Ramblings & ephemera
From Natalie Angier’s “In One Ear and Out the Other” (The New York Times: 16 March 2009): In understanding human memory and its tics, Scott A. Small, a neurologist and memory researcher at Columbia, suggests the familiar analogy with computer memory. We have our version of a buffer, he said, a short-term working memory of […]
Posted on March 17th, 2009 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: art, language & literature, science | Comments Off on Why we can easily remember jingles but not jokes
From danah boyd’s “Social Media is Here to Stay… Now What?” at the Microsoft Research Tech Fest, Redmond, Washington (danah: 26 February 2009): Social media is the latest buzzword in a long line of buzzwords. It is often used to describe the collection of software that enables individuals and communities to gather, communicate, share, and […]
Posted on March 17th, 2009 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: business, history, social software, tech in changing society | Comments Off on Defining social media, social software, & Web 2.0
From Paul Graham’s “Why TV Lost” (Paul Graham: March 2009): The somewhat more surprising force was one specific type of innovation: social applications. The average teenage kid has a pretty much infinite capacity for talking to their friends. But they can’t physically be with them all the time. When I was in high school the […]
Posted on March 17th, 2009 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: business, history, social software, tech in changing society | Comments Off on Why everyone wants a computer: socializing
From Paul Graham’s “Why TV Lost” (Paul Graham: March 2009): About twenty years ago people noticed computers and TV were on a collision course and started to speculate about what they’d produce when they converged. We now know the answer: computers. It’s clear now that even by using the word “convergence” we were giving TV […]
Posted on March 17th, 2009 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: business, social software, tech in changing society | Comments Off on The future of TV is the Internet
From Robert Graham’s “PHPBB Password Analysis” (Dark Reading: 6 February 2009): A popular Website, phpbb.com, was recently hacked. The hacker published approximately 20,000 user passwords from the site. … This incident is similar to one two years ago when MySpace was hacked, revealing about 30,000 passwords. … The striking different between the two incidents is […]
Posted on March 10th, 2009 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: language & literature, security | Comments Off on What passwords do people use? phpBB examples
From “Missing SFO Laptop With Sensitive Data Found” (CBS5: 5 August 2008): The company that runs a fast-pass security prescreening program at San Francisco International Airport said Tuesday that it found a laptop containing the personal information of 33,000 people more than a week after it apparently went missing. The Transportation Security Administration announced late […]
Posted on February 12th, 2009 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: business, law, politics, security, tech in changing society, technology | Comments Off on Give CLEAR your info, watch CLEAR lose your info
From “Storm Worm botnet cracked wide open” (Heise Security: 9 January 2009): A team of researchers from Bonn University and RWTH Aachen University have analysed the notorious Storm Worm botnet, and concluded it certainly isn’t as invulnerable as it once seemed. Quite the reverse, for in theory it can be rapidly eliminated using software developed […]
Posted on February 8th, 2009 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: business, security | Comments Off on The end of Storm?
From Kelly Jackson Higgins’ “The World’s Biggest Botnets” (Dark Reading: 9 November 2007): You know about the Storm Trojan, which is spread by the world’s largest botnet. But what you may not know is there’s now a new peer-to-peer based botnet emerging that could blow Storm away. “We’re investigating a new peer-to-peer botnet that may […]
Posted on February 8th, 2009 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: business, security | Comments Off on Three top botnets
From Gregg Keizer’s “Dutch Botnet Bigger Than Expected” (InformationWeek: 21 October 2005): Dutch prosecutors who last month arrested a trio of young men for creating a large botnet allegedly used to extort a U.S. company, steal identities, and distribute spyware now say they bagged bigger prey: a botnet of 1.5 million machines. According to Wim […]
Posted on February 8th, 2009 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: business, security | Comments Off on Largest botnet as of 2006: 1.5 M machines
From Clive Akass’ “Storm worm ‘making millions a day’” (Personal Computer World: 11 February 2008): The people behind the Storm worm are making millions of pounds a day by using it to generate revenue, according to IBM’s principal web security strategist. Joshua Corman, of IBM Internet Security Systems, said that in the past it had […]
Posted on February 8th, 2009 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: business, security | Comments Off on Why botnet operators do it: profit, politics, & prestige
