Please try the URL privacy information feature enabled by clicking the flashlight icon above. This will reveal two icons after each link the body of the digest. The shield takes you to a breakdown of Terms of Service for the site - however only a small number of sites are covered at the moment. The flashlight take you to an analysis of the various trackers etc. that the linked site delivers. Please let the website maintainer know if you find this useful or not. As a RISKS reader, you will probably not be surprised by what is revealed…
>From the News-Gazette[1], the local paper at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign: > An Illini Alert message sent out Thursday morning to 87,000 emails and > cell phones was an error, the University of Illinois says. > > The message system, which is intended to alert the campus to > emergencies, was being tested. A message was sent that said, "Active > shooter at BUILDING NAME/INTERSECTION. Escape area if safe to do so or > shield/secure your location." > > There was no emergency, and the message was sent in error, UI > spokeswoman Robin Kaler said. The paper also quotes the UIUC spokesperson: > The alert sent today was caused by a person making a mistake. Rather than > pushing the SAVE button to update the pre-scripted message, the person > pushed the SUBMIT button. We are working with the provider of the > Illini-Alert service to implement additional security features in the > program to prevent this type of error. It sounds as if there is an obvious risk in having the "make 40,000 people fear for their lives" button right next to the "save this for later" button. Having no confirmation and a meaningless label on the button also seems risky; I'd be a lot less likely to accidentally click a button labeled "Send this alert to thousands of people right now". [1] http://www.news-gazette.com/news/technology/2011-03-24/ui-emergency-message-mistake.html
By yvonneeskenzi, 21 Mar 2011 I've been doing PR for the IT security industry for 16 years and there has never been such a major breach to an IT security vendor, as the one to hit RSA on Friday. And rarely has a PR disaster been dealt with so badly. From where I'm sitting, resellers, distributors, customers as well as bloggers, tweeters and journalists are running around speculating about what's happened and panicking about what to do - with no clear advice or guidance from RSA's internal or external experts. It's almost like they've battened down the hatches, stuck their heads under their duvets and hoped this whole nasty incident would shut-up and go away, so that they could start the week afresh as though nothing had happened. ... http://eskenzi.wordpress.com/2011/03/21/rsa-hack-%E2%80%93-a-lesson-in-how-not-to-handle-a-pr-disaster/
Tim Greene, The RSA Hack FAQ: RSA hack: What happened, when, what should you do about it, Network World, 18 Mar 2011 In the aftermath of RSA saying that its SecurID two-factor authentication tokens may have been compromised in a data breach of the company's network, here are some key questions and answers about the situation. The answers in quotations come from a public letter signed by RSA's Executive Chairman Art Coviello. ... http://www.networkworld.com/news/2011/031811-rsa-hack-faq.html
A consequence of the earthquake in Japan is the looming shortage of bismaleimide triazine, a key component of substrates for memory sticks and BGA packages. One of the more intelligent and informative articles on the subject is this one: http://www.eetimes.com/electronics-news/4214144 The reader comments are also well informed. One reader correctly points out that a packaging house can't just switch vendors, because of the need to qualify any new supplier. That can take months. The risk is having a single company or a single geographic area providing most of the world's supply of a key material. This happened before, about 15 years ago, when a Japanese factory making most of the world's supply of die attach adhesive burned down. Pricing for DRAM surged about 30-40%, and I got hit by that shortage when I needed a new computer. The article mentions another risk: even if the BT production facilities are capable of operation, rolling blackouts in eastern Japan may cripple their output. It turns out that Japan uses 50 Hz electricity in the east and 60 Hz in the west. There are frequency-conversion stations, but they have a combined capacity of only about 1 gigawatt. This article provides some details. http://news.techworld.com/green-it/3265854/japans-earthquake-and-tsunami-leaves-tokyo-facing-blackouts The nuclear reactors put out of commission and Tokyo are both on the 50 Hz side of the fence. Western Japan can't make up the shortfall. I guess it takes a disaster like this to expose obscure choke points in the world's infrastructure.
