Defending The Kingdom

A few posts from the Defending the Kingdom archive, which summarize well the reasons I keep this blog.

1. Why security is a problem that will, unfortunately, always be with us.
2. Why we can’t expect technology to solve all of our security problems.
3. How to think about security problems as a compromise between security and effort spent getting it.

Where real kidnappings are common, criminals can stage fake kidnappings and get the same payoff:

The phone call begins with the cries of an anguished child calling for a parent: “Mama! Papa!” The youngster’s sobs are quickly replaced by a husky male voice that means business.

“We’ve got your child,” he says in rapid-fire Spanish, usually adding an expletive for effect and then rattling off a list of demands that might include cash or jewels dropped off at a certain street corner or a sizable deposit made to a local bank.

The twist is that little Pablo or Teresa is safe and sound at school, not duct-taped to a chair in a rundown flophouse somewhere or stuffed in the back of a pirate taxi. But when the cellphone call comes in, that is not at all clear.

[...]

Authorities say hundreds of different criminal gangs are engaged in various telephone scams. Besides the false kidnappings, callers falsely tell people they have won cars or money. Sometimes, people are told to turn off their cellphones for an hour so the service can be repaired; then, relatives are called and told that the cellphone’s owner has been kidnapped. Ransom demands have even been made by text message.

Add another privacy threat to the list of things you can do nothing about:

A technical glitch gave the F.B.I. access to the e-mail messages from an entire computer network — perhaps hundreds of accounts or more — instead of simply the lone e-mail address that was approved by a secret intelligence court as part of a national security investigation, according to an internal report of the 2006 episode.

[...]

The episode is an unusual example of what has become a regular if little-noticed occurrence, as American officials have expanded their technological tools: government officials, or the private companies they rely on for surveillance operations, sometimes foul up their instructions about what they can and cannot collect.

Going through old Bruce Schneier essays, I came across one that downplays the danger of cyberterrorism:

The worry is that a terrorist would cause a problem more serious than a natural disaster, but this kind of thing is surprisingly hard to do. Worms and viruses have caused all sorts of network disruptions, but it happened by accident. In January 2003, the SQL Slammer worm disrupted 13,000 ATMs on the Bank of America’s network. But before it happened, you couldn’t have found a security expert who understood that those systems were dependent on that vulnerability. We simply don’t understand the interactions well enough to predict which kinds of attacks could cause catastrophic results, and terrorist organizations don’t have that sort of knowledge either — even if they tried to hire experts.

But Schneier says that worrying about cyberterrorism can have useful side-effects:

Luckily, the same countermeasures aimed at cyberterrorists will also prevent hackers and criminals. If organizations secure their computer networks for the wrong reasons, it will still be the right thing to do.

In May 2007, I commented on the Consumer Reports 2006 State of the Net assessment. Here are the results of the 2007 State of the Net report:

Spam

Your chances: 1 in 2

Viruses

Your chances: 1 in 5, with a typical cost of $100.

Spyware

Your chances: 1 in 11, with a typical cost of $100.

Phishing

Your chances of losing money from an account: 1 in 81, with a typical cost of $200.

Encouragingly, the odds of getting nicked by each one of these threats fell since 2006, except in the case of phishing (formerly 1 in 115, meaning phishing attacks are becoming cleverer and more widespread). The cost for each malady stayed roughly the same, with phishing the exception once again. Last year, phishing victims typically lost $850, so the number has fallen considerably.