John Pescatore

A week off always causes me to assume the merry-go-round will have slowed down while I was away, but noooooooo – I’ve spend the first 3 hours today just digging out from under email and administrivia. So, for today just some short comments on events that I didn’t delete as I shoveled email into the trash bin:

• Skype eavesdropping Trojan released – this really isn’t anything new or even anything all that Skype-specific. It is just an example of malware that can record stuff and send it back to bad guys. There are scads of password/keystroke/data loggers out there that are just as (actually more) dangerous.
• DHS Clarifies Electronic Border Search Rules – really not much new here and the actual number of laptops that have been searched in the first 10 months of this program are small. If you assume 5% of travellers carried laptops, then only .01% of laptops were searched and only 5% of those were searched “in-depth.” Still, yet another reason to make sure laptops are backed up. See this Gartner Research Note for Gartner advice on best practices.
• The “Turn off the Internet” button is still not dead – West Virginia Jay Rockefeller’s aides still seem convinced that the President having the power to “shut down” the Internet is a good idea. A dumb and dangerous idea – why not add “shut down the telephone system if we are under attack,” too?
• Mac’s don’t get malware but the new Mac OS warns about Mac malware – duh.
• WPA is still brokener – repeat after me “WPA2 is not that hard”

Submit a Comment »

Category: Uncategorized     Tags:

Share