Hacktivist are hurting themselves as much as others:

It’s the same old story that has been going on by mankind since time began. It’s unfortunately easier to motivate the masses with anger and greed than with positive motivations like compassion or hard work. Recently the Pastbin forum posted claims from a Muslim group that has initiated Distributed Denial Of Service (DDos) against 25 US banks.  Their botnet DDos has temporarily denied online banking access to thousands of banking customers. They are doing this to protest a YouTube video that was offensive to Muslims. 

While I don’t doubt that this video was offensive, I don’t think that it is fair to punish an entire society for the act of a few misguided fools. What a shame that this group can’t take their time and talents to pursue legitimate channels against these author(s) of this offensive video. If they knew anything about America, they could better their cause by paying a group of attorney’s to harass this video author publicly, using the media to shame these people into a formal public apology. The public shaming and expense of lawsuits would serve as a better deterrent to others than randomly targeting banking customers who have never even heard of this video. Randomly targeting all Americans is not the answer. Holding an entire nation responsible for one person’s insensitivity rarely furthers ones cause.There type would be better spent gaining sympathy from others than on revenge.

Browser Malware Protection (Trusteer)

Can you Trust Trusteer to do the Job?

The company I work for is in the process of implementing a Browser based malware protection software from Trusteer. Rapport software from Trusteer is a lightweight security software that protects customers from having sensitive information from being stolen. Rapport software imbeds itself in a browser and searches for security breaches such as:

• ·         Phishing – when a criminal builds a website like a legitimate site and convinces people to visit         usually with a misleading email
• ·         Pharming – where your PC is spoofed to visit a false site usually when you click on a saved URL
• ·         Keylogging – when a criminal captures your user-id and password information
• ·         Man In the Middle - similar to phishing is where a hacker information is being passed through a            website using a website in the middle
• ·         Man in the browser – where malware infiltrates you browser usually as a legitimate add-on
• ·         Screen Capturing – malware captures your screen shots and passes them along
• ·         Session Hijacking – a hacker steals the session parameters to gain access without credentials
• ·         Drive-by-downloading – malware is downloaded from another usually legitimate site.

Our research shows that Trusteer is a product that works well in these situations.

Does anyone have any experience with Trusteer or know of competing products that could assist us? 

Or/ 

Has anyone been hacked in a manner mentioned above....how did you detect it, respond, and prevent it from reoccurring?

Intro to Canadian Bacon Security Blog

 Welcome to Canadian Bacon Security Blog.

My name is James Mills, and you guested it... I'm originally from Canada and I like Canadian Bacon.
This is also the nickname that my youngest boy has for me.

I am a student in the MS Management Information Systems department at Bellevue University CIS608 class. Our class is about Information Security Management. Each student is required to create a blog to talk about security issues.

Over the next several weeks I look forward to blogging with you on various IT security topics. Feel free to start a topic if you like otherwise I have various topics I will start next week. Thanks for viewing.