Security Surge

I just thought I would write a quick post to explain a nice technique to help reduce your email spam!

Spammers use little programs called spiders to scour websites for data, these are great little scripts for picking up email addresses posted on websites. the spammer will then mass email all the addresses it finds.

When you write your email address on a website or forum these spiders can pick you up! The best way of sharing your address would be to write it in a format that a Human can understand but a program/script would not understand as an email address. Eg santa@thenorthpole.com could be written as santa [at] thenorthpole [dot] com

but remember, a script could be written to look out for an email address in this format, so be creative!

Often passwords are the only thing stopping attackers getting through the front door. Passwords need to be strong, but what is a strong password? To understand this we need to look at the methods attackers may use

Ask – why not just ask the victim for there password, Many people will just give it up. Sometimes this attack is often used with social engineering where the attacker may pretend to be a person with a ‘valid’ reason to need it. – DON’T TELL ANYONE YOUR PASSWORD.

Search – remembering lots or complicated passwords is difficult so people may write it down and put it in a notebook, a sticky note under the keyboard or hidden in a close draw or middle page of a book. Attackers also know this – If you have to write it down, think about its location carefully.

Relevant guessing – Very often users will create passwords that they can remember, such as there dogs name, or favorite sports team. These are details that one would not think to much about giving away in a humble conversation and they can easily be found by doing some background research on an individual. – Do not use passwords that have personal links.

Dictionary attacks – Real words are easier to remember, so a great method an attacker may use is to throw a massive list of dictionary words at your login screen/hash until one of them works. With modern computing power lots of words can be checked per-second. – Don’t use real dictionary words

Brute Force – Similar to dictionary attacks, but this time an attacker will just use random combinations of letters and/or numbers. Computers are getting more and more powerful, decreasing the time needed for this method to be successful. The longer the length of a password, the more possible combinations there are to try making it more difficult to break – Use Long passwords!

Great! So from this we now know how to create strong passwords; Use really long random numbers of letters which make no sense and remember them all in our head as we cant write them down!

As computer power increases “strong” passwords will require greater lengths and combinations. Perhaps the future of practical user authentication may be in alternative methods such as smart cards & biometrics.

The common ‘Username’ and ‘Password’ fields, which is often seen, is a form of authentication. If we fully understand how authentication works, this can help protect what is hidden behind these details.
These details are used to ‘Authenticate’ or prove who you are. Once you have authenticated yourself the system then it believes you are who you say you are and will let you proceed. Authentication is often the first and only security measures protecting what is behind it, so this needs to be strong!
You knock on the front door of a house and a friend answers. Your friend recognises who you are from your face and lets you in. If you were a stranger the person answering the door would not trust you and would tell you to go away. Human interaction is used here to provide authentication and trust – Computers don’t have human intervention.
Authentication can be done using different methods, such as Biometrics (fingerprints & retinal scans), smartcards (eg ID/swipe cards), secret questions (like the details a bank may ask you over the phone) and the popular username/password scheme. The aim of an attacker is to undermine these systems to get past these barriers. These credentials are a prime target of an attacker.
In a Uname/Pword scenario the ‘Username’ Field determines who the person is and the ‘Password’ Field is a method used to prove you are this user. If both these details match then bobs your uncle!

• Keep your authentication details private and secure

• don’t use authentication details that anyone could guess or use

• make sure your authentication methods are strong!

It is largely believed that once you have antivirus software (such as Norton, MacAfee etc..) installed on your computer you are safe…Far from the truth.

Antivirus software works by scanning what is already on your computer, its contents and files, to see if any of it is the nasty stuff. This means that if it picks up anything then you have already been infected and this is to late, you have been breached!

Yes, it can remove or quarantine it, but once something has got in, how do you know what it has done, where it has gone and what it has changed? I’m a believer that once you have been infected, your security has been breached and its time for a format – a complete wipe of your system and time to start again so you can be sure everything is as how it should be.

So why use antivirus? It’s not all bad and antivirus is important and a must have, especially if your using Microsoft windows. They can scan files to check if they are bad before you run them and they do any harm. An example of this is an email attachment: You can first scan the email and its attachment before you double click that .exe file to check if its bad. It’s is also useful to scan external media (CD content, USB drives etc) in the same manor. Even if you have been infected, it points out this fact and you can do something about it.

Just like the recent software update article I wrote about, antivirus software is only as good as what it knows is bad. As new viruses are released the manufacturers will create virus definitions, which will let your antivirus software know about these new threats. Regular antivirus updates are important for this reason!

Just because you have anti virus software and it’s updated does not mean your safe! It’s just a tool, like anything, it needs to be used correctly.

One of the most important things thing’s you can do to keep your computer secure is run regular updates on your operating system and software.

As time goes by both white-hat and black-hat hackers are finding problems and security vulnerabilities in all different kinds of software, including operating systems such as windows! When these problems are discovered software vendors generally create and release patches to fix these problems in their software to stop the bad guys using them to compromise your system. If you do not install these updates then your system will remain venerable.
Some operating systems, such as Microsoft windows, release patches on a regular basis. In the windows world this is known as patch-Tuesday. Manufacturers may also release updates out of sequence if they believe there is a need.

Many computer systems, especially in larger organisations where updating hundreds of computers can be difficult, are not updated sufficiently creating a large security risk. This was proven true with the attack of the confickr worm, which used vulnerabilities that Microsoft had already released patches for.

This problem is not just limited to operating systems, but any piece of software. Security problems often occur because software can be extremely complex which often leads to mistakes when it is created. It is also difficult to test every single possible input/output scenario of a piece of software to see if there are any problems or bugs.

Run regular updates to keep your computer safer!

A popular way for nasty people to compromise your computer and infect you with malware and viruses is to embed malicious code into websites. Their aim then is to get unsuspecting victims to visit the website, and so this code is downloaded to your computer via your website browser (such as Internet explorer of firefox).  Normal website code, such as HTML and CSS, is largely harmless for this purpose but other languages such as javascript, directX and flash may not be as friendly when used in this manner. The logical solution to this problem is never visit a website that you dont trust, but what if you do?

A highly recommended way to help prevent this sort of attack from happening is using a plug-in for the web browser firefox called ‘NoScript’. What this plugin does is block this type of code from downloading and running on your web browser by default. If you do visit a website that uses these features, and you trust them, then you have the ability to temporarily allow the website or add it to an ‘allowed’ list for future reference.

NoScript also has more additional features (including cross-site scripting protection), which will make you more secure when browsing the Internet. I would consider NoScript a Must have!

Find NoScript Here

The world of computer security is ever changing. There is way to much security news for me to be able to write and update you all about it on this small website, so here is a list of places you may be interested in to get the latest security information. I will try and write updates and articles as much as I can on SecuritySurge, but if you are interested in keeping up to date here are some places you could look:

The Register - the security section of the popular ‘the register’ is often updated with the latest news of security

Security Fix - A popular security blog from the washington Post, updated by Brian Krebs

SecurityNow Podcast – A weekly podcast by Leo Laport and Steve Gibson who talk about the latest security news and topics.

But don’t forget us!

Hello, Welcome to http://securitysurge.com

This website is about information and news regarding the world of computer security. Our aim is to educate and inform you about issues and news in an easy to understand format. We are a new website with a small but friendly community who have an interest in technology and computer security.

I am a university computer student. I hope to publish and share information that I think you may find usefull and interesting. Im also looking for people to help me out with the site, so if you think you have the technical knowledge and knowhow to contribute computer security related articles to this website email me:   contact [at] securitysurge [dot] com

See you soon!