The Rise of Cyberlaw

Today’s CEOs and management not only need to worry about profit margins, market analysis, and mergers and acquisitions; now they also need to step into a world of practicing security with due care, understanding and complying with new government privacy and information security regulations, risking civil and criminal liability for security failures (including the possibility … Read more

Recognizing the Gray Areas in Security

Since technology can be used by the good and bad guys, there is always a fine line that separates the two. For example, BitTorrent is a peer-to-peer file sharing protocol that al- lows individuals all over the world to share files whether they are the legal owners or not. One website will have the metadata … Read more

The Basics of the Computer Virus

A plethora of negative magazine articles and books have catalyzed a new kind of hypochondria among computer users: an unreasonable fear of computer viruses. This hypochondria is possible because a) computers are very complex machines which will often behave in ways which are not obvious to the average user, and b) computer viruses are still … Read more

Google Search Advanced Operators

Beyond the basic searching techniques explored in the previous articles, Google offers special terms known as advanced operators to help you perform more advanced queries.These operators, used properly, can help you get to exactly the information you’re looking for without spending too much time poring over page after page of search results. When advanced operators … Read more

Working With Google URLs

Advanced Google users begin testing advanced queries right from the Web interface’s search field, refining queries until they are just right. Every Google query can be represented with a URL that points to the results page. Google’s results pages are not static pages.They are dynamic and are created “on the fly” when you click the … Read more

Google Basic Searching

Google searching is a process, the goal of which is to find information about a topic.The process begins with a basic search, which is modified in a variety of ways until only the pages of relevant information are returned. Google’s ranking technology helps this process along by placing the highest-ranking pages on the first results … Read more

Building Google Queries

Google query building is a process.There’s really no such thing as an incorrect search. It’s entirely possible to create an ineffective search, but with the explosive growth of the Internet and the size of Google’s cache, a query that’s inefficient today may just provide good results tomorrow—or next month or next year.The idea behind effective … Read more

Securing Web Server Software

To some extent, an organization deploying a third-party web server product is inevitably placing its fate in the hands of the software vendor. Nevertheless, there is still a large amount that a security-conscious organization can do to protect itself against the kind of software vulnerabilities. Choose Software with a Good Track Record Not all software … Read more

Finding Web Server Flaws

If you are lucky, the web server you are targeting may contain some of the actual vulnerabilities described in this chapter. More likely, however, it will have been patched to a more recent level, and you will need to search for something fairly current or brand new with which to attack the server. A good … Read more