Paul Wallbank – Brilliant Communications

Tag: security

  • Tracks in the ether

    Tracks in the ether

    Bureaucrats dream of tracking every person or asset under their purview and the rise of technologies like smartphones,  Global Positioning Systems (GPS) and Radio Frequency IDentity (RFID) chips are giving them more power than ever.

    Two stories in the last week illustrated how these technologies are being used by authorities to monitor people; a school district in the United States is fighting a student who refuses to wear an RFID enabled identity card and Saudi immigration authorities are now sending text messages to guardians of travellers, mainly women, leaving the country.

    In Saudi Arabia, the law prohibits minors and women from leaving the country without the permission of their adult male guardians. As the Riyadh Bureau website explains, to streamline the permission process Saudi authorities enabled online pre-registration for travellers so now male guardians can grant assent through a website rather than dealing with the immigration department’s paperwork every time their spouse or children wants to travel.

    When the spouse or child passes through immigration, the guardian receives an SMS message saying their ward is about to leave the country. One assumes the male can withdraw that approval on receipt of the text.

    The Saudi application is an interesting use of the web and smartphones to deliver government services and probably not what Western e-gov advocates are thinking of when they agitate for agencies to move more functions online.

    More ominous is the story from the US where Wired Magazine reports Andrea Hernandez, a Texan student, is fighting her local school over the use of RFID enabled identity cards that track pupils’ attendance.

    John Jay High School’s use of RFID tags is a classic case of bureaucrat convenience as electronic cards are far easier to manage and monitor than roll calls or sign-ins.

    Incidentally John Jay High School has over 200 CCTV cameras monitoring students’ movements, as district spokesman Pascual Gonzalez says, “the kids are used to being monitored.”

    The problem is that RFID raises a range of privacy and security issues which the bureaucrats either haven’t thought through or have decided don’t apply to their department.

    Notable among those issues is that “has a bar code associated with a student’s Social Security number”. It never ceases to amaze just how, despite decades of evidence, US agencies and businesses keep using an identifier that has proved totally unsuited for the purposes it was developed for.

    Probably the most worrying point from the Texan story is how school officials tried to suppress the story, offering Ms Hernandez’s father a compromise on the condition he “agree to stop criticizing the program and publicly support it.”

    That urge to control criticism and dissent is probably the thing all of us should worry about when governments and businesses have the ability to track our movements.

    In this respects, the Texas education officials are even more oppressive than Saudi anti-women laws. Something we should consider as more of our behaviour is tracked.

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  • Ending the era of the computer password

    Ending the era of the computer password

    Earlier this year, Wired Magazine writer Mat Honan had his entire digital identity stolen from him when hackers cracked his email password and then systemically took over all of his cloud and social media accounts.

    Matt writes of his experience on Wired and proposes it’s time to kill the password.

    The problem with Mat’s proposal is that he doesn’t suggest an alternative.

    The age of the password has come to an end; we just haven’t realized it yet. And no one has figured out what will take its place.

    Every alternative authentication method to passwords has flaws just as serious, if not worse. Many are plainly impractical.

    All of them, including passwords, have the common weakness that those holding the information can’t be trusted either – one of the greatest ways for passwords to get into the wild is when incompetents like Sony give them away.

    Security is evolving, in the meantime we need to keep in mind some basic rules.

    • Use different passwords for different accounts
    • Only access accounts from trusted and up-to-date computers
    • Create strong passwords for accounts that matter, like online banking and email
    • Strong passwords are multiword phrases
    • Use two-factor authentication if its available
    • Don’t link unnecessary social media and cloud accounts together
    • Be very careful

    We should also remember that a skilled, motivated hacker will probably break into your account regardless of your computer security. In this respect it’s no different to the physical world where a determined criminal will get you regardless of the locks and alarms on your house.

    It’s also important to remember that security is more than just evil hackers; data can be damaged or given away by a whole range of means and people breaking into systems is only one risk of many.

    Computer security is an evolving field and while it might be premature to declare the password dead, we’re going to see big changes as we try to lock down our valuable digital assets.

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  • Listener’s questions – ABC Nightlife computers

    Listener’s questions – ABC Nightlife computers

    As a follow up to last night’s ABC Nightlife computer spot where we looked at who owns our online data, there were a few questions which we’d get back to listeners on.

    The entire show can be listened to online through the ABC Nightlife with Tony Delroy website and includes some of the issues we’d get back to listeners on, but first an apology.

    Bruce Willis never sued Apple

    One of the callers Mark mentioned the story of Bruce Willis suing Apple over ownership of iTunes tracks.

    It turns out this never happened as Charles Arthur of the Guardian explains.

    While Charles can be a cranky bugger, he’s right in this case that the media didn’t a very poor job in regurgitating an untrue story without ever checking its veracity. Luckily it’s not one that I cited in the program.

    Protecting your Twitter Account

    One of the topics we discussed was the threat of accounts being hijacked and Twitter is one service that is constantly being compromised because of poor policies. An important part of protecting a Twitter account from being taken over is to make sure an extra level of authentication is used by clicking the “Password Reset” option in the Twitter Account settings.

