How to stop AT&T from selling your private data to advertisers

Reports from earlier this week suggested that AT&T is ready to follow in its rivals’ footsteps and begin selling the private usage data it collects from its subscribers’ phones to advertisers. The data in question is anonymized, according to AT&T, but it includes very sensitive information such as customers’ locations, Web browsing history, mobile app usage and more. Privacy is something of a hot button issue right now, so it is likely that a number of AT&T subscribers would prefer to not have their private data sold to advertisers. Luckily, there is a fast and easy way to opt out of AT&T’s “External Marketing and Analytics Reporting” program, and complete instructions follow below.

1. Start by clicking the following link, which leads to AT&T’s opt-out page: http://www.att.com/cmpchoice
2. Log in with your phone number and password
3. You will now find yourself on AT&T’s privacy settings page, which includes the following blurb: “Our External Marketing and Analytics Reports contain anonymous information about groups of our customers. You may choose to exclude the anonymous information from your accounts from these reports. Please log in to each one of your accounts to opt-out.”
4. Check the box next to each wireless phone line you wish to opt-out with
5. Click the “Submit” button

Each of the selected lines will now be excluded from AT&T’s program. While anonymous usage data will still be collected each time you use your phone, that data will not be sold to advertisers.

Source:
http://bgr.com/2013/07/05/att-advertising-opt-out-how-to/

Posted in Hardware, Internet, Privacy | No Comments

Brute-Force Attacks Explained: How All Encryption is Vulnerable

Brute-force attacks are fairly simple to understand, but difficult to protect against. Encryption is math, and as computers become faster at math, they become faster at trying all the solutions and seeing which one fits.

These attacks can be used against any type of encryption, with varying degrees of success. Brute-force attacks become faster and more effective with each passing day as newer, faster computer hardware is released.

Brute-Force Basics

Brute-force attacks are simple to understand. An attacker has an encrypted file — say, your LastPass or KeePass password database. They know that this file contains data they want to see, and they know that there’s an encryption key that unlocks it. To decrypt it, they can begin to try every single possible password and see if that results in a decrypted file.

They do this automatically with a computer program, so the speed at which someone can brute-force encryption increases as available computer hardware becomes faster and faster, capable of doing more calculations per second. The brute-force attack would likely start at one-digit passwords before moving to two-digit passwords and so on, trying all possible combinations until one works.

A “dictionary attack” is similar and tries words in a dictionary — or a list of common passwords — instead of all possible passwords. This can be very effective, as many people use such weak and common passwords.

Source:
http://www.howtogeek.com/166832/brute-force-attacks-explained-how-all-encryption-is-vulnerable/

Posted in Coding, Internet, Security | No Comments

Use Splunk to show your active netstat connections, geographically

I was geeking out a bit tonight thinking about a friend’s situation and thought that I could probably do something useful in Splunk that might be helpful to others.  Sure enough, a few minutes later and I am viewing all my active netstat connections geographically as they are established:

Once the shell script is enabled, download the Google Maps app and setup the final query.  Using multikv was not enough for what I wanted to view (the output included the ports) so I used rex with this data extraction: (?<ipaddress>\d{1,3}\.\d{1,3}\.\d{1,3}\.\d{1,3}) and piped it into geomap.  Voila.

Posted in Coding, Internet, Linux, Security, Software, Windows | No Comments

Security breach stopped (Opera)

At Opera Software, we are committed to the security and privacy of our users. This is paramount to us, and as such, we want to share the details of a recent incident with you.

On June 19th we uncovered, halted and contained a targeted attack on our internal network infrastructure. Our systems have been cleaned and there is no evidence of any user data being compromised. We are working with the relevant authorities to investigate its source and any potential further extent. We will let you know if there are any developments.

The current evidence suggests a limited impact. The attackers were able to obtain at least one old and expired Opera code signing certificate, which they have used to sign some malware. This has allowed them to distribute malicious software which incorrectly appears to have been published by Opera Software, or appears to be the Opera browser.

It is possible that a few thousand Windows users, who were using Opera between 01.00 and 01.36 UTC on June 19th, may automatically have received and installed the malicious software. To be on the safe side, we will roll out a new version of Opera which will use a new code signing certificate.

Users are strongly urged to update to the latest version of Opera as soon as it is available, keep all computer software up to date, and to use a reputable anti-virus product on their computer. For more information about the malware, including which anti-virus applications can detect it, virustotal has a good overview.

Source:
http://my.opera.com/securitygroup/blog/2013/06/26/opera-infrastructure-attack

Posted in Internet, Security, Windows | 1 Comment

Microsoft talks more about IE10 security features

In May, NSS Labs issued the results of its study of web browsers in terms of blocking malware. It showed Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 10 blocking 99.96 percent of all malware during their test period, which was a much better percentage than Chrome or Firefox. Today, Microsoft went over some of the features in IE10 that helps it stop malware and other security issues along with the results of another security report.

The official IE blog states that for stopping direct malware attacks via websites, IE10 uses a combination of SmartScreen URL filtering and Application Reputation features. For websites that are normally trusted but become infected by malware, IE10 users can use the XSS Filter that is made to fight off these kinds of exploits. Finally, IE10 has more memory protection features and its Enhanced Protected Mode.

Microsoft cites another third party security report, the Secunia Vulnerability Review 2013, to show IE10 is better than its competitors in offering safer PC Internet browsing. The report claims that IE10 had just 10 Secunia Advisories and 41 vulnerabilities, compared to 28 advisories in Chrome and 28 in Firefox. In terms of vulnerabilities, Secunia said that Chrome had 291 and Firefox had 257.

Of course, Microsoft is about to release the first public preview of IE11 next week for Windows 8 users as part of the Windows 8.1 update.

Source:
http://www.neowin.net/news/microsoft-talks-more-about-ie10-security-features

Posted in Internet, Security, Windows | No Comments