Orange County Computer Consultant

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Orange County Computer Consultant helps small businesses with networking, installations and small business software.

Friday, December 01, 2006

Computer Security News

Its Friday night. I'm listening to some techno and reading many different feeds. The one that caught my attention is about an Israeli computer security firm, discovered how to read enrypted pin traffic used by banks. The secret service is investigating this claim. It makes me wonder what type of encryption protocols are in place to protect me at my local ATM ? Are they strong ? Is there a standard or do banks get to choose ?

There were also some reports that Wall Street and other financial institutes could be attacked shortly. The goal of the terrorists is to hurt the US economy.

I also read a article today about how mainframes seem to have been forgotten. There are still IBM mainframes and I'm sure many other supporting our nations infrastructure. Security needs to be considered for all hardware and software on the network regardless of how old it is. Even printers are open season for experienced crackers.

In other news a hacker from Romania, hacked into NASA the department of energy and the US Navy. This worries me. Were talking the Navy and DOE. What type of testing is our goverment doing to protect against these attacks ? We have the NSA who is supposed to be protecting our networks and communications. But they choose to listen to US citizens. Protect first guys.

I still don't get why people don't use encryption. You hear almost every day. they got access to all these records. Is it that its too difficult to implement. I admit my grandma does not need it but our universities and goverment sure does.