Community Comments To Security Absurdity Article

An anonymous reader writes, "Earlier this year Noam Eppel's Security Absurdity article generated much debate in the Information Security community (covered on Slashdot at the time). He claimed that we are currently witnessing a 'profound failure' in security. Now the author has posted a follow-up highlighting some of the community comments prompted by the article, titled 'Feedback to Security Absurdity Article — the Good, the Bad and the Ugly.'"

Comments

three solutions

[bcrowell]

A person can go to his/her local computer store and purchase an expensive new computer, plug it in, turn it on and go get a coffee. When he/she returns the computer could already be infected with a trojan and being used in a botnet to send out spam, participate in phishing attacks, virus propagation, and denial-of-service attacks, etc.
I assume the operating system was Windows? Solutions:

1. Buy a Mac.
2. Buy a machine with Linux preinstalled.
3. Buy a Windows machine, and put it behind a $20 router with a built-in firewall.

Re:We wouldn't be having this problem if...

[chrisv]

Even of the items that I know about - which is most of them - that doesn't mean that I follow them. As far as them being common "geek" sense, they might be, but:

• "Don't click on links in email messages. Type the URL in your browser manually." - bit overkill. Check to see where they're going first. And your mail client shouldn't have any active content enabled for viewing mail in the first place, so a JavaScript onmouseover/onmouseout/onclick handler attached to a link would have no effect anyway. If you're following the other suggestions on the list, this doesn't matter anyway, since your email is plain text and any links that appear in the body of the mail message are a result of the mail client automatically highlighting what looks like a link.
• "Disable the preview pane in all your inboxes." - That's what you disable any sort of active content for in the first place - it should be the default in any reasonable mail client to not have any sort of active content running in your mail client.
• "Read all email in plain text." - and this one as well.
• "Don't open email attachments." - this falls into the category of something most people probably don't know about, but that's because they tend to trust their email. As far as it goes, though, don't open unexpected attachments seems more correct than not opening any attachments.
• "Don't use Java, JavaScript, and ActiveX." - It's not Java and JavaScript that you need to worry about so much, it's ActiveX. And since the only browser that will run ActiveX is MSIE, that's already been taken care of by one of the other suggestions farther down this list.
• "Don't check your email with Microsoft Outlook or Outlook Express." - which is perfectly acceptable in a personal context. Too many businesses, however, mandate Outlook and Exchange. Get businesses off of Exchange once a viable competitor becomes available and then getting them off of Outlook becomes easier.
• "Don't display your email address on your web site." - or on any website, if you can get away with it.
• "Don't follow links in web pages, email messages, or newsgroup without knowing what they link to." - That's the first point on this list, really.
• "Don't let the computer save your passwords." - I'll agree with this one, but for places that I don't care about the password that I use, it still gets saved here on the computer, simply because I'll never remember the account name / password the next time I need to use it if I don't.
• "Don't trust the "From" line in email messages." - perfectly reasonable.
• "Never Use Internet Explorer and instead Switch to Firefox." - Don't I wish life were that easy? Reasonable idea, but talk 80% of the users of the internet into it... until then, it's not going away.
• "Never run a program unless you know it to be authored by a person or company that you trust." - perfectly reasonable.
• "Read the User Agreement thoroughly on all software you download to ensure it is not spyware." - this gets you approximately nowhere, since pretty much every EULA includes clauses that basically allow the distributor / author of the software to do whatever they want to your computer without any liability on their part.
• "Don't count on your email system to block all worms and viruses." - this is one of those things that should be obvious to anyone who has been online for more than an hour.
• "Get a Mac" - as much as I like this idea, that sounds like an idea that would just change the targets of viruses and worms from Windows-based platforms to Mac-based platforms. They might be more secure - but how frequently is a Mac targeted in preference to a Windows system?

So really, most, if not all, of that list isn't a "never do that", but a "use common sense before you do that", and that's most of what it amounts to in the first place. Security would be better if it wasn't for the hideous defaults that we put up with - which in an ideal environment without worms and viruses and such would make for better usability, but since most people don't use their computers in a hermetically sealed room with no connection to the outside world whatsoever...

Re:Seems a little Windows-centric ...

[dsci]

Yeah. When Apache running on Linux ever breaks through and becomes a highly visible target, LOOK OUT.

Oh wait. That's right. Linux machines ARE visible targets, yet are not pwned in proportion to their use. "Ah," you cry, "but those are servers, not desktops." True. They are servers with purposefully exposed ports and running outside of firewalls; heck, many a Linux Box (PC or embedded) *IS* the firewall for Windows machines. They COULD in principle be compromised and used in botnets like any other computer out there.

