Month: February 2007
Learning From Spam?
“Do you know that Canada is the World’s Third Largest producer of Diamonds?”
Hmm that’s interesting. I wasn’t aware of that. Please, do go on…
“In fact, Major discoveries in Recent years have made this one of the most Lucrative mining areas in the world.”
Wow makes me feel good to be a Canadian. I wonder what else this informative stranger has to say…
“Utilizing leading-edge geological theories, Kimber Resources (KRXR) has assembled a portfolio of diamond claims in this Highly Prolific region.
Good for them. It’s good to hear about a company doing well this ever changing economic climate.
“Rumors of a major discovery are just hitting the street and giving the issue really nice volume.”
Volume’s good. They always talk about shampoo that adds volume being a good thing.
“This, however, is just the beginning.”
Really? I wonder what’s next? The suspense is killing me!
“Trrading at just over $2, when official news is out we are going to see this gem well up into the $4 range!”
OK I’m sure he meant to type “Trading” but that’s besides the point. This insider information sounds like a goldmine!
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Well I’m sure you can sense my sarcasm in this post (I should hope so because I’m laying it on pretty thick). These pump and dump stock spams are really starting to get to me. I don’t understand where these desperate people are that keep these scams alive. Every couple of months I take a look at the Spam Stock Tracker site to see how much the site owner would have lost had he invested in the stock tips he received via email spam.
If you would like to learn more about pump and dump schemes, also known as microcap fraud, please take a look at this excellent page which details the process.
Hacker Breaks Into Website of Canadian Nuclear Agency
As reported by the Ottawa Citizen, and numerous other sources, a hacker attacked the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission website, littering it with dozens of photographs of a nuclear explosion and raising concerns about the security of information held by the nuclear watchdog agency.
There is no excuse for any government funded agency in Canada to be susceptible to an attack of this nature. The Communications Security Establishment (CSE) offers training to all levels of government, certifies products, and also conducts research and development on behalf of the Government of Canada in fields related to communications security.
I’ve assisted the CSE during their evaluation of a product and they were very thorough in their evaluation process. Not only do they follow their defined test plan to ensure proper validation, they also create “free form” scenarios in an attempt make the device do something unexpected, like removing key values from configuration files to see what happens.
This attack leads me to believe that the defacement of this website was due to a breakdown in process. The developers of the website, either internal developers or consultants, did not perform adequate validation of their code to ensure security. The project officer who signed off on the completion of the project should ultimately be held responsible for this breach. Part of their project goals should have been a complete inspection of the final product with respect to security using publicly available Government of Canada Publications published by the CSE.
I can’t help but think what a huge problem this breach would have been had this been anything more than a simple website defacement.
New Breakthrough in Worm Detection…Using Existing Technology???
Network World is reporting that Penn State University researchers have created technology they say can nab computer worms more quickly than traditional signature-based systems. This is done by watching for anomalous traffic patterns such as increased traffic rates to or from individual hosts.
From the article:
The Proactive Worm Containment technology watches for a packet’s rate and diversity of connections to other networks to identify worms, rather than having to wait around for a signature to be generated to spot new malware.
This technique can cut the time from identifying and capturing a worm from minutes to milliseconds, allowing for only a handful of infected packets to spread, the research team claims. That makes a big difference when you consider that notorious worms such as Slammer could issue 4,000 packets a second when attacking Microsoft’s SQL Server.
I had to read this article twice to try and understand how this “new technology” is different from present day Network Behavior Analysis (NBA) technology from vendors like Q1 Labs, Arbor Networks, Mazu Networks, and Lancope. Forcing myself to read it a third time still hasn’t convinced me that their methods are newer than anything out there today.
Also from the article:
The technology, now in beta testing and in the midst of being patented, isn’t just fast. It’s also smart. In the event that a high connection rate turns out not to be the sign of a worm, the security system can do its version of a mea culpa and release the packets upon recognizing the mistake, the researchers say.
I guess I will wait to see description used in the patent as well as a final product before I make final judgment but I fail to see how the methods being used are new.