Jon’s Network

Computer Defense has a Denial of Service Survey to research people’s perception of it.

A computer crimes agent from the FBI told Richard Bejtlich that a company can reduce vulnerabilities, but it is up to the FBI to reduce threats.

In other words, it is beyond the legal or practical capability of most computer crime victims to investigate, prosecute, and incarcerate threats.

Richard points out this CDT press release that explains the State’s inability to protect consumers from online criminals.

Victims of computer crime are at the mercy of the government when it comes to hunting down their criminal. But the government has little to no incentive to do so. If a victim instead decided to track down the criminal and obtain restitution, it would likely be deemed illegal by the same government whose protection services were inadequate for the victim in the first place.

What we have then is a law enforcement monopoly - a protection racket - that makes us all less safe, because the monopolist doesn’t have any incentive to protect us. In the case of the government, they get more funding if they make mistakes. When they do catch criminals, the criminals pay restitution to the government, not the victim, or are incarcerated at the victims expense.

Better technology can only go so far to protect us from online crime. A better legal and law enforcement system would help far more. A free market in law enforcement and protection is the logical alternative.

Along the lines of the free filtering you get when you use OpenDNS (that I mentioned here and here), Blue Coat has a free client designed to run on home computers:

K9 Web Protection - Free Internet Filtering and Parental Controls Software

Interesting limitation on the 8e6 AD integration

For the AD Agent, it is currently has only been released for Active Directory environments with 2200 users or less.

FileAdvisor by Bit9

Use Bit9’s database for free.

Web Filtering by Bloxx - Internet Monitoring Products

This company looks like they have combined Vericept-like analysis with URL filtering in a single solution, but instead of merely logging everything, they actually block based on content. Not sure how well it works yet.

Educators struggle with AUP enforcement

But a movement growing in schools today says taking away a student’s access to technology is akin to denying that student valuable learning opportunities–and so many school leaders are now searching for better alternatives.

As opposed to banning a kid from the internet and forcing teachers to create new lessons for them that don’t require internet access. I would say most schools still ban kids from the internet or otherwise suspend or expel them for AUP violations, demonstrating that you can’t force someone to learn.

I still recommend Vericept for schools that want to monitor online behavior beyond what the typical filter will do.

Still, behavior problems in schools are systemic. If you abolish compulsory education and child labor laws, they would more or less disappear.

Passwords Suck! « Amrit Williams Blog

Amrit on passwords. I’m with Mike Rothman though (see the comments); I use 1Password.

A school district just told me about this anonymizer proxy that uses Flash. This URL is in the Websense database (I didn’t test it against any others) but I’m wondering if any vendors can detect this technique without blocking Flash altogether.

flashform

UPDATE: The thing doesn’t work right now, so never mind.

Sophos intends to buy Utimaco. Until then, Sophos will resell SafeGuard Enterprise and they now have a mutual referral agreement for all products from both companies. Utimaco will become a new business unit focused on data security and the SafeGuard brand will be retained.

From the customer announcement email:

Our future direction integrates information control and security compliance with existing anti-malware infrastructure to make security more manageable, and merging with the market leader in mobile data security provides a strong foundation for growth and leadership.