Technology

Interview with Kevin Mitnick

Slashdot runs the questions and answers with the world most famous hacker Kevin Mitnick. While most of his adventures and opinions are well covered on the web and in the books, you might still be surprised by some of the answers.

Here is his take on the involvement of anti-virus and other security companies in the creation of viruses and other malware.

Cybersecurity Companies?
by bigredradio

Kevin, do you suspect any collusion on the part of cybersecurity companies such as Kapersky Labs or Avast! and virus creators? If there were not so many exploits in the wild, would there be a billion-dollar anti-virus industry?

KM: I don’t know about Kaspersky but I think it’s ludicrous to assert that any anti-virus company would be involved with malware creators. These are large companies and the risk of being involved in this type of unethical behavior is too great.

And here is his opinion of what the future has for us.

cybersecurity
by Anonymous

What cybersecurity threats do you see as the most dangerous to the Internet now?

Re:cybersecurity
by zero0ne

What threat do you see as the most dangerous in 2, 5 and 10 years?

KM: Malware is probably the most substantial threat. Not only because it is so prevalent and being crafted better to avoid detection, but also because a large majority of internet users are oblivious to the dangers involved with clicking unknown links, authorizing Java Applets, opening attachments from people they don’t know, and are easily fooled by average phishing attacks. People are still the weak link, and even intelligent ones make poor decisions. Case in point, the recent spearfishing attacks on Google and RSA, which proved highly effective.

Looking into the future is difficult as technology progresses so rapidly. In the next few years, as more and more corporations move towards cloud computing, these servers loaded with information are going to be the new playground for hackers. Layers of security need to be applied in any cloud-computing environment to minimize the risk.

With the recent hacks on Certificate Authorities, I would count on SSL becoming obsolete in the future and being replaced with a new, more robust secure standard, since the “web of trust” is no longer a feasible model.

With the proliferation of consumer devices coming onto the market that are internet-ready, I would expect to see more attacks at the heart of these new technologies. New devices, especially those branded by names like Apple, Microsoft, and Google, always tend to draw the attention of hackers from all over the world.

Happy Programmer Day!

Today is the 256th day of the year, which means it’s Programmer Day once again. I’d like to take this opportunity to congratulate all my colleagues around the world and wish them all quieter rooms, better tools, larger salaries, faster computers, and fewer bugs. Let the source be with you! If you write code and 256 has a special meaning to you, I tip my hat to you and hope you’ll enjoy this little comic strip from Geek And Poke.

For those of you who are not programmers, but curious about a special meaning of 256, the explanation is really simple. Bit a smallest unit of information, which can only take values of 0 or 1 in binary notation. Bits are organized into bytes. There are 8 bits in a byte. Which means there are 2 to the power of 8 combinations of ones and zeros in a byte. 2 to the power of 8 is 256. There are a few more meanings to the number, if you are still interested.

Media landscape after 9/11

GigaOm runs an article on how much media landscape changed since 9/11.

But what strikes me every time I think about September 11 is how much the media landscape — particularly on the web — was transformed by those events, and how very different the world is now when it comes to how we experience real-time news.

When the attack happened, we were still in pre-social network era. No Twitter or Facebook or Google+. And even though quite a few people had blogs, the majority of the news were still coming from the TV and newspapers. For those of you, who don’t remember, most news websites were dead for a day or two immediately after the attack. Slashdot – a popular IT news website which is very much used to having tonnes of traffic was on the edge of collapsing too. Here is their article for this year with a link to the September 11th, 2011 archives.

I remember working in PrimeTel office at the time. I was involved with a project that dealt with video walls and window TV ads in multiple branches of a client’s business. I had a large 40-something-inch plasma TV mounted on a stand next to my desk. I was working on a piece of software that would combine video clips and images into a continuous playlist. I was using sample ads from the client as well as a bunch of landscape photography images for my tests.

Once the attack happened and most of the news sites went down, we established a public folder where all colleagues could drop images and videos they found anywhere on the web and those would get automatically added to the continuous video that was playing on the TV. I remember it was quite something. By the end of the day people from other departments and other floors started to come by to watch it. I remember even the owner of the company came in for a few minutes.

What I couldn’t realize then was how social that thing was. It wasn’t me or anyone else in particular. It was a collective effort of a few people. Each one would come across something and then share it in the public folder. That was very similar to how social networks like Twitter and Facebook distribute things these days. And with the last 10 years, it was proved several times of how well this works.

As Mathew Ingram notes in that GigaOm article:

Now try and think about what it might have been like if September 11 happened today, with ubiquitous smartphones featuring cameras and video and web access. Although cellular networks were overloaded in the aftermath of the attacks, some Blackberry messages got out of the towers — and today, we would almost certainly have gotten a real-time flow of tweets and images and video from people in the towers, at the Pentagon, even on the plane that flew into the ground in Stony Creek, Pennsylvania.

Update: Joe Wilcox of BetaNews also reminds that there was no YouTube back then.

What people don’t get about my job : Programmer

I came across this rather lengthy, but definitely worth a read, article about different professions and misconceptions people have about them. Some of the stories are surprising, some – less so. Given that there is not one from a computer programmer, I decided to share here my view of it.

It’s too tough to choose a single misconception, so I’m going to limit myself to the top three. These three are the ones I have to deal with most often. They vary from person to person, of course. But I’ve heard the same from a few of my colleagues. So here it comes.

Continue reading What people don’t get about my job : Programmer