As a part of my job responsibilities and growth plan in my organization I was supposed to undergo an examination to test my technical competence and knowledge. While studying a section on application administration something caught my eye. One part of the subject was on analysis of prominent services of web servers and application servers. While outlining the reasons why performance issues might occur in a web application, one of the reasons given was security. Risking copyright infringement, I am pasting the line verbatim:

Do you know or ever wonder why cyber bad guys succeed in their attempts to well, do bad things to your computers, despite the kind of awareness that prevails? One of the reason I feel is there is no concentrated effort against them. I recently joined up a mailing group called stopbadware. I was reading through the emails and I realised that many of the people are upset about the bad guys and the threats they pose and want to do something about it. Each one has its one views / opinions about how to tackle it and once they feel that they cannot have their say or can't agree to the current, they leave the group and start another one with roughly the same mission.

So far I have seen:

1. APWG - Antiphishing Working group
2. Stop Badware
3. Cleanware
4. Clearware (coming up)
   
5. MS-ISAC
6. Security software vendors websites
7. Innumerable forums
8. Technology magazines
9. Certification bodies (ISACA, ISC² )
   

I am sure that I have seen just the tip of the iceberg (or even less) and there is a lot more to this. Frankly this effort is not good enough. Everyone has a limitation in what they can see and report or even notice. Because of this you are more likely to miss out some things. Every vendor has its own method to fight badware and justifiably so. But what would make it effective is a single place for a list of all existing badware. I know this is a very lofty goal and risking the same thing, I would say, I would make my website the destination for this. As of now, I am the lone ranger maintaining and updating the site. But if I get help from people in anyway, I feel I can build a decent database and a go-to place for people looking to protect themselves from badware.

Another group to tackle the phishing menace has spawned up. This time headed by Symantec. Well, this is not a new group strictly speaking, this group was run by WholeSecurity with Symantec acquired recently. But Symantec will definitely will bring a different focus and additional resources to this group.

But the point is, why another one? Symantec itself is a member of APWG, so why not pour more resources in that effort instead of creating a separate group or running a separate group. I think APWG would have been more than happy to give Symantec credit and exposure for its contributions if that is what Symantec was after. That according to me would have made a considerable difference.

Instead of having such uncoordinated efforts, if we can have a some coordinated effort, I am sure we can make a greater headway against the menace and the bad guys.

So I watched the movie today. The Da Vinci Code that is. Before even it was released. In a theatre. Free of charge but authorised. Courtesy: Symantec.

It so happened that I got an invitation from Symantec for a information security related presentation. The theme was "Protect your secrets". Essentially it was a sales presentation but it was very interesting. It broadened my concept of what is messaging. Conventionally messaging only meant email to me. But the new methods are getting included, monitored and archived very fast. These include: Instant messaging IM, collaborative software (MS Sharepoint, e-rooms, Lotus Notes Team Room etc). I guess we should add another one to the list. Scraps on Orkut. Though Orkut currently is purely personal it won't be long when people start making use of it for business reasons. After all it is somewhat similar to collaboration.

Now about the movie. If you liked the book, then you definitely will like the movie. If not for the plot, then only for Tom Hanks. He plays Professor Robert Langdon to perfection. Of course the movie has omitted some parts of the book but nothing that is detrimental to the overall plot. Overall rating: Fascinating. Should be a blockbuster as predicted.

The place where I work as a contractor has recently migrated to policy based web filter service from Blue Coat. After the migration the filters have started filtering legitimate community websites and some weblogs. Most notable is the current hot community website Orkut. I have been a very recent user of Orkut and liked its concept a lot and was using it a lot from home. But sometimes I have to access it from my office as well. Surprising is that Blue coat is categorising Orkut as "Adult/Mature Content". I am subscribed to various communities like my school, college, geeks, mathematics, puzzles etc. Granted that many of the communities may be mature, but it is not appropriate to do a blanket categorisation of a website as such.

There may be other annoyances with this as well which will deny people working here access to legitimate sites like travel or something. I remember it happening once. If the service is going to create additional work and pain to users, then I am not sure if it is going to be very popular. Although, Orkut is not strictly related to my work, I just check up on there while taking a small break from work. Instead of going out for a smoke (which I don't) or coffee, I try to surf the net.

I would rather want to see a filtering service which would rate pages rather than websites. Similar to what Google does for search. It indexes individual pages and not entire website ensuring that the visitors get the most relevant results for their search query. Similarly a filtering service should read through the page and block a particular page if it contains inappropriate content based on meta-tags on that page.

Just to give an example: We all know and have experienced our share of spamming on IM. There are some people who would message you and want to do some cyber fun with you. They will give a link to their Yahoo! profile (I only use Yahoo IM) and it will contain their explicit pictures. Yahoo! asks you to click a button which confirms that you are over legal age before allowing you to see the page and the page itself is tagged to be for people over 18 years of age. I am still able to view that page containing explicit picture, because it was on Yahoo. What if the filtering service blocked access to entire Yahoo because of these pages. I am sure the service provider will have plenty of irate customers.

That in my opinion should change and access should be granted or denied based on the content on page and not the site.

