Monday, October 16, 2000

How to upset your customers There is a product call WinU (http://www.bardon.com/winu.htm) that "locks" windows and supposedly keeps users from doing things they shouldn't. Leaving aside the practicality of actually making such a product work the people who wrote WinU have a bigger problem. On the web site they publish a quite extensive list of customers including any number of banks, CNN, numerous police and fire agencies etc (http://www.bardon.com/userlist.htm). Well the inevitable happened: Somebody who signs their messages "Nu Omega Tau" posted to BUGTRAQ a list of the built in "emergency passwords" (it turns out the passwords are visible as plain text in the binary). So here we have a well publicized list of companies running what is now effectively useless security software. [John Pettitt via risks-digest Volume 21, Issue 09] 0:00 # G!