Paul Kelly and colleagues at Loughborough University found that a disulfur dinitride (S₂N₂) polymer turned exposed fingerprints brown, as the polymer reaction was initiated from the near-undetectable remaining residues.

Traces of inkjet printer ink can also initiate the polymer. The detection limit is so low that details of a printed letter previously in an envelope could be read off the inside of the envelope after being exposed to S₂N₂.

"A one-covers-all versatile system like this has obvious potential," says Kelly.

"This work has demonstrated that it is possible to obtain fingerprints from surfaces that hitherto have been considered extremely difficult, if not impossible, to obtain," says Colin Lewis, scientific advisor at the UK Ministry of Defence. "The method proposed has shown that this system could well provide capabilities which could significantly enhance the tools available to forensic scientists in the future."

The exploit involved the very powerful (500KW) Aspidistra transmitter, coupled to a directional antenna farm. With that power, they could make it sound like a local station in the target area.

With a staff of fake announcers, a fake German band, and recordings of recent speeches from high-ranking Nazis, they would smoothly switch from merely relaying the German network to emulating it with their own staff. They could then make modifications to news broadcasts, occasionally creating panic and confusion.

German transmitters were switched off during air raids, to prevent them from being used as navigational aids for bombers. But many were connected into a network and broadcast the same content. When a targeted transmitter switched off, Aspidistra began transmitting on their original frequency, initially retransmitting the German network broadcast as received from a still-active station. As a deception, false content and pro-Allied propaganda would be inserted into the broadcast. The first such "intrusion" was carried out on March 25, 1945, as shown in the operations order at the right.

On March 30, 1945, "Aspidistra" intruded into the Berlin and Hamburg frequencies warning that the Allies were trying to spread confusion by sending false telephone messages from occupied towns to unoccupied towns. On April 8, 1945, "Aspidistra" intruded into the Hamburg and Leipzig channels to warn of forged banknotes in circulation. On April 9, 1945, there were announcements encouraging people to evacuate to seven bomb-free zones in central and southern Germany. All these announcements were false.

The German radio network tried announcing "The enemy is broadcasting counterfeit instructions on our frequencies. Do not be misled by them. Here is an official announcement of the Reich authority." The Aspidistra station made similar announcements, to cause confusion and make the official messages ineffective.

Salesforce.com’s Dreamforce conference takes place this week in SF. Billed as “The Cloud Computing Event of the Year”, the conference kicked off with a keynote by Benioff while people wearing puffy-white jackets and holding giant helium-filled cloud balloons stood outside.

Benioff announced partnerships with Facebook and Amazon.

Part 1: Force.com apps will be able to run on Facebook and leverage the Facebook users’ social network. An example shown was integrating “My Starbucks Idea” into Facebook. If a user submits an idea through Facebook, their friends can see it, comment or be prompted to submit their own.

Part 2: Force.com applications can now use Amazon’s cloud hosting services in addition to the public Force.com sites.

This is smart and a surprisingly non-megalomaniac way of doing things. Instead of trying to own the entire cloud stack (hmmm – someone just made a very different announcement), Salesforce looks like it’s focusing on what it does best – enabling application development in a hosted model. And letting Amazon take at least some of the future blame for any outages/interruptions in service (anyone who has Salesforce can say amen to that). That is smart.

In the paper, we propose a simple solution: take-down companies should share their raw, unverified feeds of phishing URLs with their competitors. Each company can examine the raw feed, pick out the websites impersonating their clients, and focus on removing these sites.

Since we presented our findings to the Anti-Phishing Working Group eCrime Researchers Summit, we have received considerable feedback from take-down companies. Take-down companies attending the APWG meeting understood that sharing would help speed up response times, but expressed reservations at sharing their feeds unless they were duly compensated. Eric Olsen of Cyveillance (another company offering take-down services) has written a comprehensive rebuttal of our recommendations. He argues that competition between take-down companies drives investment in efforts to detect more websites. Mandated sharing of phishing URL feeds, in his view, would undermine these detection efforts and cause take-down companies such as Cyveillance to exit the business.