> With all the focus placed on the Japanese radiation leak as > well as the toxic plume of radioactive particles (possibly > containing uranium and plutonium) heading for the United > States, another potential disaster is receiving virtually no > attention [IE THE PICKERING DISCHARGE INTO LAKE ONTARIO]. Apropos this, one of the most significant risks in any situation is panicky overstatement. Regarding a "toxic plume", "possibly containing U and Pu" particles and "heading for the US" - imagination seems to have created a monster out of nothing. There is no such toxic plume. The discharges from Fukushima have been relatively low altitude, unlike at Chernobyl, and seem unlikely to spread beyond Japan. They have been mainly gas and vapour. There is no evidence of the burning of fuel which might have caused a risk of U or Pu particles being discharged; the excessive heating of stored used fuel elements, which might have lead to much more dangerous and substantial discharges, seems to have been avoided by efficient accident management by the Japanese authorities. Isotopes identified as contributing to the (surprisingly low) levels of radiation reported are, as would be expected, principally Iodine and Caesium. It doesn't help crisis management if people invent scares. As far as Pickering is concerned the volume of water discharged sounds a lot "tens of thousands of litres" - but is irrelevant - what matters is the amount and type of radioactivity. I've seen it described as a "disaster" but Canada's Nuclear Safety Commission describes the leak as negligible. The radioactivity was apparently dissolved Tritium "far below regulatory limits", estimated to raise Tritium levels at local water treatment plans by less than 0.6 bequerels per litre (against usual levels of 6 - 10 per litre at local water processing plants and provincial standard of 7,000 per litre for drinking water - which does actually seem a bit high - European standards are, I think, about 100 per litre but that's still way above the Lake Ontario levels). Of course it might all be a great conspiracy—but that's another risk! Roger Hird rl.hird@orpheusmail.co.uk http://roger.hird.orpheusweb.co.uk
The writer of this article might be well-advised to consult a less biased news source than "planetsave.com". The linked article, while truthful, omits enough information to border on the deceptive, and those ignorant of radiological safety basics will interpret this as a major nuclear disaster. Reading the original referenced article yields a somewhat less biased result. http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/story/2011/03/16/pickering-nuclear-leak.html
(Weber-Wulff, RISKS-26.38) > So we are back to the simple risks: Single point of failure. Will they never learn? Redundancy looks like inefficiency, and the work required to ensure that redundancy is fully maintained is difficult and expensive. Until someone comes up with a way of putting a value on redundancy that will convince sceptical accountants and managers looking for a way to improve their finances, these single points of failure will remain. On another single-point-of-failure risk, I understand that the US Dept of Homeland Security has acknowledged that GPS should be backed up by a diverse source of Position, Navigation and Timing data - but that they think this is a task best left to the market. Yet, in surveys, they have discovered that many organisations believe they are not dependent on GPS when, in fact, they are ... Will they never learn?
*Daily Yomiuri* online New cybervirus found in Japan Stuxnet designed to attack off-line servers via USB memory sticks The Yomiuri Shimbun Stuxnet, a computer virus designed to attack servers isolated from the Internet, such as at power plants, has been confirmed on 63 personal computers in Japan since July, according to major security firm Symantec Corp. rest: http://www.yomiuri.co.jp/dy/national/T101004003493.htm
Why do these drives continue to save the scans? Why don't they delete scans on powerdown or after a short time. It is not clear to me what purpose saving scans has beyond speeding up the printing of large documents. Shouldn't the scans be deleted once the document is printed? On the other hand, maybe I should wear my tinfoil hat with the shiny side in.
Erling Kristiansen writes: > In my opinion, the best cure is to avoid deploying GPS-based applications > that give an incentive for jamming. Road tolling is the first example that > springs to mind. I chaired the study that produced the Royal Academy of Engineering report on GNSS Reliance and Vulnerabilities. The report is available from http://www.raeng.org.uk/news/publications/list/reports/RAoE_Global_Navigation_Systems_Report.pdf Recommendation 7 in the report is "Widely deployed systems such as Stolen Vehicle Tracking or Road User Charging should favour designs where the user gains little or no advantage from the jamming of signals that are so important to other services."
