My little place on the internet...
This is my blog with personal and technical articles. My Blog for me is primarily a playground to do somethings with the server I have running via my DSL connection. And in my humble opinion it looks better every time I tinker with it.
Biometric Insecurity
I was reading to a number of my subscribed feeds when I came across this article ‘Study: Workers often jot down passwords’. A well written and informative article in all but while reading the third line I read the following including biometrics. I just don’t get it. As far as I know biometrics is still a method with a error rate between the 60% and 99.9%. 1
99.9 % that sound pretty high for this kind of score you need a retina scanner. But this still means an error in every 1000 persons scanned with every 3 Boeing 747s departing from an airport they leave leave 1 passenger behind. Or worse that other way around they take a terrorist aboard. And this is like a said with the better equipment when it comes to a secure USB vault with fingerprint scan these can often be fooled by fake fingerprints or even with putting your fingers in gelatin. 2
Getting back to the article mentioned above. Passwords and workers jotting them down is indeed undermining the, most of the time, costly security implemented at the work place. But with still the relative large error rate I’ll rather bet my security on more secure and proven technologies like two factor authentication like RSA supplies them.
References: 1 Biometrics – Wikipedia 2 www.id-nee.nl(Dutch)
0 comments
Posted on October 19th, 2006
Tags
biometrics,
password
and security
Iceweasel
I recently came across the Iceweasel browser. This is a a free software derivation of the Mozilla Firefox web browser. This spin off will in the future probably replace Firefox on al the GNU/Linux platforms due to the “free software” philosophy. Currently Debian is switched over to Iceweasel and Ubuntu seems to be the next inline.
Iceweasel also comes with extra privacy protection features :
- Blocking of cookies from sites that user zero-byte images for tracking.
- Detecting of hostname rewriting in links redirecting users to other sites, when this happens an alert messages gets displayed.
The first GNU/Linux x86 32 bit binary release is available, The source codes are also available for download. Check them out at the GNU mirror or ftp.gnu.org. Check here for more info.
0 comments
Posted on October 10th, 2006
Tags
Firefox
and browser
Spin
In my humble opinion this is an absolute must see. Short 8 minute movie by Double Edge Films staring two turntables and a time machine. Winner of 32 awards on various festivals Found at Soulkombinat
0 comments
Posted on October 5th, 2006
Tags
music,
spin
and youtube
Nepenthes Honeypot
I’ve been running Nepenthes on my system since August 10th and I’ve been able to capture until now 44 infections with various kinds of malware. Of these 44 infections there are 28 unique versions off malware. Unfortunately my Internet access provider is still filtering my traffic from the internet on ports 445 and 139 to my honeypot. If this wasn’t the case the number off infections made to this machine would possible be a lot higher then the 44 infections currently in the database. The version of nepenthes I’m running is the one that comes out of the Subversion repository because this one has postgreSQL connection for storing al the data in my database. Most of the samples I collect this way are submitted to some antivirus vendors and to the database of Offensive Computing.
0 comments
Posted on October 3rd, 2006
Tags
malware,
nepenthes,
security
and virus