Cynical Security: Innovative uses of an already useful service

Cynical Security

What you will find here are the uncensored views of someone who has been dabbling in security for a long time and sadly finds himself agreeing profoundly with Ben Laurie: "why do I bother?". When in a good mood there are plenty of constructive, even positive, answers to Ben's question. Sadly most of the time we are firefighting down in the depths of our machine rooms, oblivious to the fact that it might be worth fighting for a lost cause like computer security. What follows is that security people need to let off the steam which accumulates and occasionally they come up with something worth saying. Most of the time they don't, they are like crying drunkards banging their heads in desperation and solving their problems by getting deeper into security that nobody will ever read or care about.

January 05, 2004

Innovative uses of an already useful service

The WebMonster lets me know that there is now another very smart use of Netcraft's service.

How about using the archived information on millions of websites to improve security on the web instead of letting would-be baddies learn what operating system and webserver is being used by some MegaCorp? Netcraft has come up with an anti-phishing service.

The idea is simple: you pay them, they scourge their archives for your trademark, company name, whatever and report on their findings. The example uses Citicorp and of particular note is the fact that they have enough brains to mark sites carrying a copy of the phishing as "benign" instead of shouting wolf.

Posted by arrigo at January 5, 2004 04:30 PM