Category: Privacy & Security

Today’s Washington Post has an article about the use of biometric technology, and civil-liberties resistance against it. Interestingly, the article conflates two separate ideas: biometrics (the use of physical bodily characteristics to identify someone), and covert identification (identifying someone in a public place without their knowledge or consent). There are good civil-liberties arguments against covert…

An article by Rob Lemos at news.com discusses the differences between “white hat,” “gray hat,” and “black hat” hackers. The article lists me as a gray hat. In my book, there is no such thing as a gray hat. If you break into a computer system without the owner’s permission, or if you infringe a…

As a computer security researcher and teacher, I was interested to see the White House’s draft cybersecurity plan. It looks to be mostly harmless, but there are a few things in it that surprised me. First, I was surprised at the strong focus on issues late in the product lifecycle. Security is an issue throughout…

The White House’s “National Strategy to Secure Cyberspace,” initially slated for release on Wednesday, has been delayed, the Washington Post reports. This comes on the heels of the removal of some of the report’s proposals, and a leak of the draft proposal. It looks like the report will end up as an eloquent expression of…

ABC News reports on their own hiring of “hackers” to disrupt the Huntington Beach, CA police department. (Start reading at the “Testing the system” heading.) They tried to trick an officer into leaving his post to investigate a false “emergency.” They tried to infect the Chief’s computer with a virus. (Fortunately, neither of these attacks…

New.com reports on a new worm infecting Linux/Apache servers. (A “worm” is a malicious standalone program that propagates on its own, without requiring any human action.) A new worm that attacks Linux Web servers has compromised more than 3,500 machines, creating a rogue peer-to-peer network that has been used to attack other computers with a…

Rebecca Mercuri writes, in the RISKS Forum: Well, Florida’s done it again. Tuesday’s Florida primary election marked its first large-scale roll-out of tens of thousands of brand-new voting machines that were promised to resolve the problems of the 2000 Presidential election. Instead, from the very moment the polls were supposed to open, problems emerged throughout…