I wondered how long would it take to come. When I got hooked on to Orkut and surfed around it, I saw people proudly putting up nice pictures of themselves, their friends and loved ones on Orkut. Having known and experience the notoriety of Internet criminals who would misuse such pictures and personal information, I wondered...

Last night my cousin emailed to all his contacts about this. Especially to the girls as their photographs are the ones that are most likely to be abused. This may well be a rumour, but this is a rumour no sane person would ignore. Here is what he wrote:

"Improtant note for girls
Hi How are u All
GIRLS BEWARE PLEASE..IT IS SERIOUS! HELP URSELF
It has recently been found out that there are some spammers present on Orkut who download the Photographs of Girls from their Profile and they get 5 cent per photograph. This photographs are later sent into Image Editors like Photoshop where they are morphed and superimposed on the images of Porn Stars.

These people are so expert in this field that the photographs looks completely real and anyone can get decieved by generated images.

These photographs are then used for multiple purposes like Printing in International Magzines, Uploading on paid Porn Sites and sometimes even blakmailing. And the post consequences are a known fact. So after knowing about this fact my advice to all sisters of my brothers here to please remove their photo's from Orkut and don't give the culprits a chance to do play around with You. Afterall Prevention is better than Cure"

I have not edited the message other than some small punctuation changes and adding italics. Does every good thing has to have a darker side? I thought Orkut was cool and people were able to get in touch with each other so easily, look at each other progress through the years through pictures and even plan to meet. Is there a way to stop this menace before it gets out of hand? I think together we can. I have seen some websites, where you cannot download images. We should all talk to Orkut management about it and have them disable the photo download ability and then they can track who downloads the pictures. Well, I as a legitimate user do not require to copy the pictures. I can simply ask my friends to send me the copies of the pictures over email.

I plan to write to Orkut about it. Join me if you are interested.

In one my previous posts, I had pointed out that blue coat is blocking legitimate websites like Orkut and classified it as Adult/Mature content. Well yes, mostly the members of the website are adult. But that does not mean the website should be classified as Adult/Mature content. Jokes apart, as I had noted earlier also that there are certain categories / communities which are adult / mature in nature, but then again Orkut has specifically mentioned in its acceptable use policies that there should be no profanity, nudity and otherwise offensive or inappropriate content. I believe a policy statement by the website owners should be a good way to determine the nature of the website.

Having said that, if Orkut has to be classified as adult / mature content, then I am sure most of the websites like Yahoo!, Google would have to be classified likewise as they contain explicit adult content groups with nudity, erotic, dirty language and is explicitly mentioned as that it contains adult content and the visitor has to be over the age of 18 to visit. If that is not adult / mature content, then I am not sure I understand fully what it means. And the irony of it all is, I can visit those pages, groups very easily with the same Blue Coat web filtering service.

I had contacted Blue Coat support with this issue and I got a reply back essentially acknowledging that their service is blocking the website and implied meaning (which I understood) was that it was incorrect. The actual content is below:

==============================================================================

Hi Mukul,

I have tested site in question (www.orkut.com) and does seem to be blocked as ‘Adult/Mature Content; Newsgroups’

ProxySG42#(config content-filter)test-url www.orkut.com

Testing URL 'www.orkut.com/'

categories: Adult/Mature Content; Newsgroups

Please visit our site review site to submit re-categroization for URL / URLs

http://sitereview.bluecoat.com/sitereview.jsp

==============================================================================

I had submitted multiple site review requests to Blue Coat to no avail and now when I tried to do it again, the website informs me that it has been submitted multiple times and they feel that it is correct. Essentially meaning that they won't change it. The actual message is:

==============================================================================

The page you want reviewed is http://www.orkut.com/   (Check another site)
This page is currently categorized as Adult/Mature Content, and Social Networking

This web page has already been submitted many times, and has been verified as rated correctly.

NOTE: Blue Coat manages the web site ratings system used by many different software and hardware vendors. Blue Coat does not control whether a web page is "Blocked" or "Allowed" — your Internet Use Policy controls this. For more information on how to change your Internet Use Policy, click here

===============================================================================

I was very disappointing to get a response like this from Blue Coat. Such episodes make me a little nervous about the company and I don't think I would recommend Blue Coat to any of my clients if this persists.

Since morning today I have been having trouble in getting to my Yahoo! email. Not that there is anything critical I am expecting or have to send (I have other email addresses which I can use to send), but not being able to check email is one of the most frustrating things in modern life. Even though I get mostly junk emails (nobody writes to me!!! ^_--) but still...

At this point I am not sure whether Yahoo! is a victim of a DoS attack or simply their servers have gone down big time. I first tried it before I left for work at around 7:45 am and it was not working as it is still down even as I write. Yahoo! home page is working, so I suppose that it is just the email and IM servers are experiencing problems. I tried other services, like maps and they are working. Apparently anything that needs login is not working (though Yahoo! photos loaded fine albeit slowly).

In today's time when freebies are everywhere I am not sure that Yahoo! can really afford to keep their servers and services down for so long. Or maybe they have not noticed it yet. Then that would be even more dangerous.