Andrew Patrick

A military supplier has been making lots of money selling dowsing-like devices to troops in Iraq that are supposed to detect explosives and other nasty materials. They devices come equipped with different programming cards to customize the substances they search for.

There has been speculation that the devices are fake and the programming cards don’t do anything. Now comes an analysis of the cards by careful dis-assembly, and the results are predictable…

There is no way in which this device could be programmed to distinguish the many different substances that the ADE651 manufacturer claimed it could, not to mention that any useful interaction with such an LC circuit would require a transmitter antenna, a power source, and lots of other components that the ADE651 appears to lack.

My new employer, The Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada, is again calling for research and public education proposals for its contributions programs.

Research into the privacy implications of information technologies is one of the four priority areas for funding support under this year’s program. Emerging information technologies can threaten the privacy of Canadians or enhance it – and sometimes both simultaneously. For that reason, the Office is especially interested in receiving funding applications from researchers examining, from a scientific or technical standpoint, the impact of information technologies on privacy.

Not-for-profit organizations, including education institutions, industry and trade associations, consumer, voluntary and advocacy organizations are all eligible under the program. Up to $50,000 is available for successful projects. The deadline for submitting applications is February 26, 2010.

More information is available at:

http://www.priv.gc.ca/resource/cp/p_index_e.cfm

A new report from Trusteer has shown that phishing attacks are rarely successful, but still worth millions of dollars to the attackers.

Trusteer makes a browser plugin called Rapport which is given away for free to customers of certain banks (including some Canadian banks). The plugin monitors for phishing attacks and can detect when someone is submitting login information to a false banking site. Rapport has been installed on about 3 million computers in Europe and North America, and data collected by the plugin provides a valuable look into the damage caused by phishing attacks.

In the recent study, Trusteer monitored the data from the Rapport plugin during a three month period, and in that time it analyzed phishing attacks against 10 large banks in the US and Europe. The key findings were:

• each bank was targeted by an average of 16 phishing attacks per week (or about 832 attacks per year)
• out of every million bank customers, about 12 (0.00125%) are lured into visiting each false web site that was studied. This is a very low success rate, but…
• given that a bank experiences many phishing attacks in a year, about 1.04% of it customers were lured to one of the false web sites each year
• once people were lured to a false web site, about 50% of the time they entered and submitted their login information
• doing the math, this means that about 0.47% of a banks customers revealed their login information to criminals each year
• if the losses from stolen login information total $2,000 per case, then a bank with a million customers lost about $9.4 million per year
• …and that money is going to criminals

Whoever said that crime does not pay did not try phishing.

A Chinese woman managed to enter Japan illegally by having plastic surgery to alter her fingerprints, thus fooling immigration controls, police claim.

This is a case of a woman who underwent surgery to alter her fingerprints in order to get past Japanese immigration procedures. Apparently, the measures worked and she was only found out when arrested on an unrelated charge.

The surgery switched the fingerprints of the thumbs and index fingers between the two hands, presumably to allow the person to present the original or modified fingerprint when given the option of which hand to present to a scanner.

It makes me wonder if fingerprint transplants between people are also a viable threat. It is also not clear how 10-print systems that record fingerprints from all the fingers, such as those now used by US immigration, who handle such finger swapping.

Today I am launching NetSafetyGuide.com, an ad-supported site offering practical, up-to-date news and tips about Internet safety and security.

I believe that there is very little down-to-earth, practical information available for individuals and small businesses who want to stay secure on the Internet, but don’t know how to do it. My intention with this site is to provide current, direct advice and news that people will find useful.

Drop by and check it out.

I am working on building an encryption solution for novice Windows users who do not have administrator privileges on the machines they use. Giving the users admin access is not an option because of the environment they work in.

I have explored a couple of different technologies and I would like to hear what other people have done. Do you know of any good technologies for this problem?

The encryption solution would primarily be used for safely storing files on USB flash drives that are carried between work locations, but it might also be used for safe storage on laptop and office computers.

I am a big fan of TrueCrypt and have had a lot of success creating encrypted containers on USB drives. But TrueCrypt requires an admin account to install and run the software, so these users can’t use it. It seems that most encryption solutions also require administrator privileges.

I have tried FreeOTFE, which offers a no-install version called FreeOTFE Explorer. This software can be copied to a USB drive and then run by a non-admin user. The user can created an encrypted container, mount it, and then drag files and folders into the container using an Explorer-like interface. So far, so good.

The problem with FreeOTFE Explorer is that the users cannot work with the files within the secure container. They can’t, for example, double click on a .doc file in the Explorer-like window and launch Word to edit the file. The only thing they can do with files in the secure container is extract them to an unsecure disk.

This means that a workflow using FreeOTFE Explorer would have to be something like:

• open the container
• extract the file to an unsecure disk
• edit and save the file
• copy the file back to the encrypted container, using an overwrite option
• removing the copy on the unsecure disk

This is overly cumbersome and likely to lead to insecurities if the unsecure disk is not kept clean. I would really like these novice users to be able to work with files in the same way they are used to on unsecure disks.

The other option I have looked at is encrypted USB flash drives. Some drives, such as the ones from IronKey, have hardware encryption technology that can be used without administrator privileges. I don’t own one of these but, as far as I can tell, their operation should be transparent and users should be able to click on their files to open applications in the usual way.

IronKey drives, and other similar hardware encryption drives, are expensive, with prices being 4-5 times that of a normal USB drive. However, they may be the best solution to my problem, at least for securing files on USB drives. They would not provide a solution for secure storage on laptop hard drives or desktop computers.

Do you of any other encryption solutions for users without administrator privileges? Please post a comment below.