number of auto owners in a locality install the system), and the use of peer-to-peer networks for censorship resistance. The authors examine the economics of vulnerabilities, of privacy, of the deployment of security mechanisms including digital rights management, how regulation and certification can affect system security (and sometimes have counterintuitive adverse effects, such as Ben Edelman’s finding that TRUSTe certified sites are more likely to contain malicious content than websites as a whole). They end the paper with some open issues–attempts to develop network protocols that are “strategy-proof” to prevent cheating/free-riding/bad behavior, how network topologies have different abilities to withstand different types of attacks (and differing vulnerabilities), and how the software development process has a very high failure rate for large projects, especially in public-sector organizations (e.g., as many as 30% are death-march projects). There are lots of interesting tidbits in this paper–insurance for vulnerabilities, vulnerability markets, the efficacy of spam on stock touting, the negligible effect of music downloads on music sales, and how DRM has moved power from record labels to platform owners (with Apple being the most notable beneficiary), to name a few. (Hat tip to Bruce Schneier’s blog, where you can find links to a slide presentation that covers the highlights of this paper.)

Today I received the following email from John Martin of Phoenix (whose email address begins with “satguys01”), who was apparently set off by my web page reporting my record of lawsuits against telemarketers, which he came across about 30 minutes earlier while doing a Google search for “arizona telemarketing attorney” (could he be in need of one?): Date: Sun, 28 Jan 2007 08:12:22 -0800 (PST) From: John Martin Subject: Get a life You are just as bad as the telemarketers that call you. Just like a scummy attorney that profits from filing frivolous lawsuits. You raise the cost of doing business for companies, raise taxes by overburdening the courts, and therefore raise the cost of goods for consumers in the marketplace. What do you care? You made a dollar. Telemarketing is critical for the economy to function. The wheels would stop turning if there were no phones or business conducted on them. The Federal and State do no call list is just another angle for the Fed and State to make a buck. Just ask yourself, why is it legal for politicians to contact and harass millions of citizens with automated messages and call people on the so called do not call list? So its OK for them to fund raise and get re elected (profit) using unscrupulous methods. But a legitimate business offering legit goods or services is restricted. Are there Marketers that take advantage of people yes. Like any other business there are bad apples. But most offer legit goods and services. Does your mailbox get full of junk mail? Do you watch commercials on TV? or even now at the movies? Why not sue them? Junk Mail does more damage to the environment than anything else. But the US post service make money on it so that will never stop. Screen you calls, that’s what caller id is for, hangup on automated messages and telemarketers. And stop with the lame lawsuits. Do you really suffer any damages by listening to a message or having a dialer hang up on you? Or are you just an other greedy opportunist like you EVIL telemarketing counterparts just out for a quick buck? I sent the following reply: From: “James J. Lippard” [my email addr] To: John Martin Subject: Re: Get a life In-Reply-To: [email protected] The difference, John, is that they are knowingly violating the law, and I’m not. None of my lawsuits have been frivolous, which is why I have a 100% record of success. I’m only raising the cost of business for companies that are blatantly breaking the law; my impact on the courts is negligible–I always offer to settle out of court for the minimum statutory amounts before filing a lawsuit, and I always file in small claims which minimizes the paperwork. The money I collect is specified as damages in the statutes, and serves not only to compensate me for the violations but to act as a deterrent to further violations. It has worked pretty well–I don’t get many such calls any more. If you think the law is wrong, petition to have it changed. But if you violate it, be prepared to get sued and to lose. What’s your interest that motivates you to send a nasty email to someone you don’t know? From your email address, I would guess that you’re in the satellite dish resale business, which is well known for its sleazy violations of telemarketing law. Are you a regular violator of the TCPA, John? BTW, I have a nice life. What kind of life do you have that you seek enjoyment out of sending such an email as this?For the record, I don’t watch television commercials (thanks, TiVo!) and I’m also very opposed to spam (and much of my professional life in the Internet industry has been devoted to combatting it). We also don’t go to see movies in the theater anymore except on rare occasion; we rent DVDs. I’m an advocate of permission-based marketing to individuals, not indiscriminate broadcast advertising.

