Like two schoolhouse enemies forced to work together on a class project, the fortunes of China and the United States are inextricably linked. But that doesn’t mean both nations have to see eye-to-eye on everything – or that they even play well with one another.
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Online Safety & Scams
USSPI executive director David Gewirtz says, “Homeland security begins at home.” There are bad guys out there and they’re as close to you as your network port. Read the articles below to learn how you can keep yourself and your family safe.
By David Gewirtz | March 26, 2009 | Online Safety & Scams
Our banks are struggling in a world of self-inflicted hurt, but now they’re also suffering from a very old-school problem: counterfeit checks. Counterfeiting, of course, has been around forever and the first fake check was probably created within days of the first genuine check being printed.
By David Gewirtz | March 10, 2009 | National Security, Online Safety & Scams, Presidential Technology
The risk isn’t just about military contractors and national security. These programs can upload whatever they find on your computer and share them with everyone. They can upload your banking information, your medical history, everything you’ve got in My Documents, your passwords, your credit card numbers, and even that embarrassing love letter to the hottie working Thursday nights at the local Taco Bell.
By David Gewirtz | November 14, 2008 | Online Safety & Scams
Now that America has decided its new President, the dark underbelly of society has come up with a new social engineering scam designed to separate you from your money, infect your computers, and turn your technology against you. I know. Happy thoughts.
By David Gewirtz | October 1, 2008 | Online Safety & Scams
In this all-new book review shootout, we put five books to the test. Read on to learn how Crimeware: Understanding New Attacks and Defenses by Markus Jakobsson and Zulfikar Ramzan, Internet Forensics by Robert Jones, Phishing Exposed by Lance James, Aggressive Network Self-Defense by Neil R. Wyler, Bruce Potter, and Chris Hurley, and Insider Threat: Protecting the Enterprise from Sabotage, Spying, and Theft by Eric Cole and Sandra Ring stand up to our editorial review.
By David Gewirtz | October 1, 2008 | Online Safety & Scams
Here’s a quick tip that’ll save you a bunch of time. If you use the Junk E-mail feature within Outlook, you can easily increase the system’s accuracy and reduce the number of false-positives, all by checking one checkbox.
By John Oram | September 22, 2008 | Online Safety & Scams, Presidential Technology
Wednesday morning, the phone started ringing here it didn’t stop for the next two days. Members of the media were feeding on the news that Republican Vice Presidential nominee Sarah Palin’s Yahoo email account may have been hacked, and since our own David Gewirtz is one of the nation’s leading experts on the issue of Presidential email, he was being asked to comment.
This following article by John Oram of the IT Examiner is the result of one such interview.
As you probably know, Russia has attacked Georgia (Tblisi, not Atlanta) with tanks and troops. However, before the physical attack, there was a cyberattack against many of Georgia’s online resources. First indications seemed to imply the cyberattack originated as a Russian offensive, while later analysis by some sources dispute that, claiming that “script kiddies” are behind the assault.
David wrote this article for the current issue of Counterterrorism. Given the timing of the Georgia attack, we felt it’d also be of interest to our Computing Unplugged and OutlookPower readers and are reprinting it here with permission.
By David Gewirtz | July 21, 2008 | National Security, Online Safety & Scams, Presidential Technology
Another senior government official has had his BlackBerry stolen by another foreign intelligence agency. But this time, it’s not an American official. According to the U.K.’s The Sunday Times, a senior aide to British Prime Minister Gordon Brown had his BlackBerry stolen by Chinese intelligence agents while on a trip to China back in January.
This latest report is particularly juicy because the senior Downing Street aide got caught in what’s probably the world’s oldest intelligence ploy, the “honeytrap,” an intelligence scam where an attractive female spy is used to lure a government official into some form of compromising position.
Returning to the story of our bonking Brit and his BlackBerry bandit. Just how much trouble did this aide’s problematic peccadillo get him into? Of more concern, how much damage did our international man of mystery’s “special branch” do to Britain’s security – and, by extension, the security of her allies?
By David Gewirtz | July 14, 2008 | National Security, Online Safety & Scams, Presidential Technology
This latest Special Report spotlights a surprising lack of government record-keeping oversight, along with critical cyber-security gaps, both revealed in last week’s Government Accountability Office (GAO) audit of the National Archives and Records Administration and four key government agencies: Homeland Security, the Environmental Protection Agency, the Federal Trade Commission, and HUD.
The GAO audit was provided to the United States House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform.
Unfortunately, while the GAO described certain record-keeping and computer management practices at these various agencies, they may not have fully understood how the practices they documented would lead to troubling security flaws at the Department of Homeland Security and Federal Trade Commission, and they certainly didn’t point them out explicitly for the Committee to investigate. This report provides those details.
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DAVID GEWIRTZ is a CNN contributor and editor-in-chief of the ZATZ magazines. He is a recipient of the Sigma Xi Research Award in Engineering and was a candidate for the 2008 Pulitzer Prize in Letters. David serves as USSPI's executive director.
