Five ways to compromise your own security
- Misplaced trust: Don’t enter your online banking password on someone else’s computer. Don’t trust a brand. Don’t trust security systems that don’t trust you. Don’t even trust yourselves too much–because trusting in the infallibility of something you create can prove fatal to security.
- Security through ignorance: Most of us are probably aware that obscurity is not security. That doesn’t mean we don’t try to use obscurity for security, sometimes without even knowing we’re doing it. A great example of this is the effects of Google and Yahoo! indexing Flash content. This indexing is showing that a lot of sensitive information is naively encoded in Flash objects, and has been available to people with the know-how to harvest it all along.
Many of the people who created these security sieves never realized that they were essentially relying on obscurity for their security, though.
The problem in many cases is that they didn’t really understand the technology they were using, and as a result they never thought things through enough to realize that the only thing “protecting” such information was a veil of obscurity. Don’t make that same mistake; understand the security implications of the technologies you
Written by Harry Waring on October 4th, 2008 with no comments.
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