Smart Security by Dharmesh M Mehta: Internet

Wednesday, February 20, 2008

Things you can do to help end Phishing

Learn to recognize and avoid phishing. The Anti-Phishing Working Group has a good list of recommendations.

Update your software regularly and run an anti-virus program. If a cyber-criminal gains control of your computer through a virus or a software security flaw, he doesn't need to resort to phishing to steal your information.

Use different passwords on different sites and change them periodically. Phishers routinely try to log in to high-value targets, like online banking sites, with the passwords they steal for lower-value sites, like webmail and social networking services.

Wednesday, November 08, 2006

Alternative to IE and Firefox

An interesting alternative is SecureIE (www.secureie.com) which costs 30$ and seems
to outperform Firefox and IE in the security field (http://tinyurl.com/bjayn).

Thursday, October 12, 2006

Firefox popups

Like you, I love Firefox for many reasons, including popup blocking. So over the last few weeks I’ve been surprised to see occasional popups.

It turns out that some clever people figured out that you could launch popups from Flash, getting around the Firefox default settings.

Fortunately, you can get around it:

1. Type about:config into the Firefox location bar.
2. Right-click on the page and select New and then Integer.
3. Name it privacy.popups.disable_from_plugins
4. Set the value to 2.

The possible values are:

* 0: Allow all popups from plugins.
* 1: Allow popups, but limit them to dom.popup_maximum.
* 2: Block popups from plugins.
* 3: Block popups from plugins, even on whitelisted sites.

Wednesday, September 06, 2006

Free Web Proxy List

A web proxy is becoming more and more important in todays internet. Schools and Companys tend to block sites pretty quickly nowadays, especially when the blocking is directed at just a few websites and not every website in that category. Web Proxys might be able to sneak past this policies and display the site in your browser even though it is banned in the network.

How do web proxys work ?

A network bans a website either by its IP, its name or part of its name. A web proxy makes only shows its own address to the network and not the actual destination of the user. The admin of the network will think everything is fine and you are free to reach the site that is banned. The only thing that might happen is that the admin is banning the web proxy as well, but this is not a big deal either. Hundreds of web proxys exist, just switch to a new one and you are ready to visit the banned site again.

Setup your own Web Proxy:

Let us assume that all proxy websites have been banned in your network, you can´t find a single web proxy that is still working. Your best choice is to create your own web proxy at an address that only you know. All you need is the php web proxy poxy and some webspace with php to upload it to. Search google for free webspace php and you should find some hosts that allow you to use php and upload your web proxy to them.

You can alternativly use a cgi web proxy which needs a webspace with cgi enabled.
Web Proxy List:

Please not that the list does not display if the webproxy is able to handle scripts, I did not find a reliable way to make a test for all languages out there, therefor this has not been added to the list. I also removed websites that loaded slowly, displayed errors or forced you to click on an ad before you could use the service.

It is most likely that the name “proxy” might have been banned as well, try using web proxys that do not have proxy i their url, this might help.

oxys that do not have proxy i their url, this might help.