I’ve got a couple of websites of hierarchically organized links that I’ve maintained for quite some time, though I haven’t really worked on them much lately. I currently get more spam link submissions than genuine link submissions to each, so I’d like to request contributions of legitimate entries. One is my skeptical links site, which is fairly extensive, especially on a few topics such as Scientology, creationism, the websites of skeptical groups, and critiques of organized skepticism. The other is my security links site, which is much less extensive, but still has some useful links, mostly on security and hacking tools and security standards. Contributions are welcome–just go to the appropriate area and click the “add a site” link at the top of the page. ...

The TRUSTe program is supposed to certify that a website has a reasonable privacy policy. But Ben Edelman has cross-referenced TRUSTe certifications with SiteAdvisor ratings, and found that sites with TRUSTe certifications are twice as likely as those without to be listed as “untrustworthy” in SiteAdvisor’s database–meaning that they send out spam, distribute spyware, etc. Edelman calls out four particularly notorious sites that have or have had TRUSTe certification: Direct-Revenue.com, Funwebproducts.com, Maxmoolah.com, and Webhancer.com. All four are heavily involved with spyware. Direct Revenue and Maxmoolah have had their TRUSTe certifications revoked, but should never have been certified in the first place if TRUSTe was doing the validation they should have been doing. TRUSTe has long been criticized by anti-spammers for giving certifications to organizations that don’t deserve them. Ryan Singel has raised similar questions about TRUSTe’s reliability. ...

In an attempt to offer something constructive, here’s a version of network neutrality–let’s call it Lippard Network Neutrality–that seems to me to be reasonable, providing me with what I want as a consumer of Internet services and what I would want if I were managing security for the provider of those services: 1. Nondiscrimination Companies that provide facilities-based wireline broadband (i.e., those who own the last-mile wires) to residences must provide unrestricted Internet access to their customers who wish to purchase Internet access, allowing the use of any Internet service or application that does not violate any laws or cause degradation or disruption to the service or other customers. The provider may engage in filtering for consumer-grade service in order to prevent the spread of malware and the sending of spam, including (for example) SMTP filtering or redirection to the provider’s mail services, but must allow the purchase of business-grade service under which customers may operate their own mail servers. The provider retains the right to suspend service or quarantine users that send spam, become compromised with malware, or engage in illegal activity or activity that disrupts the service. 2. Unbundling Providers must unbundle Internet access from other services sold over the same connection, so that a customer may use the entire capacity of the circuit for Internet access. These two requirements would give me what I want as a customer, as well as give the provider the ability to recover their costs, provide services that use QoS, provide additional filtering to protect their network and the rest of their customer base from malware, and so on. I think it’s quite reasonable for a basic consumer Internet service to do port 25 filtering, force the use of the provider’s mail servers, and to do network-based filtering of malware–but I would like the ability to pay extra for completely unfiltered Internet service and take steps to protect myself. And in fact, that’s what I’m currently paying Cox for today–I pay for business-grade service to my home in order to run my own servers here, though I could put those servers into a colo facility and get the same effect, which is what I would do if Cox decided to discontinue offering business-class service to residences. Because that option exists, it would not be necessary to mandate that providers must provide business class service as I described above, but I’d still want to be able to ensure that I could access my remotely hosted services from home. How this differs from what many network neutrality advocates are arguing for: 1. I don’t prohibit QoS or tiering, as that is a genuinely useful network feature where I expect to see future innovation of services that depend on it. 2. The nondiscrimination provision is written to allow some kind of less-than-full-Internet walled garden service at low cost–so long as customers can still purchase real Internet service. (I think such a service would be under competitive pressure to allow access to the full Internet, for the same reason AOL ended up allowing full Internet access–otherwise the service wouldn’t attract enough users to be a successful product offering.) 