Category Archives: Security

Bruce on Phishing: It’s the Banks, Stupid

Bruce Schneier again talks sense, this time about phishing: Schneier on Security: Phishing Financial companies have until now avoided taking on phishers in a serious way, because it’s cheaper and simpler to pay the costs of fraud. That’s unacceptable, however, because consumers who fall prey to these scams pay a price that goes beyond financial… Read More »

Are Watches Dangerous?

Bruce Schneier points to a Guardian story about watches being a security threat: At Labour’s Brighton conference in the UK, security screeners are making people take their watches off and run them through the scanner. Why? No one seems to know. Bruce rightly points to the absurdity of the idea of a watch being a… Read More »

What’s Safe?

Another example of why you can’t really trust software to tell you whether a website is dangerous or not. The Register reports that a Trusted search software labels fraud site as ‘safe’:   Digital certificate firm GeoTrust’s launch of a search engine with built in trust features this week has been marred by the classification… Read More »

The Demise of the Anti-phishing Toolbar?

Must confess I missed this when it first kicked in, but could it be the nail in the ‘anti-phishing toolbar’ coffin? EarthLink lands a win, according to ZDNet, after being sued by a bank incorrectly flagged as a phishing website: EarthLink had warned its customers who installed a free “ScamBlocker” toolbar–and visited AssociatedBank.com–that the Web site… Read More »

Shutting Skype Out

Who actually pays for Skype? How about the network operators, who have to put up with all the extra traffic? And what are they doing about it? A piece from VOIP Planet, Keeping Skype @Bay, points to the arrival of products specifically designed to block Skype (and other p2p traffic) from their networks: Skype is… Read More »