Kiss Your Anonymity Goodbye

A doctoral student at the University of California has devised a means of fingerprinting a computer and tracking that computer across the internet. This fingerprinting defeats all known methods of hiding the identity of a computer. Attempting to use proxy servers, NAT firewalls, routers or any other methods fail to hide the identity of the computer.

The fingerprinting is very simple to understand. Every computer has an internal clock. That clock is inaccurate by a miniscule amount of time. Only an atomic clock is perfectly accurate. This inaccuracy is referred to as “clock skew”. By analyzing the network packets being sent by a computer, the clock skew in the computer’s internal clock can be measured. It is believed that no two computer clocks will have the exact same level of clock skew. Changing the computer’s time will have no effect on this fingerprinting process.

The only way to defeat this fingerprinting is to instruct your computer to not attach a time stamp to every packet it sends over a network or to falsify the timestamps. Doing this can be either simple or very complicated, depending on your experience with computers. I wouldn’t know how to do it myself. I wouldn’t be very surprised if someone comes out with a software tool to do just that.

http://www.spywareinfo.net/mar13,2005#tracking

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Web Sites For Children Most Likely To Install Spyware

Having been a player in the spyware world for so long, nothing really should surprise me anymore. Still, this shocked me. It seems that web sites designed for children visitors are most likely to try to install spyware and/or browser hijackers.

I really can’t put my finger on why this surprises me. Spyware and hijacker makers have no ethics or morality. They care for nothing except for sneaking their garbage onto as many PCs as possible. Why not target children?

I don’t know what the final version of the various spyware bills floating around Congress will look like. I do have copies of the latest drafts but those are just drafts. I sincerely hope that whatever law finally is signed outlaws the automatic installation of hijackers.

http://www.spywareinfo.net/mar13,2005#kids

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Yahoo ‘cookie’ tracks users online

Q: I heard Yahoo was using “cookies” to track what people do on the Web, not only on their site but other sites. Is that true or a myth?

A: It’s actually true. Yahoo is using something called “Web beacons” or a “super cookie” that tracks not only where its users go on the Yahoo network but also tracks where they go outside of the Yahoo network using a persistent file on the hard drive. Note that you have to have a Yahoo account to be tracked. If you want to opt-out of this tracking, log in to your Yahoo account, then go to privacy .yahoo.com/privacy.

Scroll down to the section about cookies. You will see the words “Web beacons” as a highlighted item. Click on that. That will bring up another page and you’ll see the phrase “outside the Yahoo network.” There you will see a small link to “click to opt-out.” Click on that.

That brings up a confirmation page saying you are now opted-out. STOP. If you click the normal looking confirmation button on the page, you will opt yourself back in. (Yahoo is learning sneaky tricks from spyware folks on how to trick people into clicking the wrong buttons.) Close the page using the X and if you trust Yahoo, you can consider yourself opted out.

Frankly I would never sign up for one of these free accounts any more using a real name or any real personal information. Nothing is free any more.

http://www.sunherald.com/mld/sunherald/business/11063372.htm

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5 impressive Windows XP tricks

You know that feeling you get when your friends or family see you do something on your computer that they’ve never seen before?

If you haven’t had this opportunity, here’s where you start.

If you have, then you know that you’re feeling like the world’s coolest power-user when this happens. Knowledge is power! Here are five Microsoft Windows XP tips that will get you/keep you schoolin’ your friends and family.

http://www.microsoft.com/athome/moredone/5xptricks.mspx

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IT Managers Rate Spyware No. 1 Threat

Two-thirds of IT managers named spyware as the number one threat to their networks’ security in 2005, a survey released Monday said. The poll, conducted by security firm WatchGuard on the Seattle-based company’s Web site in December, revealed that 66 percent of the managers and administrators surveyed thought that spyware would pose a greater threat this year than either viruses or phishing attacks.

About the same number — 65 percent — said that between the three threats of viruses, phishing, and spyware, their network were least protected from spyware.

Even so, the IT leaders complained that neither their company’s executives nor their users understood or respected spyware’s potential damage. A majority of 54 percent, for instance, said that execs were keeping their eyes on viruses as the major threat, while only 38 percent said executives were backing efforts to put spyware at the top of the security focus list for the year.

Additionally, almost three out of four IT managers said that more than half their users don’t know what spyware is.

http://www.securitypipeline.com/57703353

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