3. I don’t prohibit differential pricing for different services and classes of service. 4. I don’t set any restrictions on contractual arrangements (apart from these two restrictions), including interconnection agreements or who pays. I think that should be left to private negotiation and competition. 5. I don’t extend these requirements to other types of Internet providers such as backbone providers or those providing business services, as those are areas with plenty of competition. 6. I don’t extend these requirements to wireless providers, because I think that with sensible market-based allocation of spectrum, there could be plenty of independent competition with much less capital expenditure than for wireline deployment. I could possibly be persuaded that there is a place for common carriage requirements, especially for access circuits to businesses, which is where the last-mile providers could really engage in anti-competitive behavior against backbone providers that don’t own a lot of last-mile wires (e.g., Level 3, Global Crossing, Sprint), now that the major telco last-mile providers have each merged with a major backbone provider themselves (Qwest/U.S. West, AT&T/SBC/BellSouth, Verizon/MCI). This requirement currently exists in the law for telcos, and unlike the common carriage requirement for DSL, is not planned to go away next year. I would not put the above into the purview of the FCC, at least not with their current dispute resolution procedures which favor the telcos. Paul Kouroupas at Global Crossing (also my employer) has been arguing for “baseball-style” or final arbitration dispute resolution, where each side submits their best and final offer to an arbitrator, who chooses the best. This provides incentive for each side to try to reach the best agreement up front, as well as a process that can proceed quickly, without any government involvement or expense. This suggestion is the second point of Global Crossing’s proposed REFORM legislative agenda. (Unbundling and common carriage of bottlenecks such as last-mile access circuits are the sixth point.) Comments, criticisms? I should add that I believe what I’ve spelled out above is pretty close to what I’ve heard is in Sen. Stevens’ telecom reform bill, though I haven’t read it and I suspect he applies the nondiscrimination and unbundling requirements more widely than to residential broadband. ...

While thinking about Jonathan Adler’s presentation at the Skeptics Society conference, it occurred to me that the problem of botnets is, in effect, a tragedy of the commons. The private personal computers of consumers which are connected full-time to the Internet and are not kept up-to-date on patches have, in effect, become a commons to be exploited by the botherders. The owners of the computers are generally not aware of what’s going on, as the bots generally try to minimize obtrusiveness in order to continue to operate. The actual damages to each individual are typically quite small (with some notable exceptions–botherders can steal and make use of any data on the machine, including personal identity information and confidential documents), and the individual consumer doesn’t have sufficient incentive to prevent the problem (say, by spending additional money on security software or taking the time to maintain the system). Similarly, the typical entry-level casual blogger may not have incentives to keep their blogs free of spam comments. Neither, for that matter, does commons-advocate Larry Lessig, whose blog’s comments are full of spam, making them less useful than they otherwise would be–I think this is an amusing irony about Lessig’s position in his book Code. He argues that we need to have some subsidized public space on the Internet, but it seems to me private companies have already created it largely without public subsidy, and I think Declan McCullagh has the better case in his exchange with Lessig. (By contrast, Blogger does have incentive to prevent spam blogs, which consume large amounts of its resources and make its service less useful–and so it takes sometimes heavy-handed automated actions to try to shut it down.) Bruce Schneier has argued that the right way to resolve this particular problem is by setting liability rules to shift incentives to players who can address the issue–e.g., software companies, ISPs, and banks (for phishing, but see this rebuttal). I agree with Schneier on this general point and with the broader point that economics has a lot to teach information security.

