Government


QR Tags Can Hide Malicious Links, Experts Warn

QR tags have become the next big thing in interactive marketing. But as smart phone users flock to the trendy, postage-stamp sized bar codes, researchers are warning that they could be used to hijack mobile phones by directing them to malicious Web pages.


Within days of the attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, politicians, social scientists and anyone else who could find a microphone was repeating a line that would soon become a mantra: Americans will have to make some sacrifices in the name of greater security and safety. Viewed now through the prism of privacy, that looks like the understatement of the century. Americans have surrendered virtually all of their privacy and have gotten nothing but wave after wave of new attacks and threats in return.

By Chris WysopalIn the days following 9/11 we heard alarmist warnings of a coming wave of cyberterrorism. In the early days of the war in Afghanistan when an Al Qaeda computer was found, it was treated as evidence that terrorists knew how to use computers so therefore they would soon be sending worms to shut down or blow up our power plants. During that time I was interviewed on a CNN talk show describing what a terrorist might be doing with a computer that was found to have computer aided design (CAD) software on it.  I said it might be used to figure out the best place to plant a bomb to cause the most damage to a structure.  This wasn’t cyberterrorism. It was using the computer as an engineering tool.  Somehow this got lost by the host of the show who kept on plugging away that cyberterror from Al Qaeda was coming soon.  That never materialized and in the last 10 years I don’t think there has been any documented cases of cyberterrorism.

It was December 8, 2000 – the waning days of the Clinton Administration. Richard Clarke, a member of President Clinton’s National Security Council, was addressing attendees at SafeNet 2000, a conference sponsored by Microsoft Corp. that brought together computer security experts from around the country to talk about ways to increase cooperation around cyber security. 

In the wake of this weekend’s revelations of the seriousness of the attack on certificate authority DigiNotar, security experts have renewed criticism of the Internet’s digital certificate infrastructure, with some wondering if larger certificate authorities (CAs) might be too big to fail.