Update: Verashni has since written a story on the matter.

Many non-technical people don't realise how easy it is to manipulate many of the core internet protocols. 2008 Was a particularly bad year for it with some key weaknesses being pointed out in critical protocols such as DNS, SSL and BGP (again) which have joined the ranks of SMTP, Ethernet and in-line SQL as broken. However, with all the technofeats, I forget how easy it is to do something simple that appears to be manipulation to the general public. A journo friend of mine, Verashni, noticed (amoung others) that visiting www.malema.co.za will take you to the DA's website. For any forein readers, this is funny as I'm sure Julius Malema has a dartboard with, opposing political party leader, Hellen Zille's face on it. I did a quick check of who had registered the domain and it was fairly obvious this was a prank:

2f. billingaccount : The ANC
2g. billingemail : neveranc@gmail.com
2i. invoiceaddress : Not 54 Sauer Street, Johannesburg, 2001
2j. registrantphone : +2774 115 9505
2k. registrantfax :
2l. registrantemail : neveranc@gmail.com

Five years ago I started this blog to keep my then supervisor up to date on my academic progress. It's interesting that at the same time five years ago Facebook was launched, and I think the last five years have been particularly interesting for computer security, and it's been fun. I've also grown a lot over the years, and it's funny to read my early entries with hindsight.

I've never had a massive readership except for the odd case of big blogs linking to me (SANS, F-Secure and Washington Post were my most memorable). Although, the feedback I've received over the years has really helped to refine some of my stances and ideas, and hopefully a few of yours dear reader. For example Ben Nagy once scared me into a whole new tack leading from this to this. Last year was particularly fun with Roberto Preatoni and Dan Kaminsky both getting involved in some discussion. It also marked a return to more active blogging for me, after a drop off in the move from academia to consulting. I hope to keep it up.

To my regular readers, thanks for reading, to any new readers welcome. My goal has always been to encourage debate and discussion, so if you've never argued with me before  but always wanted to, know that I welcome the chance.

Richard Bejtlich just posted an entry entitle "Data Leakage Protection Thoughts." In it he argues that Data Leak Prevention products will just lead to a new barrage of alerts for someone to ignore (ala IPS/IDS), or blocking a too-small-set of data for which a significant amount of time would need to be invested to understand how to block. I'm paraphrasing, but I think it provides the gist.

I've been saying to anyone who would listen, that many advertisers (such as Google and DoubleClick - owned by Google) don't let you opt-out of their profiling. Essentially, many advertisers set a cookie and use it to track you across sites. This is useful to add state to stateless HTTP, but often lots of third-party cookies are set by advertisers which have no function other than to help profile you, i.e. it's possible to have a perfectly functional site without these cookies.