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Ultrasaur Blog
Keeping track of exciting new threats to your digital records.
Archive for the ‘misc’ Category
Thursday, July 23rd, 2009
If you ask a random person on the street if digital photos can be trusted, the answer is probably going to be a no — even though many prints live most of their lives digitally.
Adobe and others are working on software to heuristically tell if a photo has been altered. From a mathematical perspective, I find this software fascinating, but in a sense it’s self defeating:
- No matter how much the software costs, I suspect that phot forgers are also software pirates, so they’re going to have this software
- You can now iterate on your forged imaged until it passes the test
So essentially a tool for detecting forgeries is a perfect tool for creating forgeries.
Tags: digital media, fraud
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Friday, July 17th, 2009
When we demo, usually one of the first things I say is “You have digital records” because almost every organization is moving towards having more and more of their content in document management systems of some stripe.
But it’s always interesting to read about the tiny fraction that aren’t, like New York Police Department, which still spends a third of a million dollars every year on typewriters.
Most of the city’s arrest forms have been computerized, but property and evidence vouchers printed on carbon-paper forms still require the use of typewriters.
…officials are working on software that would eliminate the need for the typewriters.
Tags: funny, government, paper, police
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Tuesday, July 7th, 2009
Using a Social Security Number as a password is fairly common in the US for reasons I can’t understand.
Of course this password is nowhere near random, different states get different prefixes and now:
With just two attempts, the researchers correctly guessed the first five digits of SSNs for 60 percent of deceased Americans born between 1989 and 2003.
Oddly, the solution is the old (and wrongheaded):
The new findings remind consumers that they should use caution when sharing data online
Which is a little strange considering that all that was involved in this attack is knowing the victim’s date of birth — the kind of information that has been published in old fashioned local newspapers for a lot longer than the internet has been around.
Tags: data, databases, stub
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Friday, May 15th, 2009
Hackers ‘destroy’ flight sim site:
Yes, we dutifully backed up our servers every day. Unfortunately, we backed up the servers between our two servers.
Backups: different medium, different location.
Tags: stub
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Sunday, April 26th, 2009
Revenue Canada refuses to pay for million-dollar mistake, where a business owner couldn’t produce records after:
“someone [at the Canadian tax agency] had put them on the pile that was to be shredded”
Tags: oops
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Tuesday, April 7th, 2009
Securely disposing of records is so hard that even the NSA has had trouble doing it.
The NSA had an incinerator in their old Arlington Hall facility that was designed to reduce top secret crypto materials and such to ash. Someone discovered that it wasn’t in fact working.
Although they buried the “palm sized” chunks so well that they couldn’t find most of them, still I love any story where:
for years the screen at the top of the stack had a habit of burning through and then it would spew partially burned classified COMSEC and SIGINT materials round and about the Post and surrounding neighborhood.
Tags: destruction, funny
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Thursday, April 2nd, 2009
Now that April 1st has come and gone, we cans see that the Conficker threat was a little over blown. I’m not surprised, fear sells for online media outlets too, and antivirus moves quickly so any virus that included a multi-week delay on its payload is going to have a hard go of it.
But if you’re still concerned, here’s a quick check, see all 6 pictures: you’re fine. (Thanks: zero day)
Tags: itsok, virus
Posted in misc | No Comments »
Monday, March 30th, 2009
KPMG weighs in to remind us that employees do commit fraud
The E-crime Survey 2009, presented at the E-Crime Congress in London on Tuesday, surveyed 307 private companies, government organizations, and law enforcement agencies.
In the survey, KPMG said that fraud committed by managers, employees and customers tripled compared to 2007, which indicates that the recession will likely only exacerbate those problems.
Tags: crime, hacking, stub
Posted in Uncategorized, misc | 1 Comment »
Saturday, March 28th, 2009
Fun new data storage error in the Heilbronn DNA Mixup: “It now turns out that the several-hundred-men task force might have really been chasing a phantom… All the swabs used in the forensics works were sourced from the same supplier.” Yup.
When the watchers become the watched: “Surveillance cameras have captured the faces of criminal suspects in banks, in elevators and on street corners. But they have also surfaced in an unexpected law enforcement role: as evidence against police officers accused of misconduct or of lying on the witness stand.”
Tags: misc, stub
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