Category Archives: Web site strategies

SiliconANGLE: State data privacy laws are changing fast – here’s what businesses need to know

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With no federal data privacy law on the books, states are doubling down on new laws governing the protection of people’s data.

In the past year, Delaware, Indiana, Iowa, Montana, Oregon, Tennessee and Texas have all enacted such laws, more than doubling the number states had them previously — those being California, Colorado, Connecticut, Utah and Virginia.

Although that represents progress, it’s also a challenge for companies doing business nationally to keep track of the subtle differences among the various laws. My analysis for SiliconANGLE here.

Scott Helme and Probely join forces on SecurityHeaders.com

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A well-known security tool, SecurityHeaders.com, is now part of many services that Probely offers. The company has a full range of web application and API vulnerability scanning solutions. That news story hides the history and importance of the union and its principal, Scott Helme. I had an opportunity to talk to him directly and find out what led to the change.

For those of you that aren’t familiar with Security Headers, it is a free website that can test your own site for weaknesses in various HTTP protocol and web policy implementations. Helme launched the site in 2015 after an experience testing his own home broadband router that could result in a compromised network. “I was just a guy with a hobby doing security research,” he told me recently. That led to a series of well-publicized other hacks, such as on the computers onboard the Nissan Leaf cars that he investigated with Troy Hunt. He also did some live hacks on TV of audience members’ equipment.

Since it was launched, the site has done 250M website scans.

Helme has worked with Probely since the company became a sponsor two years ago. “By joining forces with Probely, I’m incredibly happy that Security Headers will remain stable and viable for years to come!” said Helme. The union was designed for the site to be more sustainable and to leverage more resources, since until now it has been solely his own labors.

Helme’s goal with Security Headers was to make information security more comprehensible and actionable for the average person. That is why the site, and other tools that he offers, are all free and open. That will continue under the new regime at Probely. “I’ve put so much thought into it, working with these people, what they do, how they do it, and how they align with what I do,” he said.  “We have a lot in common.”

So I decided to try it out for myself, and I was quite surprised. I have had a website for almost 30 years, and while I knew about the Security Headers site never actually did a scan. Here are my results:

Pretty miserable, right? I basically failed every one of Helme’s six tests. But I was in good (or bad) company: about half of those 250M scans also resulted in an “F” grade.

So — I have a lot of work to do. The results page doesn’t just show the failures, but also provides links to content from Helme on how to learn more about these protocols and policies and what I need to do to fix them to get a better grade — and improve my site’s security. For example, the page links to improvements in hardening my response headers, doing a better job of defining my content security policies and implementing strict transport security protocols. The content is based on numerous talks that Helme has given (and will continue to give) over the years and is written clearly with copious code examples too.

But here is my dirty not-so-secret: I have zero experience with setting up website header parameters. This is probably the reason why my site received a failing grade. After years — decades — of experience setting up various web servers, I have never touched the header configurations of any of my servers. Back in the early days of the web, these parameters didn’t exist. So I can cut myself a little slack. But really, I should have known better, after all the stuff that I write about infosec down through the years. But that is one of the reasons why I try to be as hands-on as I can, and now I have some work to do and things to learn.

That is the essence of what he and Probely are trying to do — to teach us all how to have more secure sites.

(Note: this post is sponsored by Probely but is independent editorial content.)

Who killed Shireen?

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CPJ calls for swift, transparent investigation into shooting death of Al-Jazeera's Shireen Abu Akleh while reporting in West Bank - Committee to Protect JournalistsThe killing of Al Jazeera veteran journalist Shireen Abu Akleh last week has haunted me in the days since it happened. She was covering a raid by Israeli forces in the refugee camp of Jenin in the West Bank. For specifics about what happened, I would urge you to read Bellingcat’s analysis.

The Israelis initially said she was killed by Palestinians, then changed their story to say they weren’t sure who actually fired the fatal shot. Various other sources, including representatives of the Palestinian government and various Al Jazeera reports that have aired in the past week, claim it was Israelis, and done deliberately. These reports state that a sniper took careful aim at Shireen because she was wearing body armor and a helmet. The single shot hit her head just below her ear, which wasn’t protected.

The map shows her position (the red dot at the top), as well as the positions of Army forces and Palestinians. Both groups were similarly armed with M4 assault rifles using the same ammunition. I’ll get back to this in a moment.

