Want to know where David Beckham and his Spice Girl wife Victoria stay? The UK`s most famous football star and his lawyers are looking to sue portal 192.com after the site published the home address of the Manchester United and England player. 192.com specialises in revealing open domain information that is hard to find. Among its extraordinary array of information are details of over 4.4 million UK company directors, 55 million residential telephone numbers and reports for 2.7 million UK companies. The portal published a map, aerial picture and the full postal address of the Beckhams` luxury Cheshire apartment. Is this an invasion of privacy, or are the Beckhams over-reacting? After all, they are public figures. There`s an interesting debate to be had here.
You can bet the farm that this ISA Server 2000 will be a favourite target for hackers, who are going to view its cracking as an irresistible challenge, given Microsoft`s record of vulnerabilities.
Ian Melamed, chief technology officer, SatelliteSafe
* Ag shame - Onel de Guzman, the creator of the I Love You virus, doesn`t want you to be cross with him! His statements are so breathtaking that I`m going to quote them verbatim: "I hope they don`t see me as a bad person. I`m not a hacker who destroys. I don`t want to hurt computers. In fact, I want more people to use them. Hackers are also users. They buy and use products that should not be defective, that should not have holes in them. I`m also a victim. They should blame the manufacturer." This from the man responsible for unleashing the most destructive virus of all time: it caused $10 billion worth of damage worldwide, but he wants us to feel sorry for him!
* Microsoft has come under ongoing fire for not being seen to take security seriously. That might change with the release of its first security product, a firewall for the enterprise. Internet Security and Acceleration (ISA) Server 2000 forms part of the .NET initiative. Microsoft claims the product has been in development for three years, and says its robustness is underscored by the fact that security experts have failed to compromise it. Well, you can bet the farm that this ISA Server 2000 will be a favourite target for hackers, who are going to view its cracking as an irresistible challenge, given Microsoft`s record of vulnerabilities. A real trophy target, this.
* The power of hoax e-mails has been graphically demonstrated with a nasty version that flew around the country claiming that McDonald`s employees were filmed by M-Net`s Carte Blanche spitting on food intended for customers. One consequence, say people reputedly in the know, is a drop of 20% in McDonald`s local revenues. Both McDonald`s and Carte Blanche deny that such footage exists, but the e-mail has acquired urban legend status, and is being accorded the same import as the tale of kidney theft and pleas for aid for the Tuli elephants. The rule with these hoaxes has to be: don`t pass them on! You have no idea how much damage they can do!
* Did he or didn`t he? That`s the question being posed by the security world with regards to a Filipino mathematics expert`s claims that he has become the first person to crack RSA Security`s encryption algorithm. Had he done so, it would have been a body blow to the industry`s de facto encryption standard, which is licensed by thousands of companies and used to encrypt and decrypt messages in PKI (public-key infrastructure) e-mail and Web transactions. I`ll watch this development with interest.
* Next up: hackers are really getting organised. While hackers have always taken great delight in cracking the licence mechanisms of commercial software and sharing the secrets, now it emerges that the creator of a tool for cracking password-protected Web sites has added a new feature; each time a hacker cracks a Web site, the details of the cracking are automatically posted to a Web site where all other hackers can share user names and passwords. The software developer`s pseudonym is SubReality, his software the amazingly titled CrackWhore, and you can review his handiwork at http://www.SubReality.net.
* In closing, the expected Valentine`s Day virus massacre did not take place; by stridently alerting the world to the possibility, the anti-virus community again shot itself in the foot by crying wolf, to mix two metaphors. Instead, we had the lightning-fast blitz of Anna Kournikova, which has been so well chronicled that it scarcely bears retelling here. The Anna Kournikova worm did little damage and its author is behind bars, but it showed again how vulnerable corporate networks are, and how lax corporates are about educating and informing their staff as to the perils of opening unsolicited e-mails. While not wishing to add to the general hysteria surrounding viruses right now, I do fear that, despite all the warnings and imploring, we are still vulnerable to many viruses and that a potent and lethal one is on the way.
(Sources: HNN, San Francisco Chronicle, ComputerWire, Silicon.com and The Register.)
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