I had every intention of blogging during the long holiday weekend. Catching up on email and work at some point was on the agenda as well.  However, this morning in the middle of email my laptop froze up.  I could not do anything with it and so had to power down.  On start up I got a missing media notice and it looks like my hard drive went kaput.  Luckily my Windows Mobile phone has everything I need to stay connected. Email, typepad blog platform, etc.  Well we went to my family in Hollywood Beach for a fireworks display and BBQ tonight.  I left my phone in a backpack, so I would not take it in the beach or water with me.  Great it rained, the backpack got soaked and my phone is down now too! 

So I think it is God telling me to go off grid this weekend.  I am writing this on Bonnie's desktop machine. The kids are staying with my cousins and Bonnie and I are headed down to Key Largo for the weekend.  I have her spare pink Razor with my Sim card for phone calls, but that is it.  No email, no computers, no blogging!  Speak to you all Sunday night or Monday, enjoy your weekend!

Hopefully, I had one article written scheduled for tomorrow morning. I hope it publishes.

Some of the largest and medium-sized U.S. airports report close to 637,000 laptops lost each year, according to the Ponemon Institute survey released Monday. Laptops are most commonly lost at security checkpoints, according to the survey. Close to 10,278 laptops are reported lost every week at 36 of the largest U.S. airports, and 65 percent of those laptops are not reclaimed, the survey said. Around 2,000 laptops are recorded lost at the medium-sized airports, and 69 percent are not reclaimed. Travelers seem to lack confidence that they will recover lost laptops. About 77 percent of people surveyed said they had no hope of recovering a lost laptop at the airport, with 16 percent saying they wouldn't do anything if they lost their laptop during business travel. About 53 percent said that laptops contain confidential company information, with 65 percent taking no steps to protect the information.

I went to the salon today to ‘get my nails did’ and was greeted with quite a ruckus. The entire staff is Vietnamese- no big surprise there- but the owners and most employees speak English extremely well and so everyone is always chit-chatting throughout the salon.

The wife side of the husband-wife team was especially giddy as she shared a little gem of a story with me today… and I didn’t feel I’d be doing you justice to keep it to myself. 

They (the salon staff) all live in one of the larger cities here in NC. One of their friends (a middle-aged guy) was out shopping Monday and was sitting in his car in a parking lot during a coming- or going- to a store. A young girl (mid-20’s) came up to his car and motioned to ask for use of his cell phone.

Now, at this point in the story, I could have told you the rest…

He opened the window a bit and the young lady asked to borrow his phone for a moment to call a family member. Turns out she had some car troubles and needed a ride. Being the nice gentleman that he is, he lent her the phone and she took a couple of steps away to make the call. Only… she didn’t stop. Evidently she got about 4 cars down the row before our chivalrous guy got out of the car and gave chase.

When he got in reach, she pushed him down to the ground and - yep - ran back to his car, phone still in hand… and drove away.

He now has no car and no phone. So, ironically enough, he then had to approach a stranger and politely ask for the use of their cell to phone home and let the group know he was bamboozled. A few tears were shed, but his wife assured him it would be fine and he shouldn’t be scared. (No, I’m not making that up).

I was giggling right along with her (and the guy’s wife, who happened to be there).

Moments later I thought to myself, “I hope that doesn’t happen to me!” Almost in the same instant I realized… it probably wouldn’t. I’ve been a bit of a paranoid freak since I was little, thanks probably in most part to having two ex-military intelligence parents. For all my life I’ve been raised with ‘the security mindset’ as Schneier refers to it.

Always suspicious… always calculating… always aware… and certainly never underestimating a situation.

And so then I had to muse… WHAT WAS HE THINKING leaving the car running and unlocked to go after the siren with the cell? For the sake of politeness, I kept my question to my ‘inside voice’, but I do have to wonder why you’d sacrifice the security of a vehicle for a $50 cell phone.

The moral of the story…  There are two. 1) Involve someone with a ‘security mindset’ and 2) Your security is only as strong as your people. A sweet damsel in distress… social engineering at it’s finest…

# # #

Back in the saddle again. It’s a short week for both sides of the border here in North America. Happy post Canada Day to my brethren and a Happy (and approaching) July 4th to our cousins to the south.

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And now, the news…

1. 2600 HOPE conference bringing hacking to New York City (and we’ll see you there) | CNET
2. FBI Investigating Major ATM Hacking Ring | Las Vegas Now
3. Study: Unpatched Web Browsers Prevalent on the Internet | PC World
4. Netherlands man arrested for hacking 50,000 credit cards | Security Pro Portal
5. Vint Cerf Says Government Needs To Encourage Internet Competition | Information Week
6. The Government’s Top Hackers? | Veracode
7. HSBC sites vulnerable to XSS flaws, could aid phishing attacks | ZDNet
8. HMRC goes cap-in-hand to Americans for help with fraud | The Independent

Tags: News, Daily Links, Security Blog, Information Security, Security News

A while back I wrote about how much I liked the Xobni email add on for Outlook. A short time later I heard rumors that Microsoft was buying them, but that appears not to be true at this point, though I still think it makes a lot of sense.  In the meantime, I have continued to use and be impressed with Xobni.  I have come to rely on its ultra fast search and the way it organizes threads of conversations and groups of people, as well as attached files.

An interesting thing though about Xobni. As I was given invitations, I would send them out to people I know.  Though many of them liked the functionality of the product, they said that it slowed their Outlook to a crawl and just did not think the performance hit was worth it.  Maybe I got used to the slowness or I am just not seeing it, but I did not see what they saw. In any event, many people were not using the product.

Well the Xobni folks just released a new version of the product that promises improved performance. I hope that helps those people who were complaining about this. It also offers several other new features, the biggest being LinkedIn integration.  I really like this LinkedIn integration as it gives you yet another layer of information on the people writing to you. All in all, I think this just makes the product more indispensable than it is already.  It is now available to the public, so I would encourage you to check it out for yourself!

The first session, on deception, was fascinating. It emphasised the huge range of problems, from detecting deception in interpersonal contexts such as interrogation through the effects of context and misdirection to how we might provide better trust signals to computer users.

Over the past seven years, security economics has gone from nothing to a thriving research field with over 100 active researchers. Over the next seven I believe that security psychology should do at least as well. I hope I’ll find enough odd minutes to live blog this first workshop as it happens!

[Edited to add:] See comments for live blog posts on the sessions; Bruce Schneier is also blogging this event.

One of the projects leaders uses terms that should warm every New Yorker's heart, if he or she knew what they meant. IT head Paul Cosgrave says the system will overcome silos, an often disparaging term for the separation of resources across groups that can only expensively be overcome. It's the government and business equivalent of the academic problem of a lack of cross-discipline focus.

One of the first applications allows sanitation workforce managers a frighteningly precise amount of knowledge about routes, activities, and behavior of trucks in their territory. Let's hope that's not misused! Efficiency is one thing; micro-management is another.

Another project is testing wireless water-meter reading. The city hopes to spend $90 per meter for the upgrade and shed part of a $12.2m contract with Con Edison that covers 850,000 units. What should be useful about this is that problems can be detected by monitoring waterflow patterns, which in turn allows the often huge problems that take months to notice (occurring underground or in basements where rivers formerly flowed) to be stopped before they turn into multi-million-dollar problems for property owners or the city. Anytime anything happens in Manhattan, it's a multi-million dollar problem.