What is even sadder about the circumstances surrounding Shireen’s death are the circumstances around her funeral. There were additional clashes with the Israeli army and police at both the hospital morgue and the church where her services were held. I am not going to link to the video clips but let’s just say it is pretty clear that “clashes” is probably not the best descriptor. Tensions and emotions were high, and it was ugly.

There have been 19 journalists killed in Israel (including Gaza and the West Bank) over the past two decades. That link will take you to the Committee to Protect Journalists — two other people have been killed there without confirmed motives. What makes this more personal for me was first, Shireen was a dual American/Palestinian citizen and a journalist. She is buried in the Christian cemetery that I visited three years ago when I was searching for the grave of Oskar Schindler. The route that took her to the cemetery is one that I have frequently walked over my many visits to the city. Finally, I have seen numerous reports of hers over the years that I have watched the Al Jazeera English channel, and admired her reporting and how often she was in the line of conflict. She was amazingly courageous.

Now, figuring out the origins of that bullet aren’t going to be easy. The Israelis and Palestinians don’t want to work together, but to have a definitive answer means you need to test the guns that were used that day. Some of them have been collected, but the chain of custody is probably broken on both the bullet and the weapons. Never has a single bullet carried so much weight since that November day in Dallas when JFK was killed.

I mourn Shireen’s death greatly.

Retaining my back catalog

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Taylor Swift and I have something in common: we both are having trouble retaining our back catalogs. In her case, she is busily re-recording her first six albums since the originals are now under the control of a venture-backed investment group. In essence, she is trying to devalue her earlier work and release new versions that improve upon the recordings. In my case, I am just trying to keep my original blog posts and other content available to my readers, despite the continued effort by my blog editors to remove this content. Granted, many of these posts are from several years ago, back when we lived in simpler times. And certainly a lot of what I wrote about then has been eclipsed by recent events or newer software versions, but still: a lot hasn’t. Maybe I need to add more cowbell, or sharpen up the snare drums. If only.

I realize that many of my clients want to clean up their web properties and put some shiny new content in place. But why not keep the older stuff around, at least in some dusty archive that can still receive some SEO goodness and bring some eyeballs into the site? Certainly, it can’t be the cost of storage that is getting in the way. Maybe some of you have even done content audits, to determine which pieces of content are actually delivering those eyeballs. Good for you.

Although that link recommends non-relevant content removal, which I don’t agree. I think you should preserve the historical record, so that future generations can come back and get a feel for what the pioneers who were making their mark on the internet once said and felt and had to deal with.

Some newspaper sites take this to the extreme. In July 2015, the venerable Boston Globe newspaper sent out a tweet with a typo, shown here. Typos happen, but this one was pretty odd. How one goes from “investigate” to “investifart” is perhaps a mystery we will never solve, but the Globe was a good sport about it, later tweeting, “As policy we do not delete typographical errors on Twitter, but do correct#investifarted…” Of course, #investifarted was trending before long. The lesson learned here: As long as you haven’t offended anyone, it’s ok to have a sense of humor about mistakes.

Both Tay and I are concerned about our content’s legacy, and having control over who is going to consume it. Granted, my audience skews a bit older than Tay’s –  although I do follow “her” on Twitter and take her infosec advice. At least, I follow someone with her name.

I have lost count on the number of websites that have come and gone during the decades that I have been writing about technology. It certainly is in the dozens. I am not bragging. I wish these sites were still available on something other than archive.org (which is a fine effort, but not very useful at tracking down a specific post).

I applaud Tay’s efforts at re-recording her earlier work. And I will take some time to post my unedited versions of my favorite pieces when I have the time, typos and investifarts and all.

In any event, I hope all you stay healthy and safe this holiday season.

 

 

FIR podcast episode #151: How Akamai rebuilt its website and drove customer engagement

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Few of us get to have as much influence over a more public website than Annalisa Church, VP Digital Technology, Insights & Operations for Akamai.  She has built a career on converging marketing and technology to drive better experiences for customers and build long-term value for enterprises. She is devoted to transforming marketing into a data-driven organization through actionable insights and ensuring the voice of the customer. Prior to Akamai, she worked for eight years in Dell’s marketing department.

