I realize there is supposed to be some kind of entertainment value to a plastic owl that blinks and rotates its head, but that seems like such a waste of computing potential.

ThinkGeek says this thing has just three modes: active, mellow and sleeping.

Sleeping? Is that robot slang for off?

Instead of blinking and rotating randomly, what if this little guy responded to CPU load or memory. Even better would be a monitor for network traffic and…firewall or IDS settings.

So here’s a truly killer application: security center metrics tied to animal robots like this owl. Malware detected on sensitive systems? A rooster starts to crow. Spam reaching critical levels? A pig grunts and squeals. Talk about clear indicators and fun for the whole operations team.

On the other hand, that could be far too sophisticated so I would also consider buying this thing if it were just a webcam in the form of an owl. Its eyes are certainly big enough to be a lens or two, and you would know it’s off when they are closed. This would be handy, given increasing privacy concerns around cams that have no reliable physical indicators.

The ISecAuditors say you may find it worthwhile to setup hundreds of Google accounts if you want to run a brute force attack on an account sometime in the future. They posted an explanation on Full Disclosure

To bypass the limitation of 1.200 requests per day it is only necessary to have different Gmail accounts. Each new account means 100 new possible requests. If the attacker wants to do a request each second, means 7.200 attempts each two hours, the only need is to have 72 accounts. This would mean 86.400 request/day. More requests only need more accounts.

As the Gmail account creation is a manual process as it needs to pass the captcha. Another limitation is that Google only permits the creation of 10 new accounts creation per day from the same IP address, but using proxies or Tor network would bypass this limitation. Anyway, although the creation of N accounts, those could be used anytime for password cracking accounts.

Google should enforce stronger password standards for certain (the advisory suggests there are none at all). However, companies with large numbers of accounts have to also consider the overall cost of such a move relative to any gains.

In short, for every active user with a locked account there is an unlock/helpdesk fee associated. This will be at least $15 so a thousand locked accounts per day will be more than $15K in overhead. Thus a decision to enable account locking, or strong passwords more likely to lead to mistakes and then account locking, is really going to be based on the economics of risk.

The advisory suggests four control mistakes have been made by Google.

Anyway, is it possible to abuse the “Check for mail using POP3” capability to do attacks to the passwords of the users in an automated way, evading all referred security restrictions and controls and doing a transparent and not noticeable attack to the user that its account is being password cracked as:
– There’s no need for required action from the victim.
– There’s no modification in the password of the victim.
– There’s no locking in the victim account.
– There’s no security notification to the victim.

This seems like very tortured English to me, speaking of making mistakes. Not sure what they mean by required action from the victim. That also seems like a repeat of their last bullet point, which is notification to the victim. Action could only be required after or with notification.

A warning sent to the victim saying “your account has had X unsuccessful logins” is more likely to lead to a helpdesk call ($$) than anything. Imagine if the message said “you have had 1,200 failed logins today, please change your password to something stronger”. That would not only lead to a helpdesk call but probably a very confused/angry call or maybe one full of fear and demanding action.

Locking the account is unlikely to happen, as I suggested above.

Finally, brute forcing a password never leads to modification. Modification would happen entirely outside of a brute force event.

With this in mind, the advisory boils down to nothing more than a public service announcement to users that they should use strong passwords. Although I would say such a notice is commendable, they fail to suggest what/how to make a password strong enough to their liking thus leaving everyone in the same exact spot they were before reading the advisory. This provides Google, and its users, little incentive or explanation why they should alter the current risk profile.

There seems to be some sort of confusion about who exactly should be considered an expert on cyber security.

Take for example a post by the ITAC (Identity Theft Assistance Center) that boasts:

Michael Brown was a “former Director of FEMA. Mr. Brown is an expert on cyber security and provides excellent insights into what our nation can do to better protect itself in this new era of cyber warfare.”

Remember how he was disgracefully removed from his position as FEMA Director after Hurricane Katrina?

CNN posted a more critical view of him; the sort of information that makes me wonder why the ITAC portrays him so favorably and whether we should really expect any “excellent insights”.

The e-mails Melancon posted, a sampling of more than 1,000 provided to the House committee now assessing responses to Katrina by all levels of government, also show Brown making flippant remarks about his responsibilities.

“Can I quit now? Can I come home?” Brown wrote to Cindy Taylor, FEMA’s deputy director of public affairs, the morning of the hurricane.

A few days later, Brown wrote to an acquaintance, “I’m trapped now, please rescue me.”

Sounds like Mr. Brown was trying to pull a Palin, and “former Director of FEMA” is an understatement.

The truth seems to be that this man doctored his resume and worked friends and connections to get into positions of authority. This unfortunately put people’s lives at unnecessary risk as Time has detailed.

Brown’s lack of experience in emergency management isn’t the only apparent bit of padding on his resume, which raises questions about how rigorously the White House vetted him before putting him in charge of FEMA. Under the “honors and awards” section of his profile at FindLaw.com — which is information on the legal website provided by lawyers or their offices—he lists “Outstanding Political Science Professor, Central State University”. However, Brown “wasn’t a professor here, he was only a student here,” says Charles Johnson, News Bureau Director in the University Relations office at the University of Central Oklahoma (formerly named Central State University).

[…]

According to FEMA’s Andrews, Brown said “he’s never claimed to be the director of the home. He was on the board of directors, or governors of the nursing home.” However, a veteran employee at the center since 1981 says Brown “was never director here, was never on the board of directors, was never executive director. He was never here in any capacity. I never heard his name mentioned here.”

The FindLaw profile for Brown was amended on Thursday to remove a reference to his tenure at the International Arabian Horse Association, which has become a contested point.

Brown’s FindLaw profile lists a wide range of areas of legal practice, from estate planning to family law to sports. However, one former colleague does not remember Brown’s work as sterling. Stephen Jones, a prominent Oklahoma lawyer who was lead defense attorney on the Timothy McVeigh case, was Brown’s boss for two-and-a-half years in the early ’80s. “He did mainly transactional work, not litigation,” says Jones. “There was a feeling that he was not serious and somewhat shallow.”

Why would anyone think today that he suddenly has become an expert with regard to technology, let alone anything to do with cyber security?

I read a few of his blog entries and once I got past his Palinesque trash talk about Obama, I found a few examples of his supposedly “excellent insights”. Here is his analysis of a recent disc reported missing:

We live in an electronic world of ones and zeroes. That data represents national security interests, personal interests, our lives and our safety. There has to be a better way to secure and protect this from human error. Why, for instance, isn’t the data archived on site at the White House Data Center (a secret location not yet revealed by Joe Biden insofar as I know – it is a cool place, though.) Why couldn’t that disc been archived or “processed” (whatever the National Archives was doing to it) at the White House data center and then transferred electronically to the archives. Seems a little archaic to actually deliver a hard drive from either the White House or the data center to the archives.

But then I’m a Mac person. What do I know?

Nothing, apparently. Ones and zeros? Sorry, but we do not live in a binary world although we make use of binary. Decisions are often vague and have shades.

He asks why a disc couldn’t be archived at a data center and then transferred electronically. What? A disc with data, almost certainly a duplicate of what is already in the archives, disappears. So he asks if it could instead be sent over a network to protect against human error. Bzzzt. Fail.

And what kind of conclusion is his personal choice of an operating system? A Mac has nothing to do with this topic.

I say without hesitation this is *not* an expert on cyber security.