Archive for 'Safeguarding data' Category
Wireless security and the TJX breach
Over at the Wall Street Journal there is an excellent summary of the ever-worsening TJX credit card fiasco where attackers downloaded “at least 45.7 million credit- and debit-card numbers from about a year’s worth of records”. Interesting points: TJX had 802.11 wireless network in stores to support handheld inventory devices, but these were only protected [...]
Read the rest of this entry...Setting up software RAID in Ubuntu Server
Updated Mar 13 2009 to reflect improvements in Ubuntu 8.04 and later. Linux has excellent software-based RAID built into the kernel. Unfortunately information on configuring and maintaining it is sparse. Back in 2003, O’Reilly published Managing RAID on Linux. That book is still mostly up-to-date, but finding clear instructions on the web for setting up [...]
Read the rest of this entry...Linux high availability clustering
One of the few remaining advantages of commercial Unix over Linux or BSD are the "enterprise" features like high availability (HA) clustering. Sun offers tools like Solaris Cluster that handle the hard parts of setting up high availability for you. In the Linux world it’s more common to see home-grown solutions like using a script [...]
Read the rest of this entry...Data security and the Patriot Act
Here in Canada the province of Nova Scotia just enacted a law intended to protect citizens from the U.S. Patriot Act. The law purports to solve the problem, but to me it looks worse than useless. According to the press release, under this new law "the minister of Justice must be notified if there is [...]
Read the rest of this entry...Crypto flaws are the rule, not the exception
Yesterday’s post on the OpenSSL forgery flaw got me thinking about the problem of cryptography. It isn’t the algorithms themselves… in theory the symmetric and asymmetric encryption methods in use today take decades of supercomputer time to brute force. But attackers don’t need to bother with brute force attacks when there are so many mistakes [...]
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