Thursday, February 17, 2011

Are you closer to getting "owned"?

Owned is a slang word  that originated among the 1990s hacker sub-culture and refers to the acquisition of administrative control over someone else's computer. More than twenty years later, getting "owned" is getting easier and easier: 
  • New Capabilities = New Vulnerabilities:  Think about it. Add a window to your house and you create space between the window sill for bugs to crawl in the summer time. iPhone's, Netflix, XBoxe's, iPads are just a few of the dizzying number of ways for us to get online. Each of these new devices create their own space for "bugs" -- the software and hardware type.  
  • Unfair Advantage: Speaking of software bugs, they have a very "long tail" i.e. it takes a long time to find all of them. In one case, there was a 17 years for a Microsoft Internet Explorer bug that was closed out just last year. That's an unfair advantage for the bad guy. One of many unfair advantages. Some others: the ability for someone to disguise themselves, “act at a distance” and influence without bodily presence. Remember, there is no caller ID for the Internet. It was not designed to trace back the precise location of a person that "clicks" buy.  

Are you owned? 

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