At the Skeptics Society conference on “The Environmental Wars," Jonathan Adler gave a talk on “Fables of Federal Environmental Regulation." Adler’s talk made several points, the main ones among them being: * Federal regulations tend to come late to the game, after state and local regulations or private actions have already begun addressing the problems. The recurring pattern is that there is an initial recognition of a problem, there’s state and local regulation and private action to address it, and then there’s federalization. I can add to Adler’s examples the development of the cellular telephone industry, where private actors stepped in to allocate licenses through the “Big Monopoly Game” (a story told in the book Wireless Nation) when the FCC proved incompetent to do so itself; federal anti-spam legislation, which came only after many states passed anti-spam laws; and federal law to require notification of customers whose personal information has been exposed by system compromise (which still doesn’t exist, though almost half the states now have some kind of hacking notification law). (In a related point, industries regularly develop products that completely sidestep federal regulations, such as the SUV, interstate banking, credit cards, money market accounts, and discount brokerages. The development of the latter financial products is a story told in Joseph Nocera’s A Piece of the Action: How the Middle Class Joined the Money Class.) * The causes of federal regulations are not necessarily the problems themselves, but are often rent-seeking by involved entities, which can create a barrier to other alternative solutions. Adler listed four causes of federal environmental regulations: increased environmental awareness (by the voters and the feds), increasingly nationalized politics (political action at a national level), distrust of states and federalism, and rent-seeking. He gave examples to illustrate. * We don’t see (I’d say “we tend not to see”) environmental problems where we have well-defined property rights; the environmental problems occur in the commons (cf. Garrett Hardin’s “The Tragedy of the Commons”). I disagree with making this an absolute statement since there are bad actors who disregard even well-established property rights (or liability rules). Adler’s intent was to raise skepticism about federal regulation on environmental matters on the basis of several points: * History shows the problem already being addressed effectively in a more decentralized manner. * Federal regulation tends to preempt state regulation, creating a uniform approach that doesn’t allow us the benefits of seeing how different approaches might work–we can miss out on better ways of dealing with the issue. * The rent-seeking behavior can produce unintended consequences that can make things worse or impose other costs. While I’m not sure I agree with the implied conclusion that federal regulation is never helpful, I agree that these are good reasons to be skeptical. The preemption issue in particular is a big one. The federal anti-spam law, CAN-SPAM, was pushed through after years of failure to pass federal regulations against spam after California passed a tough mandatory opt-in law. The federal law was passed largely through efforts by Microsoft and AOL (whose lawyers helped write it) and preempted state laws which mandated opt-in or any requirements contrary to the federal law. I don’t think it’s cynical to believe that preventing the California law from taking effect–which would potentially have affected online marketing efforts by Microsoft and AOL–was a major cause of the federal legislation passing. The benefit of preemption is that it creates a level playing field across the entire nation, which reduces the costs of compliance for those who operate across multiple states. But it also reduces the likelihood of innovation in law through experimentation with different approaches, and reduces the advantages of local entities in competition with multi-state entities. It also prevents a state with more stringent requirements from affecting the behavior of a multi-state provider operating in that state, when the requirements get dropped to a federal lowest common denominator. As regulation almost always has unintended consequences, a diversity of approaches provides a way to discover those consequences and make more informed choices. Another issue is that many federal regulations provide little in the way of enforcement, and the more federal regulations are created, the less likely that any particular one will have enforcement resources devoted to it. If you look at the FCC’s enforcement of laws against illegal telemarketing activity (such as the prohibition on prerecorded solicitations to residential telephones, and the prohibition on telemarketing to cell phones), it’s virtually nonexistent. They occasionally issue a citation, and very rarely issue fines to telemarketers who are blatantly violating the law on a daily basis. In this particular case, the law creates a private right of action so that the recipient of such an illegal call can file a civil case, and this model is one I’d like to endorse. I’ve personally had far more effect on most of the specific telemarketers who have made illegal calls to my residence than the FCC has. Federal laws and regulations can be effective when they are applicable to a small number of large players who can be adequately policed by a federal agency (but in such cases those large players tend to also be large players in Washington, D.C., and have huge influence over what rules get set) or when the enforcement is pushed down to state, local, or even private levels (e.g., using property or liability rules rather than agency-based regulation). Otherwise, they tend to be largely symbolic, with enforcement actions only occurring against major offenders while most violations are left unpunished. The most effective solutions are those which place the incentives on involved parties to voluntarily come to agreements that address the issues, and I think these are possible in most circumstances with the appropriate set of property and liability rules. A good discussion of this subject may be found in David Friedman’s book, Law’s Order: What Economics Has to Do With Law and Why It Matters. There seems to be a widespread illusion on the part of many people that many problems can be solved merely by passing the federal legislation, without regard for the actual empirical consequences of such legislation (or the actual process of how it’s determined what gets put into such legislation!). From intellectual property law, to environmental law, to telecommunications law (e.g., net neutrality), good intentions can easily lead to bad consequences by those who don’t concern themselves with such details. Friedman’s book is a good start as an antidote to such thinking.

