Wired News, with help from some readers, attempted to get real answers from the largest United States-based ISPs about what information they gather on their customers' use of the internet, and how long they retain records like IP addresses, e-mail and real-time browsing activity. Most importantly, we asked what they require from law-enforcement agencies before coughing up the data, and whether they sell your data to marketers.
E-mail solicitations that use graphical images of text to avoid filters are not new. Recently, however, they became more sophisticated and account for roughly 40 percent of spam today.
As spam filters evolve to detect new methods, the spammers job is to deliver something that the filter hasn’t yet learned is spam. Parsing an image can confound a filter because it sees only noise—millions of 0s and 1s in no discrete pattern.
To battle it, you must understand it. The graphic below demonstrates the various methods and how they work.
Source: Becoming Paranoid - Posted by Eckie Silapaswang
Many users, specially those who are worried about privacy, already know cookies: how they work, where are they saved and, most imprtantly, how to delete them. Most browsers include an utility to manage them, blocking or deleting the ones we don’t want.
Source: Ars Technica - Posted by Eckie Silapaswang
Don't carry RFID? You might be surprised; the short-range ID technology is currently found in everything from US passports to swipeless credit cards to public transit passes to World Cup tickets to car keys to the building access pass for your office building. A few of the digerati even elect to have RFID implants from VeriChip slipped beneath their skin in order to use them as cashless payment systems.
Peggy Jones, a business manager for the information-management team at the College of Southern Maryland, was asked recently to help dispose of what she now estimates were about 1,200 old backup tapes and cassettes her IT organization had been storing in a relatively well-fortified walk-in vault.
Last Friday, 27B asked 10 of the nation's largest ISPs to clarify their data retention and sharing policies, in the wake of a report that ISPs were selling 'anonimized' user internet history logs to data firms and an ongoing drive by the Justice Department and some in Congress to require ISPs to hold that data for long periods of time. 'Anonymized' clickstreams can easily be used to rebuild a person's online life, especially given that search engine urls usually include the contents of a search.
Source: IT Manager's Journal - Posted by Benjamin D. Thomas
Meet Lynette, a seemingly super-charged IT supervisor. Her assigned turf is network administration, but she is often the first to pitch in on special projects, can habitually be found providing requested extra staff guidance and generally sets a highly motivated personal example within her unit. Thus, Lynette routinely displays certain highly desirable leadership characteristics which add more value to, and have greater impact on, unit performance and outcomes. Lynette is a value-added leader similar to several you can likely identity within your own organization.
The rate of identity theft-related fraud has risen sharply since 2003, a report from research firm Gartner suggests.
Gartner's study, released Tuesday, shows that from mid-2005 until mid-2006, about 15 million Americans were victims of fraud that stemmed from identity theft, an increase of more than 50 percent from the estimated 9.9 million in 2003.
Source: TheRegister.co.uk - Posted by Benjamin D. Thomas
In an investigation for the Daily Mail, security consultant Adam Laurie has demonstrated how a new UK biometric passport can be cloned without even being removed from its delivery envelope.
The Mail exploit draws on previous work by Laurie and others, and puts together vulnerabilities in the chip technology, and in the chip security and logistics systems used by the Identity & Passport Service.
