I was interested to read that 5 major vendors are banding together to fight cyber terror by providing faster responses to threats. The vendors: Cisco, Juniper, Intel, IBM and Microsoft have established a non profit organization called: Industry Consortium for Advancement of Security on the Internet or ICASI.
Without knowing much about ICASI activities, I believe this is a step in the right direction since today's attacks target multiple products, OS and protocols creating a wider attack vector.
My only hope is that such initiative will provide some new weapons to fight tomorrow's attacks.
This photo was taken by my colleague, Eric ,in front of building 43 (Microsoft campus, Redmond) .
The tree is sitting on a car in the parking lot (yes, there is a car under there). No one appears to have been injured. The woman in the gray sweater holding her forehead appears to be the car owner. This photo was taken from his office.
Until today, I've always trusted my ISP. First, because I had no reason not to, but it was more than that. My ISP knows a lot about me. Starting from which computers I have at home (media center, windows desktop, Linux servers and mobile devices) all the way to building my browsing habits (hours, homepage, preferred sites, randomly accessed sites etc..). Recent campaigns offered me a trusted Internet provided by my trusted ISP claiming they protect me from many incoming threats.
however, Starting today, I see my ISP in a different light - He is my big brother (well, at least one of them).
Take a look at the following article to see what I mean:
Leaked Report: ISP Secretly Added Spy Code To Web Sessions, Crashing Browsers
An internal British Telecom report documents BT's partnership with U.K. ad company Phorm, which specializes in building profiles of ISP customers, then serving targeted ads on webpages the user visits.
From late September to early October 2006, British Telecom secretly partnered with Phorm to let the company monitor and track 18,000 of the BT's customers. Phorm installed boxes on BT's network that redirected web requests through their proxy server.
Those boxes inserted JavaScript code into every web page downloaded by the users. That script then reported back to Phorm the contents of the web page, which Phorm used to create ad profiles of a user. Additionally, Phorm purchased advertising space on prominent web sites, showing a default ad for a charity. But when a user who had previously looked at car sites visited one of those pages, he instead got an advertisement for car insurance.
The users were not informed they were being made guinea pigs for a new revenue system for BT and had no way to opt out of the system, according to the report. The JavaScript caused flickering problems for some users as the script reported back information about the content of the web page to a Phorm server. The script also crashed browsers that loaded a website that relied excessively on anchor tags.
BT's secret test first came to light when one suspicious user contacted The Register about the problem. At the time, BT denied any involvement, though the company later admitted it had run a secret test and planned to expand the monitoring technology to its entire network.
..Neither Phorm nor BT returned calls seeking comment on the document.