Annalisa recently led a massive overhaul of the Akamai website, which is available in nine different languages, with more than 1,200 pages in English covering 18 different products.  The site has tremendous customer engagement, with one million monthly visitors, and almost two-thirds of them become customers after visiting the site.

The diagram below shows some of the changes that Church implemented during her redesign to make it more effective and more relevant to visitors. These efforts have paid off in terms of more engagement, more conversions from visitors to customers, and wider impact.


Listen to our podcast here:

How one startup team has created five successful exits

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It is an origin story that has been told numerous times: a group of computer nerds meets in college and goes on to build a software startup, eventually selling their company. But this is a story with a twist: four of the team members met more than 20 years ago when they were undergrad engineers at Carnegie Mellon University. Together with a fifth team member they would go on to have five different and successful exits at various tech startups.

The team includes Peter Pezaris (CEO and developer), David Hersh (product manager), James Price (devops), Michael Gersh (marketing/analytics) and latecomer Claudio Pinkus (who joined the others 13 years ago).

Their projects included:

  • Codestream, a devops collaboration platform which was founded in 2017. Earlier this summer, NewRelic announced they were acquiring the company this week.
  • Glip.com, a team collaboration platform acquired by RingCentral in 2015.
  • Multiply.com, a social commerce platform acquired by Naspers in 2010.
  • Commissioner.com, one of the first online fantasy sports platforms, which was acquired by CBS/Sportsline, and
  • Ask.com, acquired by IAC in 2005.

I wrote a story about the team — Hersh is married to my wife’s cousin — and hopefully can link to it here eventually. What is notable about Codestream is how they took an open source offering and parlayed this into a commercial success. Sure there are other stories about how major software vendors such as IBM, Oracle and others have acquired open source companies. This is just one that i knew about personally.

Avast blog: The importance of equitable and inclusive access to digital learning

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Schools continue to remain closed around the world. A UNICEF analysis last summer found that close to half a million students remain cut off from their education, thanks to a lack of remote learning policies or lack of gear needed to do remote learning from their homes. And as UNICEF admits, this number is probably on the low side because of skill gaps with parents and teachers to help their kids learn effectively with online tools.

While the situation has improved since last year and more kids are back in their actual classrooms, there are still critical gaps in math and reading skills and a wide disparity when country-wide data is compared. The equity/inclusion problem isn’t exactly new, but the pandemic has focused awareness and foreshadowed the obstacles. I discuss this in my latest blog post for Avast here.

Telegram designs the ideal hate platform

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Last week the Parler social network went back online, after several weeks of being offline. Its return got me thinking more about what the ideal hate platform is. I think there are two essential elements: the ability to recruit new followers to hate groups, and the ability to amplify their message. The two are related: you ideally need both. Parler, for all the talk about its hate-mongering, really isn’t the right technical solution, and I will explain why Telegram has succeeded.

This blog post comes out of email discussions that I have had with Megan Squire who studies these groups for a living as a security researcher and CS professor. She gave me the idea when we were discussing this report from the Southern Poverty Law Center on how Telegram has changed the nature of hate speech. It is a chilling document that tracks the rise of these groups over the past year. But the SPLC isn’t the only one paying attention: numerous other computer science researchers have tracked the explosive growth in these pro-hate groups since the Capitol January riots and other seminal events in the hate landscape.

Telegram’s rise in numbers doesn’t tell the complete story. Telegram has crafted a more complete social platform for distributing hate speech and recruiting new followers. Certainly, Facebook still has the largest user base, but their tech hate stack (if you want to give it a name) is nowhere near as well developed as Telegram’s, and Parler’s is a distant third. Compare the three networks below in terms of both amplification and recruitment elements:

Criteria Parler Facebook Telegram
Type of service Microblog Social network Messaging+
Coherent and transparent reporting process for hate speech No Mostly and improving No
Support email inbox No Yes No
Content moderation team It depends Yes It depends (see below)
Appeals process Yes Yes No
Encrypted messaging No Separate app Built-in
Corporate HQ location USA (for now) USA Dubai
Growth in English-speaking hate group followers Unknown Unknown Huge growth (SPLC report)
Group cloud-based file storage No No < 2 GB
Group-based sticker sets No No Yes
Bot infrastructure and in-group payment processing No No Yes

“Telegram is absolutely the platform of choice right now for the harder-edged groups. This is for technical reasons as well as access/moderation reasons,” says Squire. You can see the dichotomy in the table above: most of the moderation features that are (finally) part of Facebook are nowhere to be found or are implemented poorly on Telegram, and Parler is pretty much a no-show. Telegram’s file-sharing feature, for example, “allows hate groups to store and quickly disseminate e-books, podcasts, instruction manuals, and videos in easy-to-use propaganda libraries.” I have put links in the chart above to descriptions on why the bot infrastructure and sticker creation features are so useful to these hate groups.

