Category: Security

  • Code thieves and the people who hire them

    I saw in the news that there’ve been two cases lately of programmers stealing source code on the way out the door from their employers, presumably to use at their next job.  In both cases the code was for financial companies’ high-speed trading systems. Let’s acknowledge that high-speed trading systems are more complicated than, say, […]

  • Logistics executives don’t read Batman

    From the latest Canadian Business: The secret shipping news: Intelligence services use import manifests to help clients identify consumer trends and keep track of rival products. Briefly, it’s often possible to learn key strategic information about a company from its shipping manifests, which can be found through US Customs declarations or companies like Import Genius, which can […]

  • A lack of thinking things through

    I’ve had this in my reader’s open tabs for over a month now – totally old news, but they found out that people were able to tap into the video feed from U.S. Predator drones using software that costs around $25. And yes, it’s in my browser because there’s a part of me that wants […]

  • Primus shows how consecutive IDs in a URL can have massive negative consequences

    Back when I developed ticketing software for events, the clients would complain that I made the ticket ID too long.  I feel vindicated today. Via a post to the Torcamp mailing list (from Stephen, last name left out to give some semblence of after-the-fact privacy,) I found out about an email campaign being run for […]

  • We need a captcha for captchas

    OK, so captchas (I suppose I should capitalize that, but too… darned… lazy) exist to detect that you’re a real human and not some script that’s up to no good. But… What if you’re a human who’s being used by script that’s up to no good? Via Seth: someone’s come up with an app that […]