Defending The Kingdom

If you’re a corporate/business user of McAfee’s Antivirus program, read this before doing anything else today. (Unless you want to destroy your computers’ file systems on reboot.)

Carry on.

Read this list of commonly used passwords and see if you get a little nervous. Double twangs of deserved nervousness if you use the same password for every account.

The post has some solid advice about making and managing great passwords, too.

According to one study, anyway.

A recently released report claims that Internet Explorer 8 (IE8) is more than twice as effective at blocking malware sites than its nearest rival.

According to NSS Labs, which conducted the Microsoft-sponsored study, IE8 blocked 69% of the 492 malware-distributing Web sites that were included in the survey data. Mozilla’s Firefox, meanwhile, blocked only 30% of those same sites.

That the study was paid for by Microsoft doesn’t help its credibility (check out some of the complaints that are cropping up), but it’s worth considering as a single data point.

I consider browser security to be a crucial pillar of overall system security at this point. Malware infected sites, which can include otherwise trustworthy sites that have been hacked, are becoming fairly common.

Just a heads up for you Twitter users:

A phishing attack that began striking U.S. Twitter profiles this weekend is still going strong and isn’t showing any signs of letting up. As VentureBeat reports, the scam operates through a direct message reading, “Lol. this you?” Once users click on it, they’re sent to a fake Twitter login page, where they could be tricked into revealing their login and password.

It seems to me that threats like this one are becoming more common, probably because most folks have become pretty good at fending off standard viruses. The major browsers vendors are working hard to inure their software to phishing threats, but it’s hard to protect people from their own gullibility.

NatWest, a UK-based bank, has a unique login page that makes it safe to sign into your online bank account even on untrusted computers. The login page makes it impossible to employ the Revised Vesik Method that is ordinarily the best way to beat keyloggers, but it more than compensates with its clever login requirements.

When logging in, the first set of fields ask for just three of the four or more digits that make up your account PIN, and the next set of fields asks for just three of the eight or more characters from your password (you are using eight characters or more for your passwords, right?). The specific characters you need to enter change each time you successfully login.

So suppose a keylogger captures every stroke you enter – are you safe? Yes, since the six digits that a keylogger could scrape are likely to prove useless when the next login page is generated. The new page will ask for different characters, and it won’t regenerate new requirements until those characters are successfully entered. That’s important, because otherwise it might be possible to refresh the page until the desired six digits are requested again.

As safe as other techniques?

You might wonder if the trick of asking for just six digits means that the login procedure is less safe than one that asks for eight. I believe it is, but not in any sense that matters as long as there is a limit to the number of incorrect login attempts that can be made. Like most banks, Natwest hinders password-guessers by temporarily blocking access to online banking after a certain number of failed login attempts

So, how much less safe is NatWest’s request for six digits instead of eight? Well, guessing an eight digit password composed of numbers and varied case letters would see success about 1 in 200 trillion times; guessing a single number from a four digit PIN and then guessing the correct three digits from the same password as before would see success about 1 in 2.4 million times. There is a difference, but it doesn’t really matter if the temporary lockout feature is working properly. In my judgment, the anti-fishing benefits make NatWest’s login procedure safer than login pages that ask for complete passwords.

The one downside is that logging in is inconvenient, since you have to mentally count to the right digit in your password before entering it. Still, Natwest’s login requirements ought to be considered industry best-practices. I hope to see more banks adopt the technique.