What you never create can't leak

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Shhh finger to lips man

The latest leaked messages to blow up in someone’s face are some emails from Evan Spiegel, the CEO of Snapchat. These were incredibly sexist emails sent while he was in college at Stanford organizing fraternity parties.

These emails are like racist rants, homophobic tweets, and pictures of your “junk”. They are all trouble waiting to happen, and there is always a risk that they will crop up and bite you when you least expect it. If you have ever shared any potentially damaging messages, documents, photos, or whatever then you are at risk if anyone in possession of them is angry, board, or in search of attention.

Even if it only ever lives on your computer, you are vulnerable to hackers breaking in and stealing it, or to someone getting your old poorly erased second hand computer.

This falls in to the “if it exists it will leak” rant that I seem to be having to repeat a lot lately. The first rule of privacy is: think before you write (or talk, or take a picture, or do something stupid). Always assume that anything will leak, will be kept, will be recorded, will be shared. Even when you are “young and stupid” try to keep a thought for how that thing would be seen in ten years when you are in a very different position. Of course, ideally you are not sexist, racist, homophobic, or stupid in the first place.

Lance Cottrell is the Founder and Chief Scientist of Anonymizer. Follow me on Facebook, Twitter, and Google+.

NSA's TAO -- Leaked catalog of tools and techniques

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NSA's TAO -- Dark Reading

The Internet has been buzzing with reports of the recently leaked NSA exploits, backdoors, and hacking / surveillance tools. The linked article is good example.

None of this should be news to anyone paying attention. Many similar hacking tools are available from vendors at conferences like BlackHat and DefCon.

We all know that zero-day exploits exist, and things like Stuxnet clearly show that governments collect them.

Intentionally introducing compromised crypto into the commercial stream has a long history, perhaps best demonstrated by the continued sales of Enigma machines to national governments long after it had been cracked by the US and others.

This reminds me of a quote I posted back in March. Brian Snow, former NSA Information Assurance Director said “Your cyber systems continue to function and serve you not due to the expertise of your security staff but solely due to the sufferance of your opponents.”

One can focus on making this difficult, but none of us should be under the illusion that we can make it impossible. If you have something that absolutely must be protected, and upon which your life or liberty depends, then you need to be taking drastic steps, including total air gaps.

For the rest of your activities, you can use email encryption, disk encryption, VPNs, and other tools to make it as difficult as possible for any adversary to easily vacuum up your information.

If you are of special interest, you may be individually targeted, in which case you should expect your opponent to succeed. Otherwise, someone hacking your computer, or planting a radio enabled USB dongle on your computer is the least of your worries. Your cell phone and social media activities are already hemorrhaging information.

Lance Cottrell is the Founder and Chief Scientist of Anonymizer. Follow me on Facebook and Google+.

Amazon address exposure to strangers through your Wishlist

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Amazon Customer's Privacy Exposed In theory, your Amazon wish list should allow people to buy you gifts, but should not reveal anything but the list of items you want.

Evidently, if you buy something for someone off their list, you can then see the delivery address in the order reports in your account.

Solution is to remove the delivery address from your list. Your friends and family would have to enter the delivery address manually, but one hopes that they already know it. A good description of the process is in the above linked article.