- Pondering Security and My Perspective...
Any given day of the week (and many weekends) I keep myself busy with the task of trying to insure that end-user's computers are free of whatever the spy / ad / greyware of the day might be. Making sure that their shopping habits or surfing history are not transmitted to some faceless company. It is a never-ending struggle.
It came as a bit of a wakeup call that, no matter what I do to keep the desktop clean, there are still other dangers out there.
It turns out that all the internet traffic in my hometown is being funnelled, collected and forwarded on a massive scale. Let's sidestep the obvious violations of privacy here a for a second. We have terrabytes of daily traffic being collected and stored in large repositories. How sweet of a target would that be for any scam artists? A skilled Cracker? The Mob? I can only imagine, given a days worth of all SanFran e-mail and IM traffic, what one could rake in with a simple (automated?) blackmail scheme...
Won't happen? There must be tight security measures in place to protect against these things, right?
Eh... On the same day another story broke. The "border security" sytem which is supposed to protect the US from terrorist (fellow "Aliens" know this as "the gizmo with the cheap webcam and flaky fingerprint reader") was taken to its knees by a stray worm because of unpatched computers.
Darn it. Should have taken the blue pill!
