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Showing posts with label Email Security. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Email Security. Show all posts
Sunday, February 13, 2011
Confidential Communique: Anonymous Ready To Dump More HBGary E-mails, Launc...
Confidential Communique: Anonymous Ready To Dump More HBGary E-mails, Launc...: "Anonymous used to be all about disrupting the Web sites of companies that helped block WikiLeaks’ funding. Now it’s starting to act like Wik..."
Confidential Communique: Anonymous Hacks Security Firm Investigating It; Re...
Confidential Communique: Anonymous Hacks Security Firm Investigating It; Re...: "A U.S. security firm that claimed to have uncovered the real identity of Anonymous members responsible for a recent spate of web site attack..."
Monday, February 7, 2011
Facebook Must Explain Privacy Practices to Congress
Analysis: Congressmembers say they want answers regarding Facebook’s data disclosure.
Facebook's plan to give developers access to users' addresses and phone numbers has not gone over so well with many, and now the heads of the House of Representatives' Privacy Caucus want answers. The feature only lasted three days as the social networking site decided to suspend it pending a better (and less controversial) option.
Facebook's plan to give developers access to users' addresses and phone numbers has not gone over so well with many, and now the heads of the House of Representatives' Privacy Caucus want answers. The feature only lasted three days as the social networking site decided to suspend it pending a better (and less controversial) option.
Zuckerberg IM's Won't Help Facebooks Privacy Issues
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and his company are suddenly facing a big new round of scrutiny and criticism about their cavalier attitude toward user privacy.
An early instant messenger exchange Mark had with a college friend won't help put these concerns to rest.
According to SAI sources, the following exchange is between a 19-year-old Mark Zuckerberg and a friend shortly after Mark launched The Facebook in his dorm room:
Zuck: Yeah so if you ever need info about anyone at Harvard
Zuck: Just ask.
Zuck: I have over 4,000 emails, pictures, addresses, SNS
[Redacted Friend's Name]: What? How'd you manage that one?
Zuck: People just submitted it.
Zuck: I don't know why.
Zuck: They "trust me"
Zuck: Dumb fucks.
Brutal.
Could Mark have been completely joking? Sure. But the exchange does reveal that Facebook's aggressive attitude toward privacy may have begun early on.
Since Facebook launched, the company has faced one privacy flap after another, usually following changes to the privacy policy or new product releases. To its credit, the company has often modified its products based on such feedback. As the pioneer in a huge new market, Facebook will take heat for everything it does. It has also now grown into a $22 billion company run by adults who know that their future depends on Facebook users trusting the site's privacy policy.
But the company's attitude toward privacy, as reflected in Mark's early emails and IMs, features like Beacon and Instant Personalization, and the frequent changes to the privacy policy, has been consistently aggressive: Do something first, then see how people react.
And this does appear to reflect Mark's own views of privacy, which seem to be that people shouldn't care about it as much as they do -- an attitude that very much reflects the attitude of his generation.
After all, here's what early Facebook engineering boss, Harvard alum, and Zuckerberg confidant Charlie Cheever said in David Kirkpatrick's brilliantly-reported upcoming book The Facebook Effect.
"I feel Mark doesn't believe in privacy that much, or at least believes in privacy as a stepping stone. Maybe he's right, maybe he's wrong."
Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/well-these-new-zuckerberg-ims-wont-help-facebooks-privacy-problems-2010-5#ixzz1DHlbefuY
Wednesday, November 3, 2010
Military wants to scan communications to find internal threats
The Pentagon wants computers to see into the future -- and stop crimes before they happen.Now a Pentagon research arm is asking scientists to create a way to scan billions of e-mails to identify suspects in advance so that crimes can be stopped before they are committed
That's the goal of the latest $35 million project announced by DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, which is credited with breakthroughs like the internet, GPS and stealth technology.
But this latest idea is already is drawing fire from privacy and security experts.
In a request for proposals, the think tank highlights the Fort Hood shootings.
"Each time we see an incident like a soldier in good mental health becoming homicidal or suicidal or an innocent insider becoming malicious, we wonder why we didn't see it coming," DARPA says. "When we look through the evidence after the fact, we often find a trail -- sometimes even an "obvious" one. The question is: Can we pick up the trail before the fact, giving us time to intervene and prevent an incident."
The agency calls the project ADAMS, for "Anomaly Detection at Multiple Scales."
Simply tracking messages to and from people around a single location like Fort Hood would be a vast task. There are 65,000 people at Fort Hood and in a single year they may create 4.68 billion electronic messages between almost 15 million people.
The challenge is to cope with and get accurate results from all this data.
The agency said it would primarily use ADAMS to look at "trusted person(s) in a secure environment with access to sensitive information and information systems and sources."
"There are currently no established techniques for detecting anomalies in data sets of this size at acceptable false positive rates," the agency notes in the request for proposals.
"The focus is on malevolent insiders that started out as 'good guys.' The specific goal of ADAMS is to detect anomalous behaviors before or shortly after they turn," the agency says. "Operators in the counterintelligence community are the target end-users for ADAMS insider threat detection technology."
Even more than the technological challenges, the project raises both policy and legal implications, according to James Lewis of the Center for Strategic and International Studies. He says DARPA and the U.S. government have been struggling for a while with how to use computer software to screen millions of transactions, something credit card companies already do.
"But credit card companies can screen your transactions because you've entered into a contract with them and because it is in your interest to keep your account safe. The same isn't necessarily true for e-mail," Lewis said in an e-mail.
"If you are sending e-mail from your work account, your company has the right to screen it. But if you are sending it from your personal account, no one has the right to screen it unless they get a court order, and getting the court order requires some sort of advance knowledge of malicious intent, which defeats the purpose of screening, Lewis said.
Bruce Schneier, author of "Secrets and Lies" and other books on security technology, criticized the DARPA idea as "un-American" and a police state ploy.
"This is what a police state does -- everyone watching what everyone does and the police watching your every move," Schneier told CNN in a telephone interview. "And what we learn from history is that police states never work. It never is safer."
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