Ask Felgall

Checking whether a web page that you expect to be secure actually has a security certificate installed is much more noticeable in modern browsers that highlight the address bar in yellow or green (depending on the type of certificate) than they were in the days when all you had to go on was the padlock. In some situations it will not matter who issued the certificate since all you need to worry about is that what you enter into the form will be encrypted before it is sent. In other cases you need to be certain that who you are sending it to is who you expect them to be and to check that you need to know who it is who issued the certificate to them in the first place so as to know how much trust you can place in the certificate. Browsers usually have a default list of trusted certificate issuing authorities and will alert you if the certificate doesn’t have an issuing chain that leads back to one of these. Of course you may still want to check on just who the authority who issued a particular certificate is.

Checking Root Certificate Authorities

Adding an antispam plugin into your email client sounds like a nice idea for cutting down on spam. This one is available for Outlook Express, Outlook and Thunderbird. I tested it out with Thunderbird.

Review of “Cloudmark Desktop”

As well as all the tutorials that I put online to teach people over the web, I also teach several classes fact to face in the classroom. For anyone who lives in Sydney, my classes for term three are now organised including my new JavaScript course.

In the Classroom

Yesterday my ISP blocked my internet access for a couple of hours when their automated spam blocker somehow misidentified my connection as having been sending spam. The ISP did not of course accuse me of sending spam, their block page suggested that it would have actually been caused by a virus or spyware having got installed on my system and that this was the most likely source of the spam. Their block page also offered free antivirus and antispyware software for download so that you could use the time you were blocked in scanning your system to find and remove the problem.

I didn’t need their download links because I already have a full range of security software installed on all my computers and the antivirus software had already brought itself completely up to date before the block started.

(more…)

When reviewing books on security is always interesting to see both where the author claims to stand with regards to the ethics of white hat / black hat techniques as well as whether or not the information presented in the book reflects that stance. This book provides a lot of practical information that will definitely be more of use to those of the white hat persuasion rather than the black.

Read my review of Hacking - The Art of Exploitation

Term four is about to start and as usual I am running classes at both the Macarthur and Bankstown Community Colleges