Tag Archives: Security

Way back in 1984, Ken Thompson wrote what I consider one of the greatest papers on computer security. I wrote about this in my The Greatest Hack of all Time post. If you haven’t read this paper your education is … Continue reading →

This isn’t the usual post about some nincompoop making yet another foolish security mistake. It’s about a guy who does (almost) everything right and almost loses it all. Over at the White Hat Security Blog, Jeremiah Grossman tells a chilling … Continue reading →

Back in 2011 I wrote about the Sony break in and subsequent disclosure of 100 million log on credentials. At the time I remarked that it would be years before the final cost of the exploit would be known. Now … Continue reading →

A year ago, I wrote about Plain Text Offenders a website dedicated to naming and shaming Web sites that store their user’s passwords in plain text. Sadly, the Website has recently celebrated their 1000th post. Think about that for a … Continue reading →

Over at acmqueue William Cheswich has an interesting article on Rethinking Passwords. After listing the usual litany of problems with passwords as a security measure, Cheswick traces the historical roots of the problem. He says that we are stilling using … Continue reading →

I know, I know: I’m courting a comeuppance from Betteridge’s Law but this is too good to ignore. Christopher Elliot at Linked in has an interesting post in which he posits that the TSA, as we know it today, can’t … Continue reading →

As regular readers know, we here at Irreal are not fans of the TSA. Apparently, Charles Kenny at BloombergBusinessweek isn’t a fan either. He’s posted an article entitled Airport Security Is Killing Us in which he makes the case that … Continue reading →

Matthew Prince over at the CloudFlare Blog has a nice post on DNS Amplification DDos Attacks. He starts by explaining that DNS amplification attacks are descendants of the old Smurf Attacks. He goes on to show how they work and … Continue reading →

Xah Lee has a nice digest (heh!) of the various cryptography algorithms used on the Web. It’s not a detailed technical picture—there are plenty of those available—but, rather, a short explanation of each of the major algorithms and how they … Continue reading →