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Viewing posts from January, 2009

better-password-strength-just-one-factordeleteme

Pete over at Spire Security points out the obvvious(which alluded me):

As far as I can tell, Bruce Schneier's current Wired column, MySpace Passwords Aren't So Dumb, is intended to be taken seriously. The article is supposed to be about how "good" passwords on MySpace are these days, and there isn't a hint of irony in his statement:
"But seriously, passwords are getting better."
I am at a loss to explain how he can come to this conclusion when every single one of the 34,000 passwords he analyzed were stolen through a phishing attack. What he should have said was: "This shows that a 1-character password (the shortest they harvested) is just as secure as a 32-character password (the longest they harvested)"
He also points out that if you're not going to do two-factor authentication, then don't worry about long passwords. If any data is important enough or vulnerable enough to require a strong and therefore annoying password policy, use two-factor authentication.

blogdrums

I have had a bad case of the blogdrums, plus we've been busy working on our 3.0 release. We have just opened to the public our 3.0 beta release in an RPM version. So if you want to play around with two-factor authentication and help us out, please download.

buyability-and-usability

Today we turned on online purchasing for WiKID Strong Authentication licenses. It is a bit of an experiment in "buyability". A big hat tip to Dharmesh Shah's post on Usability vs. Buyability to clarify this point for me. We had focused on ease of use. We have provided ASP scripts that automate the two-factor roll-out process, for example and have an incredibly easy to use Web-interface on the WiKID server (IMHO - another hat tip to Brian Dame ;). We have attempted to take the risk out of buying WiKID by having an open-source version and by having a trial version of the commercial server available for download from the extranet. And we have set up a way to test the WiKID two-factor tokens without even providing an email address.

spire-on-low-frequency-high-impact-events

Compare this Spire Security post to my previous post about hedge fund risks to see who has the better sense of humor.

spam-and-the-fortune-1000

There is an interesting article on the Register about bots in large company networks. I always assumed that the massive bot armies of spammers and phishers consisted of the PCs of unsophisticated home users. I think this has tremendous implications. If you're PayPal and Oracle is sending PayPal spam, can you do something about it? Yes, I think.

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