Blurblog

One of the interesting topics that came up during our discussion was the take down of a security related website (seclists) that contains thousands of email list archives (Story). The reason was because a list of approximately 56,000 myspace usernames and passwords was published by a user of the website (Remember afterall it is an email list archive). From that, we wondered- How did these hackers get ahold of these usernames and passwords?

Alright, so granted that phishing scams have been prexistant since the beginning of the internet as we know it. You’ve seen them before, it’s those sites that do that special tweak to your profile that only they can do for you if you just enter in your USERNAME and PASSWORD. Brilliant, people still fall for this. But that’s not what I’m trying to get at in this topic.

So grant that the user doesn’t enter their login information to the phishing site, good job. But now let’s take another front: Schools and their web filtering systems. Now most high schools provide internet filters and censorship for the ‘protection’ of students. Now to some degree this is a good thing- primarily because it prevents students from having their own fantasies in class.

However more recently, more and more popular social networks and email services such as myspace and gmail are blocked. As with most things kids our age do, we find ways around the things that block us from doing what we want to do, so we start looking for free proxy sites. Now the use of these proxies are so widespread, that even if an administrator blocks myspace, and blocks the keyword proxy, there will always be one that a student finds and shows everyone else how to get to. Such is the case with our school. Now here’s the problem: The students don’t know if that proxy is legitimate.

Take for instance that myspace is blocked and you find a proxy that takes you to myspace. You login, you see myspace and use it. Perfect. Now take it from the proxy owner’s point of view, if they are using a sort of modified proxy that logs all post and get content, you’ve just given them your myspace(or Email) login information.

Yet again, we just gave our information to the middle man to take and publish for themselves. Now back to my original point: School internet censorship leads to the use of proxies to attain the services that are otherwise censored(eg. myspace, Gmail, Y!Mail, etc.). These proxies have the growing potential to be danger to all of our high schools(and other facilities that promote censorship) and their students.

But what I really want to hear is your opinions on this topic. It is just an analytic that became an interesting topic in today’s earlier discussion. I’ll be posting some more related topics in coming weeks. I just repaired my blog so it shouldn’t be to long. Cheers.