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Denver Airport Offers Free Wi-Fi

Link: PC World

Denver International Airport quietly drops the fee for wireless Internet access in time to serve ads to holiday travelers.

Stephen Lawson, IDG News Service
Monday, December 10, 2007

Denver International Airport is betting that travelers will like getting something for free, and so far it looks like a good bet.

The airport, one of the busiest in the U.S., last month switched its public Wi-Fi offering from paid to advertising-supported. Within a week, and with no public notice of the change, Wi-Fi use grew tenfold, said Jim Winston, director of telecommunications for the airport. He expects the network to get even busier.

DIA is a large-scale case study of free Wi-Fi in airports. About 50 million passengers pass through the airport every year, with as many as 165,000 per day during busy times of the year, airport spokesman Jeff Green said. Now that Wi-Fi is free, there are 7,000 to 8,000 connections to the network per day, according to Winston. To link all those free users with the Internet, the airport at first bumped up its "backhaul" to 5M bps (bits per second) but later found that wasn't enough. It now has a 10M bps connection just for the Wi-Fi users.

Rootkit-like behavior found on Sony fingerprint reader

Sony is at it again.

Link: Rootkit-like behavior found on Sony fingerprint reader
Ryan Naraine’s Zero Day 

Posted by Ryan Naraine

 

Finnish anti-virus vendor F-Secure has found rootkit-like features in a plug-and-play fingerprint reader marketed by Sony.

The discovery was made when F-Secure’s BlackLight scanner picked up hidden files on a system with the Sony Microvault USM-F fingerprint reader software.

How Security Companies Sucker Us With Lemons

Wired Article Link:

Security Matters
Commentary by  Bruce Schneier
04.19.07 | 2:00 AM                     

More than a year ago, I wrote about the increasing risks of data loss because more and more data fits in smaller and smaller packages. Today I use a 4-GB USB memory stick for backup while I am traveling. I like the convenience, but if I lose the tiny thing I risk all my data.

Encryption is the obvious solution for this problem -- I use PGPdisk -- but Secustick sounds even better: It automatically erases itself after a set number of bad password attempts. The company makes a bunch of other impressive claims: The product was commissioned, and eventually approved, by the French intelligence service; it is used by many militaries and banks; its technology is revolutionary.

Unfortunately, the only impressive aspect of Secustick is its hubris, which was revealed when Tweakers.net completely broke its security. There's no data self-destruct feature. The password protection can easily be bypassed. The data isn't even encrypted. As a secure storage device, Secustick is pretty useless.

On the surface, this is just another snake-oil security story. But there's a deeper question: Why are there so many bad security products out there? It's not just that designing good security is hard -- although it is -- and it's not just that anyone can design a security product that he himself cannot break. Why do mediocre security products beat the good ones in the marketplace?

Microsoft researchers follow Web spam money trail

Link: Zero Day | ZDNet.com

March 19th, 2007

Posted by Ryan Naraine @ 7:40 am Categories: Hackers,  Microsoft,  Browsers,  Vulnerability research,  Spam and Phishing,  Spyware and Adware,  Botnets,  Viruses and Worms,  Data theft             

Using a homegrown tool called Fiddler, researchers at Microsoft have come up with a system to track the money that flows from big-name advertisers to search engine spammers.

The methodology, created by Microsoft Research in partnership with the University of California, Davis, has already uncovered a complex scheme where a small group using false doorway pages are able to profit by  redirecting traffic passed from search engines in one direction and then sending advertisements acquired from syndicators in the opposite direction.  (More at the New York Times).