Libertés Numériques

Stop me if you've heard this one:

A consumer goes into a bar and walks up to a data broker.

"So tell me, where do you get data on me and 500 million other consumers?" she asks.

"Drop dead," the data broker says.

Earlier this week, Sophos released the latest edition of its Security Threat Report, summing up the biggest threats seen during 2012, along with five trends that are likely to factor into IT security in the coming year.

We had scores of still images, pored over by both official investigators and self-appointed ones on Reddit.

We had hours of video footage.

The suspects' images were on file. The FBI had even previously targeted Tamerlan Tsarnaev as a person of interest.

Why, then, didn't facial recognition technology help to winnow down the thousands of images and help to identify Tamerlan and his brother, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the two suspects behind the Boston Marathon bombings?

Just a few days after Twitter reset passwords and revoked session tokens for 250,000 possibly hacked user accounts,the king of social media succinctness has apparently moved to implement two-factor authentication. The Guardian picked up on the move after spotting this help-wanted ad for a software engineer in product security.

Twitter says, if you like to code and if you like security, do they have the perfect position for you! The position is asking for someone who will "design and develop user-facing security features, such as multifactor authentication and fraudulent login detection". Two-factor authentication requires users to enter a per-transaction or per-session code. In essence, a disposable, single-use password.

It's one small extra step for users, but it's one big headache for cyber trespassers.