    Recording online

    Des asked about recording his own message for an audio Christmas card to his friends and relatives.

    On Windows computers, Sound Recorder is the long standing built-in app while on the Mac, Garage Band is the built in application.

    There is a free third party application available for both PCs and Macs called Audacity which also allows you to record and edit on your system.

    US customer service

    One interesting thing about the conversation was how many callers criticised the “US mentality” of providing lousy service. This probably isn’t true as most American businesses provide some of the best customer service in the world.

    The lousy service from online companies is more a function of the computer engineering and venture capital background of the entrepreneurs setting up cloud computing and social media services, while the majority of these companies are from the US it wouldn’t be fair to brand this as being an American cultural issue.

    Our next Nightlife spot is on December 13 at 10pm and we’ll be looking at Windows 8 and what type of computers should people be considering. Hope you can join us.

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  • Unprotected computing practices

    Unprotected computing practices

    A US study finding malware is rampant on medical equipment shouldn’t come as a surprise to those running industrial computer systems in their businesses.

    It’s notoriously difficult to update medical equipment or other sensitive systems as a security patch could have unintended consequences. Unlike a home or business computer, these patches have to be thoroughly tested beyond the precautions vendors take.

    So it isn’t surprising that these systems aren’t kept up to date although some equipment suppliers are more tardy than they should be in updating the servers they supply.

    A few years ago I came across CCTV systems running on the original version of Windows 2000 which were hopelessly compromised. This is an unacceptable situation for the customer and was more the result of vendor carelessness than any concern that customers could be affected by these unsecured machines.

    Not having the latest software patches creates a weakness in any computer device as most common way viruses find their way onto networks is through systems not being updated – Australia’s Defense Signals Directorate rates unpatched systems as being the number one cause of corporate security breaches.

    This is what caught out the Iranian nuclear program with the Stuxnet worm as the Siemens SCADA devices used by the Iranians were running older, unpatched versions of Windows. The designers of Stuxnet took advantage of a number of known weaknesses in the software and were able to damage the equipment being controlled by the systems.

    Obviously systems should be patched wherever they can be and there’s no excuse for not patching most office and home computers. It’s also worthwhile carrying out a number of other security steps to ensure an infected computer can’t damage your network or catch a virus through your Internet connection.

    The survey looking at these medical systems is a good wake up call to all of us that we need to take computer security seriously in our businesses.

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  • Posting without permissions

    Posting without permissions

    A client of mine once had a angry worker scream at him when she found out he’d posted photographs of all his staff on the company’s website.

    “My ex is a psycho, he doesn’t know where I live or work. If he finds this, he might come around here and kill us all,” she cried.

    The photos went down immediately and Kevin made sure he got explicit consent before he posted any details of his staff onto the website.

    It was a valuable lesson on why you shouldn’t just post people’s details online without first asking them. We all have reasons why we’d like to keep certain facts out of the public light.

    A Texan gay choir’s organiser posting the details of members onto Facebook is another reminder of why it’s a bad idea to put someone else’s details online without asking them first.

    For two members of the Queer Chorus at the University of Texas, having their sexual orientation pasted on their Facebook feeds caused terrible damage with their families and it should serve as lesson to every manager, business owner or community group leader that this stuff matters.

    One of the worrying features with Facebook is how other people can add you to groups without your permission – almost certainly a recipe for misunderstanding and mischief.

    What’s even more unforgivable with Facebook’s conduct is the privacy settings for those groups overrides an individual’s own privacy settings.

    As one of the victims said in the Wall Street Journal of when his father saw the status update, “I have him hidden from my updates, but he saw this,” she said. “He saw it.”

    So even though both the individuals had chosen to lock their profiles away from public view, Facebook and the organiser of the group decided they knew better.

    We shouldn’t let the administrator of the Facebook off the hook on this lapse, Christopher Acosta decided to make the group open and public. “I was so gung-ho about the chorus being unashamedly loud and proud,” he’s quoted as saying.

    That’s nice when you have a tolerant family and you’re from a liberal community but for others that ‘transparency’ can lead to damaging family relations for years, if not lifetimes. In some communities the consequences could be far worse.

    “I do take some responsibility,” says Mr Acosta. Which is a nice way of accepting you might have screwed somebody’s life up by doing something you didn’t understand.

    Ultimately responsibility lies with the person who presses the button which causes the email or status post to be published. In this case Christopher Acosta was responsible.

    To be fair to Mr Acosta, the ability to add people to Facebook groups without their permission is a deeply flawed as are those groups’ setting overriding an individual’s privacy preferences.

    Facebook have to understand there are real life consequences to ‘transparency’ which can ruin careers and even cost the lives of people. The damage to families and communities can be immense.

    Coming from a secure upper middle class white background, Mark Zuckerberg probably doesn’t quite understand the risks his company’s policies pose to people in vulnerable situations, hopefully some of his older and wiser advisers will explain why ‘transparency’ and ‘openness’ are not always a good idea.

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