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a couple of answers
"This configuration and these practices owe in no small way to my having paid attention to your work on TR, Chad. I wish to thank you."
You're welcome. I'm glad people get some benefit from this -- especially since, the greater their system security, the greater my convenience (since compromised systems often become a problem for everyone).
"What do you see, tactically, with respect to grandpa windowuser and his conduit? Assuming successful control of the repository, how better to tighten control of the conduit function?"
I've suffered insomnia tonight, so I'm responding without sleep -- and as such, I'm not 100% certain I understand what you're asking. By "conduit", I tend to guess that in this case you mean the tools for sending outgoing email. I'll answer assuming that:
There are two things that can, or need to, be done to solve a significant chunk of this problem.
1. Separate privileges. The software on most of the desktop PCs in the world does not enforce privilege separation sufficiently. This allows privilege escalation and remote execution access to nominally separate applications. It is as a direct result of this that most malware ends up on its host system.
2. My mind just drew a blank on the second point. I blame the lack of sleep. I had it firmly in mind through most of writing out point 1, and forgot just before I got to point 2. Darn it all.
While I don't remember what point 2 was, I do remember that a key characteristic both points had in common was that neither of them specifically requires the end user to do anything about spam and email security at all. If the end user was using software that benefited from better security characteristics (not just by design, but via default configuration as well), these problems would effectively solve themselves.
A few things you can do to protect yourself even without changing the design of your software, but that do require your conscious choice, include:
1. Only view and send email as plain text. Much of the problem people currently have with getting infected, getting targeted by spam emails, and getting snowed by phishing scams would evaporate if they were not viewing images, JavaScript-enabled markup, embedded Flash and multimedia objects, and hyperlinks in their email clients. These features can lead to remote code execution, conceal the true nature of a link from the user, or "silently" provide information to the spammer (such as via variables passed in an image URL).
2. Use encrypted connections for authentication on mail servers to prevent man-in-the-middle and sniffing attacks.
3. Use a stateful packet filtering firewall that filters both incoming and outgoing packets, logs them, and informs you somehow of anomalous or suspect network activity (then do something about it if such activity is detected).
Note that the first item in this last list requires almost no effort on the part of the email user -- just an adjustment to a world that isn't overrun with eye candy in email. Also note that this one suggestion, alone, can reduce your susceptibility to infection directly via email by (I estimate) at least 98%. Less direct methods like malicious email attachments and phishing are not so drastically reduced, though even the effectiveness of phishing would be significantly reduced by this one simple change in habit.
You're welcome. I'm glad people get some benefit from this -- especially since, the greater their system security, the greater my convenience (since compromised systems often become a problem for everyone).
"What do you see, tactically, with respect to grandpa windowuser and his conduit? Assuming successful control of the repository, how better to tighten control of the conduit function?"
I've suffered insomnia tonight, so I'm responding without sleep -- and as such, I'm not 100% certain I understand what you're asking. By "conduit", I tend to guess that in this case you mean the tools for sending outgoing email. I'll answer assuming that:
There are two things that can, or need to, be done to solve a significant chunk of this problem.
1. Separate privileges. The software on most of the desktop PCs in the world does not enforce privilege separation sufficiently. This allows privilege escalation and remote execution access to nominally separate applications. It is as a direct result of this that most malware ends up on its host system.
2. My mind just drew a blank on the second point. I blame the lack of sleep. I had it firmly in mind through most of writing out point 1, and forgot just before I got to point 2. Darn it all.
While I don't remember what point 2 was, I do remember that a key characteristic both points had in common was that neither of them specifically requires the end user to do anything about spam and email security at all. If the end user was using software that benefited from better security characteristics (not just by design, but via default configuration as well), these problems would effectively solve themselves.
A few things you can do to protect yourself even without changing the design of your software, but that do require your conscious choice, include:
1. Only view and send email as plain text. Much of the problem people currently have with getting infected, getting targeted by spam emails, and getting snowed by phishing scams would evaporate if they were not viewing images, JavaScript-enabled markup, embedded Flash and multimedia objects, and hyperlinks in their email clients. These features can lead to remote code execution, conceal the true nature of a link from the user, or "silently" provide information to the spammer (such as via variables passed in an image URL).
2. Use encrypted connections for authentication on mail servers to prevent man-in-the-middle and sniffing attacks.
3. Use a stateful packet filtering firewall that filters both incoming and outgoing packets, logs them, and informs you somehow of anomalous or suspect network activity (then do something about it if such activity is detected).
Note that the first item in this last list requires almost no effort on the part of the email user -- just an adjustment to a world that isn't overrun with eye candy in email. Also note that this one suggestion, alone, can reduce your susceptibility to infection directly via email by (I estimate) at least 98%. Less direct methods like malicious email attachments and phishing are not so drastically reduced, though even the effectiveness of phishing would be significantly reduced by this one simple change in habit.
Posted by apotheon
18th Jan 2008
