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Friday 22 August 2008
By Suki Kott on Friday 22 August 2008, 23:27
According to an article by the AP, FEMA's PBX system was hacked into and used to make about $12,000 in phone calls. Given the wealth of information on how PBXs work (and their potential flaws,) one would think that Homeland Security's FEMA would have made sure their system was hardened against such exploits.
Oh -- and the calls were made to Asia and the Middle East.
Saturday 5 April 2008
By Suki Kott on Saturday 5 April 2008, 09:47
The issue of a national biometric authentication program is brought up in The Industry Standard. The authors suggest that such a scheme would be useful for "maintaining and defending our control of our own identity and personal data".
Which brings to mind an interesting point: our fingerprint, iris scan, or what have you becomes yet another piece of personal data that we have to worry about maintaining control of. Presumably this piece of data would be managed by a government agency or contractor, and one would question how well this data would be protected.
Monday 4 February 2008
By Suki Kott on Monday 4 February 2008, 16:39
Simon Hunt has created a (very cool) Google Map of international cryptography laws and regulations by location. It also pinpoints related laws in many US states.
Where was this map before the US declassified crypto algorithms as munitions? Folks with RSA algorithm tattoos could have used this to see when and where they were a national security threat.