I was ranting on a completely different issue over at Alternageek when the news started a story about a missing teenaged girl. Apparently she met an older man on MySpace, talked to him on the family phone a number of times, skipped school to meet him and never came home.

Having your children go missing or anything bad happening to your children is a parent’s worst nightmare. As a mother of four I am on constant alert and I realize I cannot keep an eye on everything going on at all times especially as they get older and become more independent. However, when it comes to what is going on in my home, darn tootin’ I know what is going on.

Internet access? Monitored via a proxy and firewall, all accesses are logged into a system log, AND the computer is right where I can see it. Even if all the technology blocking and logging fails I am still there to monitor the activities on the computer. If they go to friends houses? Yeah, I talk to the parents to ensure that the computer policies are the same as in my home, if not there will be no computer access while my children are visiting and if they should ever think that is ridiculous then I don’t want my kids there to begin with. Same goes with any other policy such as phone, TV, movies, video games…

What amazes me is that this man called this girl’s house and talked to her on the phone. Her mother thought it was just a classmate. Either this child is a REALLY good liar or something failed here. I know, parent’s are busy people! They don’t have time to stay on top of everything, right? Let me put it this way, my children are more important than ANYTHING else. Period. I want to know who people are when they call. I want to meet them, I want to talk to their parents if it is someone who they have talked to in more than just passing.

Take precautions when it comes to the internet just like you would your home. If you lock your door, subscribe to caller ID, install security systems on your property then for all that is holy, why do you leave your internet unsecured and unmonitored? Bad people on the internet isn’t new and it isn’t hard to monitor your family when they are on the computer. The software is free from most ISPs and the best prevention is to keep the computer screen so that it faces you in a common area when you children are using it.

/end rant

I like to take a gander at the comments Akismet tags as spam before deleting them every now and again. Today I came across this doozy. It was soooo long I broke it into two giant files rather than one.

Every large Internet company has an online security team in place, and Google is no different. Now the search engine giant is going public. Yesterday, Google launched its new online security blog. The blog will post news on its little-known antimalware team, which, it turns out, has been in existence for about a year.

In its initial post, Google clarifies its now-famous one-in-10-Web-sites-are-malicious statement, derived from a presentation Niels Provos, Dean McNamee, Panayiotis Mavrommatis, Ke Wang, and Nagendra Modadugu gave at last month’s Hotbots 2007. Provos says the figure that is quoted in the media should be 0.1 percent (less than 1 percent) since the analysis used in the paper, “The Ghost in the Browser” (in PDF), covers several billion Web sites. From that number, presenters selected a subgroup of 12 million, of which 1 million were found to be engaging in drive-by downloads of malicious code. There’s also a colorful map in today’s post showing which countries are responsible for hosting compromised Web sites and distribution servers (the U.S. and China both appear bright red, with Canada and Russia coming in a close second on each map).

Read more at CNet News…

Google Security Blog 

Are you one of those people who lets Firefox save your passwords so you don’t have to type them in again? That might not be such a good idea, Robert Chapin says. That’s because he’s found a new security hole in the Mozilla Firefox web browser he’s calling a Reverse Cross-Site Request (RCSR).

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“We tested five shareware or commercial keylogging programs: HomeKeylogger 1.70, GhostKeylogger, KG-BKeylogger, Spytector 1.2.8 and ProBot. None of them captured passwords entered using the trick we describe.”

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Security mentor, Chris Gates, completely rewrote his popular article on cracking Windows PWs. Starting with the basics and continuing all the way through the process of exactly how to do it, this impressive article has to be one of the definitive works on password cracking. Very well done.

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Here is exactly how to hack a Windows XP Admin Password and not get caught. Have fun.

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