security

Senior monitoring – security flipped on its head

Post published:May 30, 2017
Post author:philip

Essence Care@Home

Let's say you want to set up a security system for your home. In days past that would mean hiring a security company that would install sensors around your house, connected to a keypad, and linked via a phone line (usually a dedicated line you would need to add) to a monitoring company. Those sensors would probably have required wired connections to a central hub installed in a closet somewhere, or in a drop ceiling, requiring lots of installation work, cutting holes in walls, and cleaning up the mess afterwards with spackle and paint. Once installed, this system would only work if you paid the company that installed it a monthly fee. DIY Security Systems In recent years a new category of security systems have emerged, so-called DIY security systems. These systems are designed to be installed by the homeowner, and in general do not require ripping up walls to install them. Some systems allow you to monitor your house yourself, and some include monitoring for a fee, similar to the older systems. One good example of this type of system is SimpliSafe, which sends you a kit including various sensors to install yourself, and then provides a traditional monitoring…

E-mail security stinks, and that makes hackers (and the NSA) happy

Post published:December 18, 2015
Post author:philip

The Better Mousetrap Making the perfect e-mail client seems like the build-a-better-mousetrap challenge of our day. Every year or so it seems there's another amazing e-mail client released by a startup, that says it has 'reimagined' or 'reinvented' e-mail and how to use it. Some examples include Sparrow (launched in 2011, bought by Google and discontinued in 2012) and Mailbox (launched in 2013 and bought a month later by Dropbox, and announcement of its imminent retirement just this month). This is kind of ironic considering the move away from e-mail to other messaging services, particularly real-time services, such as Slack and Whatsapp. Recently, perhaps due in part to the imminent shut down of Mailbox, another e-mail app called Polymail has been receiving a lot of hype. It is already the fourth most up-voted product on Product Hunt, and it hasn't even launched yet. Seeing the latest e-mail-mousetrap launch reminds me about one of the inherent security problems all of these applications encourage. A Question of Protocol All of these apps rely primarily on the IMAP e-mail protocol (short for Internet Message Access Protocol). That makes a lot of sense as it keeps most of the e-mail management on the server, and allows app developers…

Who do you trust with your identity?

Post published:March 22, 2014
Post author:philip

Who will you trust with your identity?

This is the second in a series of articles, which started with The long goodbye to passwords. You might want to read that first, if you haven't already. Let's start with a few questions: Have you ever had your password exposed by hackers, such as was done with Adobe, Gawker, Cupid Media, Stratfor, Yahoo and Sony users? When you go to a web site to buy something, and they offer to store your credit card information, do you let them? If you answered yes to #2 above, what sites do you say yes to, and why? How many companies have direct access to your bank account, such as PayPal, other payment service, or a stock brokerage? Have you been pwned?* Let's start with question number one. Has a password of yours been revealed by having an account hacked? You might not even know it. Troy Hunt operated a very interesting site called ';--have i been pwned? where he has collected many of the files stolen from web sites by hackers (and subsequently released online) and made an interface where you can search by username or e-mail and see if it shows up in any of the files. Adboe itself had over…

The long goodbye to passwords

Post published:March 3, 2014
Post author:philip

First of all, if what's written above is your password, you need to change it now. I'll wait. Okay, good, now for the rest of the article. Why Passwords Don't Work It's not much of a secret that passwords are not a very good way to secure information. The real problem is when companies try to make users utilize more secure passwords, they end up making the whole system less secure. Does that seem counterintuitive? Here's a scenario. A company wants to make their corporate systems more secure. They decide that the passwords their employees are using are not secure enough, so they institute rules for passwords, which include: Must be 8 characters or longer Must include a lowercase letter Must include an uppercase letter Must include a number Must include a non-letter/number character Must not be the same as the previous password used Must not be the same as the username, or contain the username You've probably run across these rules before. You may not have seen all of them, but you've probably seen most of them, and probably many of them with a single system. In theory, these are all good rules. Where they lead to a less…

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