> The UK Ministry of Defence has informed Ofcom of the following GPS jamming > exercise: [...] Similar denial of service exercises are performed by the US DOD, though they describe what they are doing less bluntly. See the link to "GPS Testing Notices" at http://www.navcen.uscg.gov/ and look for "Flight Advisory - GPS Testing" at http://www.faasafety.gov/SPANS/notices_public.aspx These exercises have been going on for years: for example see the link below to a discussion from 2007. I believe the military have developed this capability as a less indiscriminate replacement for GPS's global "selective availability" feature which was turned off in May 2000. http://www.mail-archive.com/time-nuts@febo.com/msg10114.html f.anthony.n.finch <dot@dotat.at> http://dotat.at/
Your latest issue of Risks Digest had two items on GPS jamming. One wrote: ========= The proposed "cure" is to locate and remove jammers. I don't know what kind of signal current jammers transmit. But, considering the very low power and wide spectrum of the GPS signal, it should not be difficult to build a jammer that is virtually impossible to locate. You can only home in on a transmitter if you can "see" it above the background noise. ========= The other item indicated that consumer GPS receivers had more than 32 dB of jam resistance. I'm just typing away here and relying on memory here—so the following analysis may be off and should not be relied on without checking. The public GPS signal is about 1 MHz wide. Thermal noise in 1 MHz is about -106 dBm. So, a 32 dB stronger signal needs to be about -74 dBm. That's the kind of signal level one receives from a wireless base station transmitting to a consumer handset one or two km away—my handset reports a -88 dBm signal as I am typing this. A GPS jammer transmitting broadband noise has to be fairly high power if it is to have much range. This type of jammer should be fairly easy to track down unless it is designed for very short range jamming. The GPS jammers I see advertised on the Internet are inexpensive ($150-$300) and advertise quite short ranges (10 meters—20 meters). See http://www.jammer-store.com/gps-blockers-jammers.html. If you assume that such a jammer puts a signal 30 dB above the noise floor into a GPS receiver with an omnidirectional antenna 10 meters away, an enforcement officer with relatively unsophisticated equipment should be able to detect such a device from 100 meters away or so (20 dB free space attenuation). It is probably the case that good enforcement operators could find it at considerably longer distances. A more sophisticated jammer would replicate the satellite signals but with a slight delay or would transmit forged satellite signals (spoofing). These signals could be transmitted at much lower levels (below the noise floor) and would require more complex and specialized equipment to track down. But, such jammers would be a good deal more expensive than the simple band jammers described above. A jammer faces a dilemma. If they transmit a strong enough signal to jam, it is not easy to remain covert. In some sense any signal strong enough to jam can be detected and its direction of arrival determined. Similarly, someone marketing such devices faces a bit of a dilemma—they need to advertise if they want to reach a large market. In the United States the relevant regulator, the FCC, goes after the firms marketing such devices and gives them a warning for a first offense. See, for example, http://www.fcc.gov/eb/Orders/2010/DA-10-2240A1.html. Charles L. Jackson 1-301 656 8716 PO Box 221 Port Tobacco, MD 20677
[OK. I could have split this into separate messages, as I normally would do. PGN] Re: RAID disks, Turgut Kalfaoglu (RISKS 26.37): > "Another trouble with RAID disks is that they are usually purchased at the > same time, and more than one fail at once." Only if the sysadmins aren't thinking a few moves ahead. Experienced admins know about "bad batches" and plan accordingly—I recently bought a set of drives for RAID in two NAS devices, and made sure to buy from two different vendors, check serial and batch numbers, and verify with the NAS maker which disks were mirrored with each other, to populate disks so as to minimize the chance of both disks of a mirrored stripe set failing in a short time. (At a previous job, I saw a 12-drive RAID-5 array containing critical user data have a second failure while it was rebuilding from the first failure—that was an ugly day, especially when we found out there were no usable backups, and I was glad it wasn't my team's fault and that answering the customer's questions was not my job. The best mistakes to learn from are those *others* make...) - - - - Re: Google: Nosy Questions, Gene Wirchenko quoting Bob Bowdon (RISKS 26.37) "...why on earth would [Doodle 4 Google]'s original Parent Consent Form ask for the child's city of birth, date of birth and last four digits of the child's SSN? ...You see what Google knows and many parents don't know is that a