This post is an index to posts at The Lippard Blog on the subject of information security. This is probably not a complete list; I’ve tended to exclude posts labeled “security” that don’t specifically touch on information security and may have over-excluded. “Richard Bejtlich reviews Extreme Exploits” (August 16, 2005) Link to Richard Bejtlich review of Extreme Exploits, a book I was the technical editor on. “Sony’s DRM–not much different from criminal hacking” (November 2, 2005) Summary and link to Mark Russinovich’s exposure of the Sony rootkit DRM. “Defending Against Botnets” (November 3, 2005) Link to my presentation on this subject at Arizona State University. “Sony DRM class action lawsuits” (November 10, 2005) Comment on the Sony rootkit class action lawsuits. “Another Botnet Talk” (December 11, 2005) Comment on my December botnet talk for Phoenix InfraGard, with links to past botnet presentations. “Major flaw in Diebold voting machines” (December 23, 2005) A flaw that allows preloading votes on a memory card for Diebold voting machines in an undetectible way. “The Windows Meta File (WMF) exploit” (January 3, 2006) Description of an at-the-time unresolved Windows vulnerability. “New Internet consumer protection tool–SiteAdvisor.com” (January 25, 2006) Report on SiteAdvisor.com tool (now a McAfee product). “Pushing Spyware through Search” (January 28, 2006) Ben Edelman’s work on how Google is connected to spyware by accepting paid advertising from companies that distribute it. “Database error causes unbalanced budget” (February 17, 2006) How a house in Indiana was incorrectly valued at $400 million due to a single-keystroke error, leading to wrongly increased budgets and distribution of funds on the expectation of property tax revenue. “The Security Catalyst podcast” (February 18, 2006) Announcement of Michael Santarcangelo’s security podcast. “Controversial hacker publishes cover story in Skeptical Inquirer” (February 19, 2006) Critique of Carolyn Meinel’s article about information warfare. “Even more serious Diebold voting machine flaws” (May 14, 2006) Hurst report on new major flaws found in Diebold voting machines. “Botnet interview on the Security Catalyst podcast” (May 23, 2006) Link to part I of my interview on botnets with Michael Santarcangelo. “Part II of Botnets Interview” (June 4, 2006) Link to part II of my botnets interview. "‘Banner farms’ and spyware" (June 12, 2006) Ben Edelman’s exposure of Hula Direct’s “banner farms” used to deliver ads via spyware. “When private property becomes the commons” (June 12, 2006) Consumer PCs as Internet “commons,” economics and information security. “Network security panel in Boston area” (June 12, 2006) Announcement of a public speaking gig. “Identity Crisis: How Identification is Overused and Misunderstood” (July 6, 2006) Quotation from Tim Lee review of book by Jim Harper with this title. “9th Circuit approves random warrantless searches and seizures of laptops” (July 28, 2006) Bad decision granting border police the right to perform full forensic examination of the hard drives of laptops carried by people wanting to cross the U.S. border. “Is it worth shutting down botnet controllers?" (August 18, 2006) A response to remarks by Gadi Evron and Paul Vixie that it is no longer worth shutting down botnet controllers. “The ineffectiveness of TRUSTe” (September 29, 2006) A larger proportion of sites with TRUSTe certification are marked as untrustworthy in SiteAdvisor’s database than of those that don’t have TRUSTe certification. “The U.S. no-fly list is a joke” (October 5, 2006) The no-fly list has major flaws, listing people who aren’t a threat and not listing people who are–and presuming that terrorists will be identifiable by their names. “How planespotting uncovered CIA torture flights” (October 20, 2006) How an unusual hobby allowed for traffic analysis to uncover CIA torture flights. “Point out the obvious, get raided by the FBI” (October 29, 2006) Chris Soghoian gets raided by the FBI after putting up a web page that allows generation of Northwest Airlines boarding passes. “Electronic voting machines in Florida having problems in early voting” (October 31, 2006) A report on voting machines registering votes for the wrong candidate due to touch screen calibration issues. “The Two Faces of Diebold” (November 5, 2006) The difference between the public and private versions of SAIC’s report on Diebold voting