Tag Archives: Newspapers

Research to reduce spam emails and increase online security

The U. Texas campus newspaper pretty much gets it. I’ve added a few links and images.

Julia Brouillette wrote for the Daily Texan today, UT researchers work to reduce spam emails, increase online security,

A group of UT faculty members and graduate students have teamed up with UT’s Center for Research on Economic Commerce (CREC) to expose the companies that send out millions of spam emails every day.

SpamRankings.net, a website launched by the University’s Center for Research on Economic Commerce, displays rankings of companies by number of outgoing spam messages generated from roughly 18,000 U.S. and international organizations. The project creates models for email providers to reduce spam and is funded by two grants from the National Science Foundation, totaling approximately $1 million.

Head researcher John Quarterman said UT students, in particular, are at a high risk for identity theft because of spam.

“UT has had a big problem with student information being leaked to the outside world because of bad security,” Quarterman said. “Spam is getting out that may contain private information, like your identity.”

Quarterman said the easiest way for students to prevent spam from entering their inboxes is to maintain up-to-date software.

“Make sure you have all the updates to your operating system,” Quarterman said. “Antivirus software is worth running as well.”

According to Andrew Whinston, the center’s director and a management information systems professor, students are susceptible to deceptive links as they surf the Internet. Once the link is clicked, malicious software enters the computer system and new spam is generated.

“You have to be careful and not go to websites on the Internet that you are not really familiar with, or websites that are not authenticated in some way,” Whinston said.

Whinston said preventing spam starts Continue reading →

An Eerie Silence on Cybersecurity

Apparently it takes an alleged Chinese threat to get the New York Times to notice Internet security problems. The Times has escalated from a recent article to an editorial.

NYTimes Editorial 26 February 2013, An Eerie Silence on Cybersecurity, notes a few exceptions, and then remarks:

American companies have been disturbingly silent about cyberattacks on their computer systems — apparently in fear that this disclosure will unnerve customers and shareholders and invite lawsuits and unwanted scrutiny from the government.

In some cases, such silence might violate the legal obligations of publicly traded companies to share material information about their businesses. Most companies would tell investors if an important factory burned to the ground or thieves made off with hundreds of millions of dollars in cash.

Maybe it’s better to have a prescribed burn of released breach information than to have a factory fire of unprescribed released information.

Why don’t companies do this?

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Companies fear reputation for bad security

As more companies come out of the closet about their Internet security being compromised, still more start to admit it. But many (perhaps most) don’t even know. Fortunately, there is a way the public can get a clue even about those companies.

Nicole Perlroth wrote for the NYTimes 20 February 2013 that corporations try to hide successful cracking of their Internet security:

Most treat online attacks as a dirty secret best kept from customers, shareholders and competitors, lest the disclosure sink their stock price and tarnish them as hapless.

However, as some companies come out of the closet about this (Twitter, Facebook, Apple, etc.) and such

revelations become more common, the threat of looking foolish fades and more companies are seizing the opportunity to take the leap in a crowd.

“There is a ‘hide in the noise’ effect right now,” said Alan Paller, director of research at the SANS Institute, a nonprofit security research and education organization. “This is a particularly good time to get out the fact that you got hacked, because if you are one of many, it discounts the starkness of the announcement.”

Now here’s the interesting part:

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