IT Security Blog

Beware clicking links from IM and spoofed sites

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Yahoo messenger

If you are a Yahoo! user who regularly talks on Yahoo Instant Messenger, you have to beware of links that appear to have come from your contacts or buddies. There are some incidents of Yahoo accounts being hacked because of those links.

Modus operandi
What usually happens is that a buddy of yours will supposedly give you a link to something. It might be a Geocities page or a Yahoo photos page. Sometimes it seems as though it is a random page on your buddy’s Yahoo photos page or Geocities account. It would usually seem innocent enough. If you click it, it will direct you to a page that will require you to log in. You will probably just get stuck on that page. As if nothing has been going on. But the bad thing is that if you did try to log in, your password is already known by the person who created that page.

Have you encountered anything similar? If you have, maybe it is time to change your password.

The effects
Your Yahoo account gets hacked. The terrible thing is that you will seem to pass on different links to people on your buddy list. It would have been ok if it was some useful link like DIY stuff or something similar. But no – it leads to the spoofed Geocities or Yahoo photos site. The bad thing is that you won’t even know until you get contacted by the people on your buddy list. If you have friends from different countries, the time zones would affect how you would try to tell them that your Yahoo account got hacked. There are some messaging clients that use the Yahoo protocol that does not seem to support mass messaging so you have to do it as soon as you catch them online or you would have to send them all emails somehow.

This tip is not necessarily about your computer and the data in it per se, but it is more for you and your online identity.

Online services and their privacy statements

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privacy

Do you socialize a lot online? Is it through chat, email or voice over internet telephony? Do you make a lot of online transactions? Where? Ebay?

If you have answered yes to a lot of those questions, here is another question for you: Do you read the terms of service of the sites that you sign up for in order to utilize their services? If yes, do you make sure that you even have a copy of it? If not, maybe it is time you should.

When we sign up for online services, we give out a lot of information about us. Some might be as detailed as including bank account numbers and credit card numbers too, especially if these are banking services and/or online auctions. There are different terms of service and privacy statements. Sometimes we just sign up without bothering to read on those. There are actually some sites that change their terms of service without notifying the users. Same thing goes for their privacy clause.

Usually privacy clauses would say that the information you provide is confidential and that they would not be passed on to others. However you cannot be too sure about them all the time. There are different cases linked to identity theft because of the information others have taken off the Internet. In America, there are some documentaries already and hopefully there will be sensible actions to be done about it. You don’t want to worry too much about buying flowers for your wife using your credit card. It is better to be aware rather than to feel sorry in the end.

ADP gives unauthorized party shareholder information

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data processing center

An article in Computerworld shows that the Automatic Data Processing Center gave its shareholder information to an unauthorized party. This unauthorized party has been said impersonate corporate officers. The information included were not just names but also addresses and the number of shares they had. There are further investigations on the matter. The number of affected accounts remain undisclosed.

There are different ways in which security is breached. The intrusion may happen within your own company or outside of it. You could never tell which one will happen. The difficulty about having security breached internally is that you have placed your trust among certain people and you could never tell which one of them did it or why it has come to pass.

For such cases, there has to be a policy that will prevent this from happening. It looks as though they have given the data without much careful thinking as it was an ‘unauthorized party’ they gave it to. This is difficult to accept. Policies should be strictly imposed too. And also, maybe there is something lacking in the way personnel are trained in handling such information. If that might have been the case, they should be trained to analyze situations carefully before giving out any kind of information, especially confidential ones. The only consolation in this case, perhaps, is that account numbers and Social security numbers were not included in the information that was given.

Software flaws prediction – a research

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research

Dreaming of the perfect software? It might still be something of a dream but researchers in Colorado State University are on to making models that you could use to predict the number of flaws in an application or operating system. They aim to present the results of their study in a conference on secure computing in September.

In achieving this goal,they are testing their models on the Apache Web server and the Microsoft IIS server. They are hoping that this would be useful in reducing the number of flaws, especially those involving security. So far, the researchers have found out the number of vulnerabilities found in Windows 95, Windows NT and Red Hat 7.1, in the web servers Apache and IIS all fit their model well. They also found out that there is an S-curve relationship for the vulnerabilities.

Better decision-making

This research would be helpful in decision-making. This would be a good way of gauging the readiness of the software the developers are about to release. It would be difficult to ship the software without the knowledge of how vulnerable it is. The difficulty in the case of software that are released immediately is that there might be a lot of flaws. Think of the number of times you might have had to download security patches for the software you are using. That is not just a hassle on your end, but think of how much damage your system could have suffered.

Learning from mistakes

There are many causes of flaws and vulnerabilities. Even so, there is an opportunity to improve the quality of the software being developed. There are people who are continuously working on the security issues and these researchers are going to be part of this group. It is not an easy task and having tools like this could create an impact on the software industry.

IT security failures in the enterprise

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breached, open lock

Computer Associates recently conducted a poll of 642 US enterprise associates. Some of the results of the study, at least what they have reported:

54% loss of productivity
25% public embarrassment
20% losses in revenue (most likely related to insurance concerns)

It is sad to note that 38% of those who have reported about the IT security breaches have been internal. In a way, it is ironic as there are preparations to prevent or combat breaches from external sources.

Other important information from the poll deal with issues of improving security in the enterprise. It is critical to formulate policies and procedures that would enhance the security or else, they will not achieve their desired results which include increase in productivity.

From the study it is apparent that even though they admit that there is an increase in security failures, they are also doing the necessary steps in order to prevent them. Aside from that they are also are concerned with the need to educate everyone about practices in IT security. Businesses concerned with finance are noted in the study as well.

The steps in making sure that everything is secure is not just about your computer and making sure that everything is intact and that your network is not vulnerable to attacks. It is also affected by the way you view it. Educating the users is still one important aspect that has to be dealt with. Maybe there is something about the corporate culture that affects the way everyone views IT security. It is something that each company would have to study individually if that is the case.

Studying security breaches in the enterprise is good. It opens up the eyes of the decision makers as to what still needs to be done. Without such studies, breaches could still go on and nobody would do anything about them and that is terrible for the enterprise.

The Grokster.com Scare Tactic

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There is a Slashdot article on Grokster.com changing their front page to one which displays your IP address and notes that it has been logged. As noted in many comments on Slashdot, I’d just like to say that this is no different to ordinary browsing: the web server always gets your IP address, otherwise it wouldn’t be able to send data back to you.

And usually, this address is logged with each request. There is nothing new here, and this site is just a scare tactic to put off people who don’t already know this.

It is important to draw people’s attention to this as some may believe that the site is doing something untoward, in order to obtain an IP address. In fact, any TCP connection (except spoofed packets) results in the server-side application being able to determine your IP address.