machine vulnerabilities. “FBI eavesdropping via cell phones and OnStar” (December 4, 2006) Reports of vulnerabilities in newer cell phones that allow them to be used as listening devices even when powered off. “Time to Stop Using Microsoft Word” (December 7, 2006) New unpatched malicious code execution vulnerability in most versions of Word. “Staffer for Congressman tries to hire hacker to change grades” (December 22, 2006) Todd Shriber’s failed attempt to retroactively improve his college career. “My bank is on the ball” (January 6, 2007) My bank prevents theft of my money. “Skeptical information and security information links” (January 23, 2007) Promotion of my security links and skeptical links sites. “Schoolteacher convicted on bogus charges due to malware” (February 4, 2007) Connecticut teacher Julie Amero successfully prosecuted for showing porn to kids, when in fact it was the result of malware on a machine the school district refused to pay for antivirus software on. “McCain proposes an unfunded mandate for ISPs” (February 7, 2007) McCain sponsors a bill to force ISPs to scan all traffic for and report child porn images they find. “Warner Music: We’d rather go out of business than give customers what they want” (February 9, 2007) Warner Music says no way to DRM-free music. “The economics of information security” (February 13, 2007) Ross Anderson and Tyler Moore paper on the economics of infosec. “How IPv6 is already creating security problems” (February 19, 2007) Apple AirPort allows bypass of firewall rules via IPv6. “Windows, Mac, and BSD Security” (March 8, 2007) Amusing video parody comparing the OSes. “Bob Hagen on botnet evolution” (March 9, 2007) My former colleague on trends in botnets. “The rsync.net warrant canary” (March 25, 2007) How rsync.net will communicate whether it receives a National Security Letter without breaking the law. “FBI focus on counterterrorism leads to increase in unprosecuted fraud and identity theft” (April 11, 2007) The law of unintended consequences strikes again. “Banning the distribution of AACS keys is futile” (May 3, 2007) You can’t stop the communication of a 128-bit number as though it’s proprietary. “CALEA compliance day” (May 14, 2007) Commemoration of the day that VoIP providers have to be CALEA-compliant. “Spying on the homefront” (May 14, 2007) PBS Frontline on FBI misuse of National Security Letters and NSA eavesdropping. “The bots of summer” (June 6, 2007) Report on some media coverage of my botnet interview with the Security Catalyst from 2006. “Microsoft’s new Turing Test” (June 12, 2007) It’s not often I get to combine animal rescue and information security topics, but this is one–using animal pictures to authenticate. “Operation Bot Roast” (June 14, 2007) FBI prosecution of some botnet people. “Google thinks I’m malware” (July 13, 2007) Google stops returning results to me in some cases because my behavior looks like malware activity. “Asking printer manufacturers to stop spying results in Secret Service visit?" (July 14, 2007) MIT Media Lab project to get people to complain to printer manufacturers about their secret coding of serial numbers, which got one person a visit from the USSS. “A marketplace for software vulnerabilities” (July 29, 2007) WabiSabiLabi’s abortive attempt to create a market for the sale and purchase of vulnerability information. “Another Sony rootkit” (September 5, 2007) F-Secure finds another Sony product that installs a rootkit–the Sony MicroVault USM-F memory stick (now off the market). “Anti-P2P company suffers major security breach” (September 16, 2007) Media Defender gets hacked. “Microsoft updates Windows XP and Vista without user permission or notification” (September 17, 2007) Nine executables get pushed to everybody even if Windows update is turned off–except for corporate SMS users. “Lessons for information security from Multics” (September 19, 2007) Paul Karger and Roger Schell’s paper on Multics gets attention from Bruce Schneier. “Hacker finds vulnerability in Adobe Reader” (September 24, 2007) The era of attacks on applications rather than OS’s gets a boost. “Break-in at CI Host colo facility” (November 4, 2007) The role of physical security for websites. “Spammers and criminals for Ron Paul” (November 6, 2007) Botnets used to send spam promoting Ron Paul. “Macintosh security lags behind Windows and BSD” (November 8, 2007) Rundown on new Mac security features, some of which