Cybersecurity’s secret asset: post-it notes

Here’s a new word for all the language nerds out there: clickjacking.  A CNET article -featuring Jeremiah Grossman of Whitehat Security, who coined the term with another researcher- explains:  Like the name suggests, clickjacking is the hijacking of your click, unbeknownst to you. A victim may not even know that the click has been redirected, ...

Here's a new word for all the language nerds out there: clickjacking.  A CNET article -featuring Jeremiah Grossman of Whitehat Security, who coined the term with another researcher- explains: 

Here’s a new word for all the language nerds out there: clickjacking.  A CNET article -featuring Jeremiah Grossman of Whitehat Security, who coined the term with another researcher- explains: 

Like the name suggests, clickjacking is the hijacking of your click, unbeknownst to you. A victim may not even know that the click has been redirected, which means there could be clickjacking attacks going on that no one knows about yet.

…One of the scariest things about clickjacking is the potential for abuse. An attacker could spy on you by turning on your Web cam or microphone, direct you to a Web page with malicious content that is downloaded onto your computer, or even rig it up so you end up clicking "buy" instead of "cancel" on an e-commerce site.

…Another thing that makes clickjacking so serious is that there really is very little that end users can do to protect themselves, Grossman said.

In the Web cam scenario, the best defense is probably to put a post-it note or other item over the Web cam lens and to disable the microphone in the software, he said…

So here we are: it’s 2009, the next cyber-Katrina is just around the corner, Chinese hackers are breaking into our power grids, and the US military are seriously pondering offensive cyberwarfare capabilities- and the best cyber-defense against "clickjacking" is to "put a post-it note over the Web cam lens"? By this logic, the best way to protect US government computers from attacks is simply not to turn them on…

In a world where post-it notes on Web cams might serve as strategic defensive mechanisms, it is no longer surprising that even FEMA’s ex-boss Michael Brown (of the "heck of a job, Brownie" fame) is now an expert on cybersecurity. After all, who is more suitable to help us deal with the "cyber-Katrina" than the man who failed to deal with the real one? 

Evgeny Morozov is a fellow at the Open Society Institute and sits on the board of OSI's Information Program. He writes the Net Effect blog on ForeignPolicy.com

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