March 3, 2014

There were 5 posts published on March 3, 2014 (this is page 1 of 1).

Translating Time Warner Cable’s excuse for hiking rates

Time-Warner-Cable
In my latest cable bill, Time Warner Cable included a letter that justified its recent attempt to raise the cost of my Earthlink Internet service by 38%. Let’s take a look at it, shall we?

IMPORTANT INFORMATION ABOUT YOUR ACCOUNT

Important information about your account.

Thank you for being a Time Warner Cable customer. We appreciate your business and hope you’ve been enjoying your services.

Oh, I’m sure you appreciate my business. If there’s one thing in my life that gives me warm fuzzies, it’s the cable company!
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in Rant | 458 Words

Banks still issuing insecure credit cards

As a follow-up to my last post, I should note that I’ve now got a new card with no more security features than the old one had. There’s no microchip like my credit union’s debit card has. This guarantees it’s only a matter of time before another security breach occurs and cards have to be reissued.

When it comes to credit card security, banks are penny wise and pound foolish. Maybe Bitcoin isn’t so crazy after all?

Chase expired my credit card without warning

chase
As MT.Net readers are aware, Target recently suffered a massive security breach when hackers stole millions of credit card records. Banks dutifully responded by issuing new credit cards to their customers.

I was surprised to get new credit cards in the mail recently as we’ve not seen any fraud with our account. Kelly mentioned a friend’s replacement cards coming with a warning that her friend’s old card would expire in 30 days. We both groaned at the thought of updating all of the automatic payments that are linked to our old card. It would take great effort to track them down and update them.

“Well, we don’t seem to have any expiration on our old card,” I said after thoroughly reading the letter that came with our replacement cards. It seemed we had some time to shift our accounts over after all.

We used our old cards every day since then until today when the card stopped working. I called up Chase, the issuer of our card, to figure out what was up. After wading through a voicemail menu that is maddeningly frustrating, a rep named David Norris came on the line.

“The old account number you had is no longer a valid card, sir,” he answered.
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Why Apple’s Recent Security Flaw Is So Scary

I can’t say for sure whether the National Security Agency had anything to do with this Apple security flaw but it is certainly something the NSA could readily exploit. All the Agency needed to do is control a router between its target and the target’s destination and it would have clear view of the supposedly encrypted traffic.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: America no longer has a monopoly on world-class cryptographers (if it ever did). By encouraging these types of flaws, our government leaves us vulnerable to attacks from foreign nations. Instead, our cryptographers should be working to make American software as secure as it can be.

I hope Apple will track down the developer responsible for this colossal blunder and fire him or her on the spot.

SSL stands for Secure Sockets Layer, and it’s what helps ensure that communication between your browser and your favorite websites’ servers remains private and secure. TLS, or Transport Layer Security, is a more recent protocol that does essentially the same. In brief, SSL/TLS is a cryptographic key that lets a browser and a server know they are who they say they are, a secret digital handshake that keeps your financial information safe when you make an Amazon payment or log into wellsfargo.com.

This all happens in the background; your only direct interaction with SSL/TLS is when you notice the lock icon in your search bar has clamped shut. That means you’ve got a direct, private, secure line.

The Apple bug in question—which, again, has been patched in iOS but not yet in OS X, though Apple tells Reuters that fix is coming "very soon"—means that Safari or one of these other affected applications can’t actually know for sure if the servers it’s talking to are who they say they are. Which leaves you and everything you transmit over the web vulnerable to a Man in the Middle attack.

via Why Apple's Recent Security Flaw Is So Scary.

N&O spreads flawed password advice

Courtesy Davide Restivo

Courtesy Davide Restivo


In today’s Connect section of the News and Observer, reporter John Bordsen asked a panel of technology experts about how to protect oneself from online hackers. I have a few beefs with this article which I’ll describe here.

The first is from Dr. Magdy Attia, dean of the College of STEM at Charlotte’s Johnson C. Smith University:

Change your passwords and make them long. “Your password should be changed every month or every two months – and make it hard to guess,” Attia said. “Some people use kids’ names, birthdates or whatever. But there are software packages that can scan a large number of passwords to find out what can work. A hacker can use these tools to scan for possibilities.”

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