Security quotes of the week

Gadzooks. A scared populace is much more willing to pour money into the cyberwar arms race.

Structurally, the economics of cybercrimes like spam and password-stealing are the same as those of fishing. Economics long ago established that common-access resources make for bad business opportunities. No matter how large the original opportunity, new entrants continue to arrive, driving the average return ever downward. Just as unregulated fish stocks are driven to exhaustion, there is never enough “easy money” to go around.

As background, [Luigi] Auriemma explains that when the device receives a controller packet it displays message informing users that a new ‘remote’ has been detected, and prompts the user to ‘allow’ or ‘deny’ access. Included with this remote packet is a string field used for the name of device. Auriemma found that if he altered the name string to contain line feed and other invalid characters, the device would enter an endless loop.

Auriemma claims that nothing really happens for the first five seconds, but then he lost control of the TV, both manually on the control panel and with the remote. Then after another five seconds, he claims, the TV [automatically] restarts. Then the process repeats itself forever, even after unplugging the TV. Eventually, Auriemma managed to reset the TV in service mode. He writes that users can avoid the situation altogether by hitting ‘exit’ when prompted to ‘allow’ or ‘deny’ the new remote device.

High school student trying to crack a system to download a game for free? Cyberattack declared!

Misconfigured hardware or software causing a denial of service problem? Cyberattack declared!

Anything that seems at all out of the ordinary and you want to pass the buck as quickly as possible? Cyberattack declared!