I do have some sympathy for the objections raised by the take-down companies. As we state in the paper, free-riding (where one company relies on another to invest in detection so they don’t have to) is a concern for any sharing regime. Academic research studying other areas of information security (e.g., here and here), however, has shown that free-riding is unlikely to be so rampant as to drive all the best take-down companies out of offering service, as Mr. Olsen suggests.

While we can quibble over the extent of the threat from free free-riding, it should not detract from the conclusions we draw over the need for greater sharing. In our view, it would be unwise and irresponsible to accept the current status quo of keeping phishing URL feeds completely private. After all, competition without sharing has approximately doubled the lifetimes of phishing websites! The solution, then, is to devise a sharing mechanism that gives take-down companies the incentive to keep detecting more phishing URLs.

Here is our stab at devising a suitable sharing mechanism. We propose the creation of a members-only sharing club with compensation for net contributors paid for by net receivers. Take-down companies submit real-time copies of their entire feeds to a trusted third party (for the sake of argument, let’s assume that the APWG takes on this role). The APWG collates the individual feeds, marks the source of each submission (i.e., which take-down company) along with a timestamp. The APWG makes the amalgamated feed available immediately to all members. The members pick out phishing URLs impersonating their own clients, while ignoring the rest. Crucially, the expensive task of verifying phishing URLs and initiating take-down continues to be performed by the take-down company.

Periodically, the combined feed is audited to determine the reciprocity of contributions. Take-down companies provide a list of their clients to the auditor. The auditor then computes the number of phishing websites impersonating each take-down company’s clients that are missed by the takedown company but identified by others. The auditor also tallies the time difference for phishing websites that are identified by others first.

For example, suppose bank A1 has hired take-down company A to remove phishing sites on its behalf, and bank B1 has hired take-down company B. Suppose 500 phishing sites impersonate A1, and that A identifies 400 while B identifies an additional 100 sites missed by A. Likewise, suppose another 500 phishing sites impersonate bank B1, and that B identifies 300 while A identifies an additional 200 sites missed by B. B has received a net of 100 useful phishing sites more from A than B has given to A. Consequently, B should pay A a previously-agreed ‘finder’s fee’ for identifying these extra 100 websites.

The ‘finder’s fee’ provides additional incentive for take-down companies to invest in better phishing website detection. Designed properly, such a sharing club can overcome the potential for free-riding that companies such as Cyveillance fret about, while increasing sharing to shorten phishing website lifetimes.

Some subtleties must be mentioned, however. If the finder’s fee is big enough, some companies may be tempted to cheat to minimize their payout. For instance, underperforming take-down companies could claim to have independently discovered missing data from their feed shortly after collecting it from the shared feed. This can be mitigated by adding a credible threat of detection — inserting a few dubious fake phishing URLs that only appear in the shared feed. If the company claims to have ‘independently’ rediscovered these URLs, then they will be caught cheating. Another issue is that the auditing system does incur some overhead, which could be avoided if sharing was made unconditional.

To sum up, we recognize that many take-down companies will be reticent to share. However, we feel that sharing is too important to the goal of tackling phishing to brush aside because of a few inevitable complications. For the good of protecting consumers, the anti-phishing industry should learn to co-operate!

One of the most interesting operations was the laundry mat [sic]. Having lost many troops and civilians to bombings, the Brits decided they needed to determine who was making the bombs and where they were being manufactured. One bright fellow recommended they operate a laundry and when asked "what the hell he was talking about," he explained the plan and it was incorporated -- to much success.

The plan was simple: Build a laundry and staff it with locals and a few of their own. The laundry would then send out "color coded" special discount tickets, to the effect of "get two loads for the price of one," etc. The color coding was matched to specific streets and thus when someone brought in their laundry, it was easy to determine the general location from which a city map was coded.

