Growing threats to security and privacy

30 Dec 2005 - Dave

“What is a damn rootkit anyway? I don’t know. Most people don’t know. It will all be forgotten soon!” CEO Sony BMG.

The answer to Sony BMG’s CEO is simple.

A rootkit gives carte blanche to whoever can take advantage of it. That can be Sony or any other cyber criminal! Nothing on the infected PC is safe.

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The threat of extreme data miners.

• Extreme data miners are the folks who make or use spyware.
• Data mining is an accepted practice among advertisers and marketers. Large companies like Yahoo, Microsoft and others are quietly using less extreme spyware tools.

The threat of legal system abuse to protect spyware vendors.

• Security vendors are being sued by spyware and unsolicited email vendors.
• As a result the antivirus, antispyware and other security tools are neutered to avoid legal action.
• Spyware and unsolicited email vendors have also sued the Open Source and volunteer groups.

The threat of uncontrolled, unsolicited e-mail and the coming problem of voice spam over VOIP.

• The FTC made the clueless claim in December that the CAN-SPAM law was successful. Any drop in spam is due to improved technology and more aware email users. It is more likely that the FTC was coerced into making the claim by the Direct Marketing Association Lobby.
• I did background checks on a number of vendors who offer outsourcing services for webhosting and email hosting. They promote better security and better control of spam. The majority of those vendors also hosted unsolicited email senders who were currently flooding email systems I am responsible for. That is a conflict of interest in my book.
• VoIP telephony is a new industry. It is growing along with the greater bandwidth Internet connections. Caution is required when shopping for a VoIP provider. Many providers are basing their business model with a heavy dependency on advertising. That translates into voice spam telemarketing. Read the terms of use carefully.

The threat of extreme copy protection.

• Copy protection schemes are putting the end user at risk. I respect a company’s right to protect their products but some of their actions are placing end users at risk.
• The larger the market share that a vendor has the more extreme the copy protection. When a vendor’s product saturates a market there is more return from fighting piracy than investing in sales or customer service.
• When evalutating software purchases it is necessary to balance the features against restrictive copy protection.