SECURITY IN AN INSECURE WORLD
The Western world is rapidly devolving into an electronic police state. There was a time when it was commonly accepted that people had a right to privacy and a right to their property. Today, laws routinely allow the surveillance state to violate your rights, sold to an uninformed public under the guise of "security."
From cameras watching you walk down the street to global tracking of your finances to eavesdropping on your calls, illegal wiretapping, tracking and surveillance have become commonplace. No longer are you presumed innocent until proven guilty – in practice you are assumed guilty and monitored to determine how guilty you may be.
In a software-based communications infrastructure, tracking you no longer requires the phone company to physically place a bug on your phone line. There is no need for Big Brother to view you from the television. Almost all of your transactions, your money, and your communications are electronic and leverage the same fundamental IP-based infrastructure.
There is little difference between the technology that sends email, that allows you to make a phone call, or sends movies to your flat screen television. From a government surveillance standpoint, the implication is that it takes fewer surveillance technologies to monitor and track you and your transactions, and they can be managed remotely with ease. The system is ripe for abuse.
Additionally, the most valuable business commodity today is personal data. Your daily electronic communications are under attack from a variety of sources ranging from governments to businesses to malicious hackers.
More than 10,000 new viruses are released each day targeting Windows-based machines. Trojans, worms, and assorted malware have increased in such frequency as to render most scanning technologies ineffective.
All the while, as the Stuxnet worm has shown, the malicious software has grown in sophistication so as to be able to render even physical infrastructure damage. Routinely, unsuspecting computer users have had their machines turned into "zombies" and placed into botnets that are used for many illicit purposes without the knowledge or consent of the computer owner.
Recently, an Armenian hacker, Georg Avenesov, was arrested after running his botnet for over a decade and charging over $100,000 per month to rent it out. How many unsuspecting, average computer users were caught in the botnet? Approximately 29 million. How many today know they were unwitting participants in a global organized crime ring? Approximately zero. How many are now vulnerable for the next botnet? I’d venture the answer is closer to 29 million than to zero.
Do I even need to mention the astronomical growth of the identity theft industry?
Private industry is one of the most egregious violators of privacy today. In truth, users that fail to read end user agreements open the door for abuse through enabling many companies to track, profile, package, and sell their personal preferences and interests.
Illegal collection of web surfing and shopping data is all too common as well. Selling this packaged information is the fastest business growth opportunity in the technology space.
This business has enabled companies like Google to become one of the wealthiest companies in the world. Social networking sites like Facebook routinely make user data available to the point where peoples’ livelihoods are lost.
Even technologies that users have been trained to trust, like "secure" web site certificates and "secure" technologies like Skype, have been compromised in recent weeks. Trusted companies like Apple are facing lawsuits for illegally obtaining user data and transmitting it back to company headquarters in violation of their own end user privacy policies.
The clear message is this: the most valuable asset you own in the modern world is your own data. Governments, private companies, and malicious entities are all after one thing – knowledge of you, your habits, your bank accounts, your client lists, your SSN, etc, etc.
In an era where legislation is being considered to confiscate Americans’ retirement and pension accounts to force funding of the out-of-control government debt and where the IRS is being granted power to confiscate US citizens’ passports if they suspect tax evasion, you can’t afford to take risks with your data or your privacy. Your very liberty is at stake.
At my companies, Evry International and Securelaptop.org, we provide solutions to defend peoples’ privacy against these threats. While it’s impossible to eliminate all risk, there are clear actions that can be taken and technology that can be implemented to provide dramatically higher levels of protection.
Utilizing off-the-shelf computer hardware and open source software products, we have created a computer system that virtually eliminates any risk of viruses, Trojans, and rookits that turn computers into zombies, or other malware from being able to compromise your computer.
We use military-grade encryption to make sure that the contents of the computer hard drive are completely unreadable by anyone that would steal the machine, even if they are using the most sophisticated computer forensic techniques. With a combination of encryption technologies and operating system changes, it is almost impossible for an unauthorized user to even access the computer.
Through our business relationships with companies like Cryptohippie, we provide a one-stop shopping experience for the most sophisticated, state-of-the-art, secure, stable computing solutions available in the world.
Better yet, our computing solutions, once implemented, are almost transparent to the user, resulting in an easy-to-use, consumer-friendly product that takes privacy protection to a new level.
Cryptohippie’s president, Paul Rosenberg, is a familiar figure to TTPers attending previous Rendezvous. Rendezvous X in Vegas next month (actually the end of next week!) will be my first.
I am looking forward to presenting with Paul and Marco "The Wizard" Gilligan a seminar on Preserving Your Security at the Rendezvous. There is so much that can be done to protect you from the bad guys. There are a lot of bad guys out there – but with the right kind of help, you can remain one step ahead of them.
David Evry will be speaking at Rendezvous X.