While the laundry was indeed being washed, pressed and dry cleaned, it had one additional cycle -- every garment, sheet, glove, pair of pants, was first sent through an analyzer, located in the basement, that checked for bomb-making residue. The analyzer was disguised as just another piece of the laundry equipment; good OPSEC [operational security]. Within a few weeks, multiple positives had shown up, indicating the ingredients of bomb residue, and intelligence had determined which areas of the city were involved. To narrow their target list, [the laundry] simply sent out more specific coupons [numbered] to all houses in the area, and before long they had good addresses. After confirming addresses, authorities with the SAS teams swooped down on the multiple homes and arrested multiple personnel and confiscated numerous assembled bombs, weapons and ingredients. During the entire operation, no one was injured or killed.

Almost as bad as the Sprint PCS password reset fiasco that made the news in April, here is the Yahoo Mail password reset screen:

As you can see, you need to know the user’s birthday, country of residence, and postal code. Not difficult information to dig up in Palin’s case, as shown here. After you enter this information correctly, you are asked to type in the alternate e-mail address that’s associated with the account. But they give you hints — so if your alternate e-mail was sarah@alaska.gov, they would show you s****@a*****.gov.

Assuming you guess the alternate e-mail correctly, Yahoo mails a password reset link to that address. So it’s likely that the attacker may have also had to gain access to her alternate e-mail account. Either that, or they exploited a vulnerability in the Yahoo password reset mechanism itself, which seems less likely but not implausible.

So Yahoo itself probably didn’t get hacked, per se, even though there will probably be a lot of FUD in the media about that.

Imagine you're in charge of infiltrating sleeper agents into the United States. The year is 1983, and the proliferation of identity databases is making it increasingly difficult to create fake credentials. Ten years ago, someone could have just shown up in the country and gotten a driver's license, Social Security card and bank account -- possibly using the identity of someone roughly the same age who died as a young child -- but it's getting harder. And you know that trend will only continue. So you decide to grow your own identities.

Call it "identity farming." You invent a handful of infants. You apply for Social Security numbers for them. Eventually, you open bank accounts for them, file tax returns for them, register them to vote, and apply for credit cards in their name. And now, 25 years later, you have a handful of identities ready and waiting for some real people to step into them.

There are some complications, of course. Maybe you need people to sign their name as parents -- or, at least, mothers. Maybe you need to doctors to fill out birth certificates. Maybe you need to fill out paperwork certifying that you're home-schooling these children. You'll certainly want to exercise their financial identity: depositing money into their bank accounts and withdrawing it from ATMs, using their credit cards and paying the bills, and so on. And you'll need to establish some sort of addresses for them, even if it is just a mail drop.

You won't be able to get driver's licenses or photo IDs on their name. That isn't critical, though; in the U.S., more than 20 million adult citizens don't have photo IDs. But other than that, I can't think of any reason why identity farming wouldn't work.

Here's the real question: Do you actually have to show up for any part of your life?

Again, I made this all up. I have no evidence that anyone is actually doing this. It's not something a criminal organization is likely to do; twenty-five years is too distant a payoff horizon. The same logic holds true for terrorist organizations; it's not worth it. It might have been worth it to the KGB -- although perhaps harder to justify after the Soviet Union broke up in 1991 -- and might be an attractive option to existing intelligence adversaries like China.

Immortals could also use this trick to self-perpetuate themselves, inventing their own children and gradually assuming their identity, then killing their parents off. They could even show up for their own driver's license photos, wearing a beard as the father and blue spiked hair as the son. I’m told this is a common idea in Highlander fan fiction.

The point isn't to create another movie plot threat, but to point out the central role that data has taken on in our lives. Previously, I've said that we all have a data shadow that follows us around, and that more and more institutions interact with our data shadows instead of with us. We only intersect with our data shadows once in a while -- when we apply for a driver's license or passport, for example -- and those interactions are authenticated by older, less-secure interactions. The rest of the world assumes that our photo IDs glue us to our data shadows, ignoring the rather flimsy connection between us and our plastic cards. (And, no, REAL-ID won't help.)

It seems to me that our data shadows are becoming increasingly distinct from us, almost with a life of their own. What's important now is our shadows; we're secondary. And as our society relies more and more on these shadows, we might even become unnecessary.

Our data shadows can live a perfectly normal life without us.

This essay previously appeared on Wired.com.

EDITED TO ADD (9/9): Interesting commentary.