Could The Incidence Of Spam Decrease?
By Ian Scott
According to “Government Computer News,” the majority of spam email are associated with domains that are registered with 20 domain name registrars – 2.5% of all domain registrars. Read the rest of this entry »
Topics: Spam/Anti-Spam |
Should You Turn Off Your Flash Player? CRITICAL Vulnerability
By Ian Scott
May 30th, 2008
It’s been reported that there is a serious vulnerability in Adobe’s Flash Player. By visiting a website that has Adobe Flash media and allowing the media to run on your computer with Adobe Flash Player, you are at risk of having your computer compromised if the Flash file has been created to take advantage of the vulnerability. Read the rest of this entry »
Topics: Computer Security |
When Is A Security Officer Not A Security Officer?
By Ian Scott
This post follows right along with my last post critical of Governments attempting to “fix” and make prohibitions and bans.
Presently, in Ontario Canada, it is prohibited to call a security officer a “security officer.” Perhaps some of those bright eyed lawyers that become politicians ought to take a course in Semantics 101 as well as a bit of logic.
Now, the Province of Alberta is following suit with its Bill 10 – The Security Services And Investigators Act. Fines for calling yourself a “security officer” if you are a security officer are proposed to be up to $5,000.00 and/or a year in jail. Got that? A year in jail for calling yourself a security officer instead of using the term “security guard.”
Apparently some bimbos in Ontario and Alberta figure that you might get confused by a security officer calling himself a security officer. You might confuse that with “Police Officer.” I guess to some, the word police just sounds so much similar to security – two syllables in the word “police” being half that of the word security.
I wonder if they’ll be renaming Conservation Officers to Conservation Guards or something.
Topics: Just Plain Silly |
Ontario Governments At It Again
By Ian Scott
Seems that just about everywhere you look, governments are trying to protect us from ourselves. As reported in The London Fog, the Ontario government is now considering following other jurisdictions in banning cell phone usage in cars. But not just cell phones – the Ontario Government is also considering banning smoking in cars where children are present and possibly prohibiting the use of other gadgets.
And in Toronto, the Mayor wants to ban the discharge of firearms except by police officers within the city. This ban would mean the shutting down of several legal and safe firearm ranges where some Torontonians go to enjoy their hobby of target shooting.
Such government intrusion is boneheaded and stupid. Whilst the aim maybe to improve the security of individuals living in their jurisdictions, in the long run, such bans and prohibitions do little to protect anyone. Take the cell phone ban for example – there are already laws that deal with unsafe or dangerous driving – and someone who uses a cell phone but is driving dangerously could be charged under that law while leaving others who use cell phones (the Police themselves use gadgets all the time while driving!) alone.
Sometimes what governments do in the name of “protection” or “security” is absurd.
Topics: Personal Security |
Free IT Security Resources
By Ian Scott
Browse through our extensive list of free IT – Security magazines, white papers, downloads and podcasts to find the titles that best match your skills and interests; topics include authentication, hacking, internet privacy and internet firewalls. Simply complete the application form and submit it.
Topics: Computer Security, Intrusion Detection |
Quick Linux Partitioning Tip
By Ian Scott
One way that black hat hackers can get access to your server is by locating a vulnerable application or script that might allow them to upload files to the server. The tmp (/tmp) directory is a directory where such files might get uploaded to.
This quick tip won’t guarantee that your Linux box will never be hacked or cracked or intruded upon, but it can minimize the ability of a cracker to get access and then run executables that have been uploaded to the /tmp directory.
Here’s what you do:
First, you create the /tmp directory on its own partition. This is easiest of course when you are first installing Linux on your computer and are asked if you want to manually partition the hard drives. If you didn’t manually partition the drives and place /tmp on its own partition, it can still be done – but I’ll leave that for another post.
Once the /tmp directory has its own partition and you’ve installed the operating system, you then open up the /etc/fstab file using your favorite editor such as Vi or Emacs.
Remove the word defaults and replace with rw,nosuid,noexec then save the file.
You’ll then need to remount the /tmp partition with the following command:
mount -oremount loop,rw,nosuid,noexec /tmp
Of course, you will need to be root to do the above.
This won’t stop nasty people from uploading files to your /tmp directory, but it will prevent them from being able to run any executable programs from the /tmp directory.
Topics: Computer Security |
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