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Scoop.it!
Snapchat is a wildly popular app for Androids and iDevices that allows you to share photos with your friends. Snapchat replaces more pedestrian ways of sharing photos, such as sending them by email. The app enables you - indeed, it pretty much encourages you - to share snapshots you would probably be wiser to keep to yourself, or better yet not to take in the first place (my emphasis below):
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Losing access to your Facebook account is a big deal, especially if you use it to generate business as well as to keep up with your friends. Getting control back over "lost" online accounts can be an even bigger deal. It's not as though you went into a branch of Facebook, or Google, or Microsoft, and established your identity in a reliable and repeatable way when you opened your account. And there's no-one at the branch you've never been to who would recognise you with certainty by your appearance, voice and mannerisms. So you're stuck with unreliable methods, such as knowing the answer to various "security" questions, or sending in a scanned copy of a driving licence. Neither of those approaches to account recovery are appealing from a security point of view, or terribly convincing as identification. But what if there were someone who could speak up for you to the Facebooks of the world, and that you would trust to speak up for you because you selected them for that job in the first place?
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San Francisco-based document sharing site Scribd has admitted to a network intrusion. Scribd bills itself as The World's Largest Online Library, and with a suggested 50 million users or more, it's hardly surprising that the site has attracted the attention of cybercriminals.
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An anonymous researcher just published a paper that claims to have mapped out almost the entire internet for the first, and perhaps the last, time. I know what you're going to say. "Wow!" Or, perhaps, if you're a slightly less trusting sort, "Oh, really? How?" The answer, apparently, is, "Using a botnet."
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The New Zealand copyright tribunal has imposed its first penalty under the country's "three strikes" file sharing regulations. The name comes from baseball, where batters are automatically out if they fail to hit the ball after three tries. (Why it is called a strike when you miss altogether is not clear to this cricket-playing writer.)
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Kim Dotcom's new file sharing storage venture, Mega, wants to shield itself from accusations of failing to take action against piracy. It does so by using cryptography to make sure it doesn't see, and indeed cannot tell, what you've uploaded. That provides privacy for you (other people, including Mega's own staff, can't snoop on your files) and deniability for Mega (other people, including Mega's own staff, can't even tell what your files might be). But to deliver on that promise, you have to get the crypto right. As we explained yesterday, early indications were that Mega's coders hadn't done so: we wrote about problems with entropy (randomness), deduplication and the use of poorly-chosen data in Mega's sign-up emails, needlessly making password dictionary attacks possible.
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Stories of a vulnerability in Linksys consumer routers - the sort of device you might have at home between your family network and your ADSL modem, for example - have been circulating in the past week.
That's now turned into a low-key war of words. The fuss started when Croatian security consultancy DefenseCode published a blog article with a video demonstrating a vulnerability it claimed it had found in the Linksys WRT54GL product.
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In one episode of the nerdtastic TV sitcom Big Bang Theory, the socially-challenged Caltech physicist antihero, Dr Sheldon Cooper, has his World of Warcraft account hacked. A giant shopping-list of Sheldon's virtual property gets plundered: his wand of untainted power, all his gold, and even Glenn, his beloved battle ostrich. As Sheldon laments, "Three thousand hours. Three thousand hours clicking on that mouse, collecting weapons and gold. It's almost as if it was a huge waste of time." And that's the problem with games that you play across the internet: how do you trust the other people in the contest? Even when there's no money involved, it spoils the fun if the other guys aren't on the level. That's where on-line communities like ESEA, or E-Sports Entertainment, come into play.
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"Cybersecurity Awareness Week (CSAW) will take place in Australia, and then in New Zealand, at the back end of May 2013. Sophos is an enthusiastic supporter of CSAW events around the world, because security is the shared responsibility of us all. CSAWs are a fantastic opportunity to review some of the security issues that we're all so inured to that we barely think about them any more. Such as spam." We're all used to spam; most of us get quite a lot of it; some of us are awash in it. But even if we see only the occasional unsolicited message, one thing seems certain: as a sales and marketing tactic, it's not very convincing.
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Automattic, the company behind the wildly-popular blog hosting platform WordPress.com, has announced the immediate availabilityof 2FA (two-factor authentication) for WordPress.com account holders. Like Apple, which recently did something similar but chose to call it two step verification, WordPress has gone for its own name, referring to the feature as two step authentication. Whether you call it 2FA, 2SV or 2SA doesn't really matter, because the underlying idea is the same: introduce single-use passwords that are unique to each login. As a result, attackers can't get anywhere simply by stealing your regular username and password combination.
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Facebook's controversial flirtation with facial recognition is back in the spotlight. At the end of 2010, the tell-us-all-about-yourself social networking service announced that it would be using facial recognition to make it easier for you to tag other people in your photos.
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You've probably heard of public-key cryptography, because it's the basis of HTTPS, the system that puts the padlock in your browser. The mathematical detail behind public-key crypto is a little abstruse, but you don't need to be a mathematician to understand the principles that make it work. Here's the story. Traditional encryption (before 1970, at any rate) relies on the digital equivalent of a padlock. Turn the key clockwise to lock; turn the key anticlockwise to unlock. If you want to share data securely with someone else, you have to make a duplicate of the key and send it to them. So you have to find a secure way of sharing the key first, typically with a face-to-face meeting, or through a trusted courier.
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There are six weeks to go until the CanSecWest 2013conference. As the name suggests, it takes place at the left-hand end of Canada (left, at least, left on a traditional North-aligned map), in the delightful waterside city of Vancouver, British Columbia. CanSecWest has become famous - notorious, even - for the hacking competition that takes place there: PWN2OWN. The concept is simple: pwn a fully-patched browser running on a fully patched laptop (in other words, own it figuratively) and you get to keep the laptop (that is, to own it quite literally).
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Firefox 18 has been released. There's also a brand-new JavaScript compiler (though it augments, rather than replaces, the old one), and full-on support for Retina displays on the groovier sorts of Mac.
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