Ben Gross

Tag: Security

  • The State of User Tracking and the Impossibility of Anonymizing Data

    What we think is reasonable, commonplace, or even possible in terms of protecting or violating online privacy shifts constantly. Recent developments in tools and techniques for tracking online behavior and identifying individuals from supposedly anonymized data sets should cause us to reevaluate what is possible. Katherine McKinley of iSEC Partners published a detailed analysis of…

  • Trends in Password Masking Security and Usability

    John Gruber’s Daring Fireball pointed me to Jakob Nielsen’s Alertbox column Stop Password Masking, which resulted in a thoughtful and interesting thread of conversations and a few experimental solutions. Password masking refers to the practice of displaying an alternate character, usually a star or a bullet in place of the actual characters typed into a…

  • You Can Fool Some of the People All of the Time: Research on Phishing

    Duping users into revealing their private data goes back decades, but it wasn’t until the late-1990s that “phishing” became the word to describe the practice. Today, phishing costs banks, service providers, and consumers billions of dollars per year, and companies are working frantically to limit the damage. A survey by Gartner estimated that more than…