Archive for the 'Computer Security' Tag

51 post(s) are associated with this Tag

Tokyo: Charms against computer viruses

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Japan is one of the leading high-tech places around the world but it’s also a country of traditions.

When visiting Tokyo many have a look-around the Akihabara quarter to see the latest gadgets and future computing tools that are often already available there in small series before hitting mass markets around the world.

Next time visiting Tokyo and when you bought some great new computing device in Akihabara, take it with you and visit nearby Kanda-Myojin Shinto shrine.

The shrine sells the faithful special IT prayer charms to ward off computer viruses. Visitors can also have their computers purified to protect them from common electronic ghosts and devils.

The “computer protection services” offered by the shrine have been popular for some time among…

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Security: YouTube Hijacking

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It’s an issue of the Internet infrastructure well known since at least the 1990s - data / packets can be rerouted to more or less any IP address via the Border Gateway Protocol (BGP, RFC 4271).

BGP is normally used to announce between routers which networks are reachable by which (preferred) routes. And on the Internet all routers trust each other and there are no mechanisms built into the protocol to assure that the counterpart in a communication “does not lie“.

The issue, as said, is not new and known at least to insiders…

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Security: The weakest link

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We have been asked a few times for an example to better understand that the security of a system is defined by its weakest link. Well here’s one of our example video for that…

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DEFCON: From war-dailing to war-carting

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Three MIT students have shown the weaknesses of the Boston and other local transportation systems in the US (and of course got sued instead of learning from it). The image below is a compilation of some of the DEFCON slides from their presentation…

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Web: Naked Girls for Captcha solving

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While reports that online porn sites offering free access when the visitors enter the right response to a Captcha secured entry field have been around for a while (see for example “BoingBoing 2004″ ) with recent rises in spam originating from Google, Yahoo or Hotmail accounts the discussion on that topic is on again.

Captchas or “Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart” that are within these relay attacks defeated by visitors to the…

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