The WiKID Blog

Viewing posts by admin

how-to-get-microsoft-esque-security-with-open

Posted by: admin 16 years, 3 months ago

I was duly impressed with the recent ComputerWorld article about how Microsoft fends off 100,000 attacks per month. That is a lot of attacks! The article doesn't mention what Microsoft has spent on security, but my guess is: More than your company's revenues. So what is a poor company to do? Like wine, it is easy find a good bottle of $30 wine, the challenge is finding a good bottle of $8 wine (and were talking magnum). Luckily, thanks to open source software and the many tools built into Linux, even the stingiest of companies can have good security.

etrade-to-offer-zero-liability-accounts

Posted by: admin 16 years, 3 months ago

Kudos to ETrade for offering a "zero liability" account. I suspect this is an attempt to foil my prediction that brokerage accounts will be increasingly targeted by phishers. (Though, to be honest, they were getting off to a good start in Q4.)

Brokerage accounts are tempting. Most people (if they have brokerage accounts) have more in their stock accounts than in their bank account or savings. It's probably harder to determine if a payment leaving the account is fraudulent. With bank accounts, phishers target a larger number of users for smaller dollars amounts. With brokerage accounts, phishers aim for bigger dollars. From the BusinessWeek article:

dhs-predicts-more-brokerage-attacks

Posted by: admin 16 years, 3 months ago

The DHS is joining in on one of my earlier predictions: Brokerage accounts will be increasing targeted in the coming year. According to their post they are tempting accounts because they typically have more money in them. Further, typical anti-fraud transaction analysis doesn't really work because of the infrequency of transfers.

I'm convinced that brokerage accounts and other heavy transactions accounts will need cryptographically secure transaction authentication in addition to session and host/mutual authentication.

features-and-functionality-for-consumer-acceptable

Posted by: admin 16 years, 3 months ago

Anton Chuvakin posts a response to this post about the PayPal tokens. These posts point out a number of desired features for broad-based consumer roll-out of two-factor authentication, such as the hope for a single token to work everywhere. but fail to mention that token won't stop phishing (one of the commenters does point that out).

dns-and-mutual-authentication

Posted by: admin 16 years, 3 months ago

Once again, Amit Klein has hacked DNS. Once again, we'll say if you are doing high-value web-based transactions, you should consider using Mutual Authentication for HTTPS.

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