person's city of birth and year of birth can be used to make a statistical guess about the first five digits of his/her social security number. Then, if you can somehow obtain those last four SSN digits explicitly—voila, you've unlocked countless troves of personal information from people who didn't even understand that such a disclosure was happening." While this might be true, Bowdon went beyond suggesting such an attack might be possible and actually imputed motive to Google without evidence, which is fearmongering plain and simple despite his later updates about Google's explanations. Last-4-digits-of-SSN is a very (misguided but) common method of disambiguating identities used by a wide variety of commercial and governmental entities, and Google's use of it for that purpose is neither unusual nor, on its face, exceptionally nefarious. - - - - Re: NJ came close to selling private data at auction, Jeremy Epstein (RISKS 26.38) "Perhaps this was the most interesting part: '[The comptroller's] report says that one agency had a device that magnetically erased computer drives, but that employees did not like to use it because it was noisy.' Do you suppose government agencies that handle classified data have such a cavalier attitude about data protection?" Not the federal ones I've worked with. In one memorable case a double-rackful of servers was to be secure-wiped before site-to-site transport to comply with federal directives about confidential data leaving the established data-security perimeter. It turned out that because the personnel starting the wipe were told to go ahead and leave rather than wait several hours, and the people who were supposed to verify successful wipe did not do so before unracking and packing, the move was delayed while a decision was made on what to do. Rather than take another whole day to repeat the wipe, or wipe quickly (but hardware-destructively) with a degausser, an armed federal guard came and sat in the back of the moving truck for the duration of the 38-mile trip.
[I am rather overloaded with worthy submissions. This one
should have been included in the previous issue. PGN]
Gene Wirchenko's item in RISKS about Google's Doodle-4-Google contest would
have been more fair and even-handed had he included the paragraph only two
after the "opening paragraphs" he quoted:
In fairness, we have no evidence that Google will use or sell this
information for marketing purposes. For that matter, it's possible
they could throw the data away. (Care to guess the odds?) But to be
absolutely clear, there's no evidence Google has done anything with
this information at all, nefarious or otherwise.
My immediate suspicion, upon reading the opening paragraphs Wirchenko
quoted, was that Google was using the SSN and other information they
requested only to weed out duplicate and invalid entries, and that they were
almost certainly discarding the SSN after using it for that purpose. And,
indeed, when I subsequently read Bowdon's article, I discovered that Google
had told him exactly that weeks ago, a fact which Wirchenko certainly should
have mentioned in his submission to RISKS.
Bowdon should have apologized and retracted his claims against Google when
Google told him unequivocally that they were false and he had no evidence to
the contrary. Wirchenko should not have submitted such a sensationalistic
item to RISKS without presenting both sides of the story. And, in my
opinion, RISKS should not have run an item about an accusation that had
already been debunked by the time the item was submitted.
I am sure that Google's recent effort to weed out "farmed content" from search results did indeed have some false positives, as Mark Thorson's story seems to indicate. That shouldn't be surprising, of course—it's a basic risk of any hueristic filtering technique that the filter will have unintended consequences, esp. since the filtering algorithm's "intent" is not specified rigorously. That stated, Google has had for quite some time a method for content providers to contact Google when the provider thinks that they have been blacklisted but don't "deserve" it. https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/reconsideration That stated, my local search tech guru says that in a lot of cases, people whose sites have been farm-filtered are in fact engaging in the types of practices that Google wishes to discourage, but were doing so without the knowledge that the "search spamming" techniques have the risk of getting you blacklisted. In many cases, the "guilty from ignorance" people didn't know that they were doing stuff similar to the egregiously clear farming of JCPenney et. al., because they had engaged with SEO services companies that promise a lot of result for little money, but fail to mention that the nice cost/benefit comes with risk b/c the "blackhat" SEO techniques used. Caveat emptor once again—if the deal sounds too good to be true, it probably is!
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