Archive for July 24th, 2006

How secure are stored passwords?

I was having a little sticky beak in the Firefox help files for no particular reason when I encountered something which made stop and send an email off to the Security Now! podcast.

Hi Steve and Leo,
I was just poking around in Mozilla Firefox and noticed something in the “Help for Internet Exploer Users” section:

“About Your IE Favorites and Settings
When you first install Firefox, it will import your existing Internet Explorer settings, including your Favorites, cookies, stored passwords, and a variety of other data. This saves you time customizing Firefox to fit your needs.”

The important part of that is that Firefox imports IE’s stored passwords, which raises a question of security with those passwords being on my hard drive.

I’m not concerned about other people using my computer and using my stored passwords as I don’t store super-sensitive passwords, but if somebody were to store a password of some importance, how easy would it be for some malware to access those passwords? The innocuous Firefox can do it, what’s stopping malware from doing it?

By the way, if you read this on SN52, congratulations on one year of Security Now!

Regards,
Samuel Gordon-Stewart
Canberra, Australia

Admittedly I could, with a few minutes, find out the answer for myself, but I’m sure I’m not the only one to ever wonder about this, and somehow I think it would be a perfect question for the Security Now! podcast, and an answer on there would benefit many more people than an answer here (Security Now! has about 100,000 listeners (source)). None the less, I will get an answer on here soon. I’ll wait and see if Steve and Leo discuss this, and if so I’ll include the transcript. If not I’ll just go and do some reasearch for myself.

Samuel

July 24th, 2006 at 04:53pm

Trading From Inside The Stocking

I received this interesting bit of spam the other day…it appears to be an insider trading scam.

Ever thought of putting the result of joint work into your own trading career? Now you can do that, making use of great stocking tips worked out by experts!
I know this product will be advertised massively soon, and the stock is doomed to boom in the nearest future.

The email then goes on about a ringtone company before ending like this:

Enter the opportunity with this stock, and you’ll leave with totally handsome gains.

Don’t knock on wood – just learn to be a pro trader, and the rest will flow!

And the subject of this peculiar bit of spam? That should be obvious…”great gain on pink sheets, read a message”, oh, not obvious? Hmmm

Samuel

July 24th, 2006 at 10:32am

Samuel’s Footy Tips: Results

I think I can sum up that weekend’s footy tips by saying “not so great”.

AFL Round 16: 3/8 (37.50%)
NRL Round 20: 2/7 (28.57%)
Week Total: 5/15 (33.33%)
Graph of the weekly results

Totals:
AFL: 66/128 (51.56%)
NRL: 69/138 (50%)
Total: 135/266 (50.75%)
Graph of the total results

Samuel

July 24th, 2006 at 06:29am


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