What about moderating content? Here we have conflicting information. I labeled the boxes for Parler and Telegram as “it depends.” Telegram has said that their users do content moderation. In their FAQ they claim to have a team of moderators. For Parler, their community guidelines document says in one place that they don’t moderate or remove content, and in another that they do. My guess is that they both do very little moderation.

The picture for Parler is pretty bleak. If they do succeed in keeping their site up and running (which isn’t a foregone conclusion), they have almost none of the elements that I call out for Facebook and Telegram. Using the Twitter micro-blogging model doesn’t make them very effective at amplification of their messages (at least, not until some of their personalities can bring over huge crowds of followers) or in recruitment, especially now that their mobile apps have been neutered.

There are two technical items that are both useful for Telegram: its encrypted messaging feature and the difference between its mobile app and web interfaces. Much has been written about the messaging features between the different social networks (including my own blog post for Avast here). But Telegram does a better job both at protecting its users’ privacy (than Facebook Messenger) and has much better integration into its main social network code.

The second item is how content can be viewed by Telegram users. To get approval for its app on the iTunes and Google Play app stores, Telegram has put in place self-censorship “flags” so that mobile users can’t view the most heinous posts. But all of this content is easily viewed in a web browser. Parler could choose to go this route, if they can get their site consistently running.

As you can see, defining the tech hate stack isn’t a simple process, and evolving as hate groups figure out how to attract viewership.

N.B.: If you want to read more blogs about the intersection with tech and hate, there is this post where I examine the evolution of holocaust deniers and this post on fighting online disinformation and hate speech.

Network Solutions blog: How to Recognize and Prevent Homograph Attacks

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I have written a few times about ways to prevent brandjacking. In this blog post for Network Solutions, I discuss the use of homoglyph or homograph attacks by cybercriminals. These attacks involve exploiting international domain names and the idea is simple to explain once you know a bit of Internet history.

When the Internet was first created, it was based on using Roman alphabet characters in domain names. This is the character set that is used by many of the world’s languages, but not all of them. As the Internet expanded across the globe, it connected countries where other alphabets were in use, such as Arabic or Mandarin. 

Several years ago, researchers discovered the homograph ploy, and since then all modern browsers have been updated to recognize the homograph attack methods of using “xn–80ak6aa92e.com” instead of “apple.com.” I go into the details in my blog post and you can see an example of how a browser responds above.

There is an important lesson here for IT professionals: watch out for injection-style attacks across your web infrastructure. Every element of your web pages can be compromised, even rarely-used tiny icon files. By paying attention to all possible threats today, you’ll save yourself and your organization a lot of trouble tomorrow.

Internet Protocol Journal: Selling my IPv4 block

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If your company owns a block of IPv4 addresses and is interested in selling it, or if your company wants to purchase additional addresses, now may be the best time to do so. For sellers, a good reason to sell address blocks is to make money and get some use out of an old corporate asset. If your company has acquired other businesses, particularly ones that have assets from the early Internet pioneers, chances are you might already have at least one range that is gathering dust, or is underused.

So began an interesting journey for me and my range of class C addresses. It took months to figure out the right broker to list my block and to work through the many issues to prove that I actually was assigned it back in the mid 1990s. Thus began my own journey to correct this information and get it ready for resale. The process involved spending a lot of time studying the various transfer webpages at ARIN, calling their transfer hotline several times for clarifications on their process, and paying a $300 transfer fee to start things off. ARIN staff promises a 48-hour turnaround to answer e-mails, and that can stretch out the time to prepare your block if you have a lot of back-and-forth interactions, as I did.

You can read my report in the current issue of the Internet Protocol Journal here. I review some of the historical context about IPv4 address depletion, the evolution of the used address marketplace, the role of the block brokers and the steps that I took to transfer and sell my block.