From Gregg Keizer’s “RSA – Top botnets control 1M hijacked computers” (Computerworld: 4 October 2008): Joe Stewart, director of malware research at SecureWorks, presented his survey at the RSA Conference, which opened Monday in San Francisco. The survey ranked the top 11 botnets that send spam; by extrapolating their size, Stewart estimated the bots on […]
Posted on February 8th, 2009 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: business, security | Comments Off on Srizbi, Bobax, & Storm – the rankings
From Robert Lemos’ “Bot-infected PCs get a refresh” (SecurityFocus: 28 December 2006): On Christmas day, the number of bots tracked by the Shadowserver group dropped nearly 20 percent. The dramatic decrease in weekly totals–from more than 500,000 infected systems to less than 400,000 computers–puzzled researchers. The Internet Storm Center, a threat monitoring group managed by […]
Posted on February 8th, 2009 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: business, security | Comments Off on Number of bots drops 20% on Christmas
From Nate Anderson’s “Vint Cerf: one quarter of all computers part of a botnet” (Ars Technica: 25 January 2007): The BBC’s Tim Weber, who was in the audience of an Internet panel featuring Vint Cerf, Michael Dell, John Markoff of the New York Times, and Jon Zittrain of Oxford, came away most impressed by the […]
Posted on February 8th, 2009 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: business, security | Comments Off on 1/4 of all Internet computers part of a botnet?
From Chris Sanders’ “Packet School 201 – Part 1 (ARP)” (Completely Full of I.T.: 23 December 2007): The basic idea behind ARP is for a machine to broadcast its IP address and MAC address to all of the clients in its broadcast domain in order to find out the IP address associated with a particular […]
Posted on February 6th, 2009 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: technology | Comments Off on How ARP works
From Bruce Schneier’s “Security in Ten Years” (Crypto-Gram: 15 December 2007): Bruce Schneier: … The nature of the attacks will be different: the targets, tactics and results. Security is both a trade-off and an arms race, a balance between attacker and defender, and changes in technology upset that balance. Technology might make one particular tactic […]
Posted on February 5th, 2009 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: business, law, security, technology | Comments Off on The future of security
From Stephen J. Dubner’s interview with Bruce Schneier in “Bruce Schneier Blazes Through Your Questions” (The New York Times: 4 December 2007): Basically, you’re asking if crime pays. Most of the time, it doesn’t, and the problem is the different risk characteristics. If I make a computer security mistake — in a book, for a […]
Posted on December 17th, 2008 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: business, security | Comments Off on Bruce Schneier on security & crime economics
From Stephen E. Arnold’s The Google Legacy: How Google’s Internet Search is Transforming Application Software (Infonortics: September 2005): The figure Google’s Fusion: Hardware and Software Engineering shows that Google’s technology framework has two areas of activity. There is the software engineering effort that focuses on PageRank and other applications. Software engineering, as used here, means […]
Posted on November 28th, 2008 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: business, history, science, security, tech in changing society, technology | Comments Off on An analysis of Google’s technology, 2005
From Ian Urbina’s “High Turnout May Add to Problems at Polling Places” (The New York Times: 3 November 2008): Two-thirds of voters will mark their choice with a pencil on a paper ballot that is counted by an optical scanning machine, a method considered far more reliable and verifiable than touch screens. But paper ballots […]
Posted on November 28th, 2008 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: history, law, politics, security, tech in changing society | Comments Off on More problems with voting, election 2008
From Chapter 2: Botnets Overview of Craig A. Schiller’s Botnets: The Killer Web App (Syngress: 2007): The first criminal case involving a botnet went to trial in November 2005. Jeanson James Ancheta (a. k. a. Resili3nt), age 21, of Downey, California, was convicted and sentenced to five years in jail for conspiring to violate the […]
Posted on November 22nd, 2008 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: law, security | Comments Off on 1st criminal case involving a botnet
From Chapter 2: Botnets Overview of Craig A. Schiller’s Botnets: The Killer Web App (Syngress: 2007): Default UserIDs Tried by RBot Here is a list of default userids that RBot uses. Administrator Administrador Administrateur administrat admins admin staff root computer owner student teacher wwwadmin guest default database dba oracle db2
Posted on November 22nd, 2008 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: security | Comments Off on Usernames that botnets try