The "bigger target, more problems" arguement is flawed. The underlying problem at the system level (ie, not coutnting phishing, physical security problems, etc) is WINDOWS, period. You can argue about whether it is simply the default security model or braindead design all you want, but until that basic reality is accepted, this point of Windows market share is a deflection from the issue.

Response from Joe Luser

[britneys 9th husband]

* Don't click on links in email messages. Type the URL in your browser manually.
Too much work. I bought this computer to make my life easier.

                * Disable the preview pane in all your inboxes.
How do I do that? I'm not smart like you when it comes to computers.

                * Read all email in plain text.
I wouldn't get to see the pictures my friends send me if I did that.

                * Don't open email attachments.
What? And miss out on the lasest web games my friends are playing?

                * Don't use Java, JavaScript, and ActiveX.
No problem. I don't even know what those are. I'm not smart enough to learn all that fancy software.

                * Don't check your email with Microsoft Outlook or Outlook Express.
But Outlook is what my computer came with. I can't afford a new computer this month.

                * Don't display your email address on your web site.
Unacceptable. My customers need to be able to contact me.

                * Don't follow links in web pages, email messages, or newsgroup without knowing what they link to.
How do I know what it links to before I click?

                * Don't let the computer save your passwords.
Sorry, I don't have a photographic memory like you techno-geniuses. And don't tell me to write it down either, I'll just lose the piece of paper.

                * Don't trust the "From" line in email messages.
Then how do I know who sent me the mail?

                * Never Use Internet Explorer and instead Switch to Firefox.
I've used Internet Explorer for years. I have a busy life, I don't have time to learn Firefox or else I would.

                * Never run a program unless you know it to be authored by a person or company that you trust.
How do I know who wrote the software, it just shows up on my computer?

                * Read the User Agreement thoroughly on all software you download to ensure it is not spyware.
Yeah right. Those are longer than the internal revenue code, even my computer nerd brother doesn't read those.

                * Don't count on your email system to block all worms and viruses.
Then what do I count on? And why can't a big company like Microsoft figure out how to block viruses?

                * Get a Mac
At home? I can barely keep up with gas prices let alone get a new computer. At work? The company makes us use Windows, we don't have a choice.

Re:Wrong approch

[IamTheRealMike]

The problem is that the typesafe languages are not realistic for writing desktop software in. Both Java and .NET are plagued with serious technical problems - which is why so few desktop apps are written using them. Even trivial optimisations like stack allocation cannot be done by the programmer in these languages, they take advanced analyses running inside complex optimizing compilers .... running on the users desktop.

Basically, you are right that using these languages would eliminate whole classes of vulnerabilities. But they would not eliminate all of them, and the costs are huge in terms of writing efficient, pleasant-to-use software. Stuff written in Java today is just uncompetitive, secure or not.

...if Sysadmins and Programmers did their jobs

[PopeRatzo]

OK, that's enough. When you start telling people that they shouldn't use hyperlinks or preview panes, then we're talking about moving backward.

I'm not sure I agree with this notion of putting all the security onus on the end user at all. What if every time I got on the subway it was my job to check to see if the wheels were about to fall off? Or if every time I sent a letter through the regular mail it was up to me to make sure the envelope was unopenable by anyone but my intended recipient?

When you start having the list of "common-sense" security measures taking up more than a paragraph, that means there's something wrong somewhere up the food chain from the end user.

I know it can be done. I work at a small University and I haven't seen a single spam in my inbox in the last year. I get a list every so often of what the spam filter caught and it's amazingly accurate. And this from a system that's run by the usual half-bright academic computer services staff member.

And what about an operating system that's basically a leaky boat? Before it wastes another minute on giving me transparent windows, Microsoft needs to make Windows impenetrable to spyware without the help of half a dozen spyware catchers, firewalls and adware monitors. If an operating system can't provide basic security, then what good is it anyway?

A huge percentage of the traffic in the internet's tubes goes through a limited number of systems and providers. They might start doing their part too.

And before you lazy bastards who are making a living at "internet security" tell me "you don't know anything about internet security"... You are goddamn right I don't know anything about internet security, and I have no interest in learning. In fact, I own a house and I don't know anything about motion detectors or satellite surveillance (well, actually, I do, but I shouldn't NEED to) to be able to secure my house. I lock the front door and feed my mastiff and that takes care of it.

I am getting impatient with the ever-lengthening list of security measures regular end-users are supposed to take to use the internet. And I'm way past impatient with security measures that involve giving up utility, such as "don't click on hyperlinks, type in your URLs".

Now you there, with the bad skin and "/." t-shirt. Get to work and figure this security thing out and leave me alone with your "common sense".