are negative in effect. “Multics source code released” (November 13, 2007) Multics becomes open source. “Untraceable looks unwatchable” (December 18, 2007) A post that generated a huge amount of response, about the Diane Lane movie that flopped at the box office, before it came out. “Notorious major spammer indicted” (January 3, 2008) Alan Ralsky may actually get what he deserves. “Boeing 787 potentially vulnerable to passenger software-based hijacking” (January 8, 2008) Passenger Internet access for the Boeing 787 is physically connected to the network for communication and navigation. "‘Anonymous’ launches ‘war’ against Scientology” (January 22, 2008) Denial of service attacks and other pranks against Scientology. “Tinfoil hat brigade generates fear about Infragard” (February 8, 2008) Response to Matt Rothschild’s article in The Progressive claiming that InfraGard members have the right to “shoot to kill” when martial law is declared. “FBI responds to ‘shoot to kill’ claims about InfraGard” (February 15, 2008) Commentary and link to the FBI’s response to Rothschild. “Malware in digital photo frames” (February 17, 2008) Viruses in unusual digital storage locations. “Canada busts 17 in botnet ring” (February 21, 2008) News about law enforcement action against criminals in Canada. “More InfraGard FUD and misinformation” (February 23, 2008) Response to Gary Barnett’s InfraGard article at the Future of Freedom Foundation website. “New Mexico InfraGard conference” (February 24, 2008) Summary of the New Mexico InfraGard’s “Dollar-Gard 2008” conference. “Pakistan takes out YouTube, gets taken out in return” (February 25, 2008) Yesterday’s events of political and/or religious censorship gone awry in Pakistan. “Jeremy Jaynes loses appeal on spamming case” (March 1, 2008) The Virginia Supreme Court upholds Virginia’s anti-spam law. “Software awards scam” (March 25, 2008) Many software download sites give out bogus awards. “Scammers scamming scammers” (April 7, 2008) Marco Cova looks at what some phishing kits really do. “Bad military botnet proposal” (May 13, 2008) A response to Col. Charles Williamson’s proposal to build a military botnet. “MediaDefender launches denial of service attack against Revision3” (May 29, 2008) Anti-P2P piracy firm crosses the line and attacks a legitimate company. “San Francisco’s city network held hostage” (July 19, 2008) Some actual facts behind the hyped charges against the city’s network administrator. “Did Diebold tamper with Georgia’s 2002 elections?" (July 20, 2008) Some troubling information about Diebold’s last-minute patching on Georgia election machines. “Expert tells China visitors to encrypt data as U.S. announces policy of laptop seizure” (August 1, 2008) Concerns about privacy in both China and the U.S. “Military botnets article” (August 28, 2008) Peter Buxbaum’s article on “Battling Botnets” in Military Information Technology magazine. “Virginia Supreme Court strikes down anti-spam law” (September 12, 2008) Julian Jaynes goes free as Virginia’s anti-spam law goes away. “Sarah Palin’s Yahoo account hacked” (September 17, 2008) Palin’s Yahoo account is hacked, and the contents published. “TSA airport security is a waste of time and money” (October 18, 2008) Link to Jeffrey Goldberg’s article in The Atlantic. “Behind the scenes during the election process” (November 6, 2008) Both major party presidential nominees suffered computer compromises. “White House may be forced to recover ’lost’ emails” (November 14, 2008) Lawsuit may require recovery from backups. “Criminal activity by air marshals” (November 14, 2008) Multiple cases. “PATRIOT Act NSL gag order unconstitutional” (December 19, 2008) Recipients of National Security Letters now can’t be gagged without court order. “The U.S. Nazi dirty bomb plot” (March 15, 2009) A little-covered story about a real terrorist plot. “The Cybersecurity Act of 2009” (April 4, 2009) It’s not as bad as it appears. “Tracking cyberspies through the web wilderness” (May 12, 2009) How University of Toronto researchers have tracked online spying activity. “Bad military botnet proposal still being pushed” (June 26, 2009) Col. Williamson’s proposal to build an offensive U.S. military botnet is still being promoted by him. “DHS still a mess, five years on” (July 16, 2009) Center for Public Integrity review of DHS. “How Twitter got compromised” (July 23, 2009) TechCrunch gives the anatomy of the attack on Twitter.