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Category: Security Services
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We now know, thanks to Edward Snowden, that the NSA and other governments intercept and store all communications that they can.  This includes email, web browsing, phone records, and more esoteric communications like IRC.

This information is collected by and shared among various US allies, including Canada, the UK, New Zealand, and Australia.  By some reports, it is also shared with many other countries, including Denmark, Germany, Israel, the Netherlands, Singapore, Sweden, and Switzerland.

This can put your business at risk, as private corporate data is intercepted and analyzed by many foreign governments.  This obviously includes external communication over the public Internet, but could potentially include internal communications, also, as the NSA has actively targeted many organizations in hacking operations.

Is your private business information something you would want to share with 12 different governments?

CB Services can set you up with interception-resistant email, encrypted by default for all internal communication, and encrypted to any outside organization who uses a similar encryption system.

Proprietary encryption systems, which cannot be reviewed by the public at large, are potential backdoors for organizations like the NSA.  Time and time again, proprietary encryption has been revealed to have significant flaws, due to the lack of input from many industry experts.

For this reason, CB Services uses no proprietary algorithms for encryption.  Only publicly reviewed encryption schemes are used to protect your information.

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Category: Security Services
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The NSA is watching.  Thanks to Edward Snowden's whistle blowing, the US government has admitted to a massive spying operation against most of the citizens in the United States, and virtually all Internet traffic crossing the borders of the US.

Kinda creepy, isn't it?

Bruce Schneier, in his essay NSA Surveillance: a Guide to Staying Secure, recommends privacy-enhancing programs to make it more difficult for these spying operations to track you.

"1) Hide in the network. Implement hidden services. Use Tor to anonymize yourself. Yes, the NSA targets Tor users, but it's work for them. The less obvious you are, the safer you are."

CB Services runs a Tor node, to improve the Tor network for users.  It can also be set up on your computer, to provide you with this same protection from government snooping.

Using Tor prevents an organization watching your internet connection from doing something called traffic analysis.  Knowing who you talk to and when can reveal a significant amount about your personal interests, employment, and more.

 

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Category: Security Services
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The site you tried to visit is a phishing site.

It's an con, or fraud, attempting to obtain usernames and passwords from various sites to perform identity theft, or various other financial shenanigans.  The email containing the link you followed to this site is a fake.

Fortunately, the perpetrator doesn't know much of anything about computer security, and passed along the username and password needed to change the phishing site in the email.

CB Services, in an attempt to make the Internet safer for all, has made some changes to the phishing site to redirect you to this site.  Hopefully, the information you find here will be beneficial to you in future.

What is phishing?

Phishing is sending fraudulent emails, appearing to be from sites like PayPal, eBay, or your bank.  These emails direct you to click on a link to a site, also appearing to be the official site.  At the site, there is a login form, which sends the username and password that you enter to the phisher, rather than the legitimate site.  Usually, you are then redirected to the official site, sometimes with a login error.

What do I do if I suspect I've been phished?

Go to the legitimate site, login, and change your password immediately.  Don't make the new password a variation of the old one.  For instance, if your original password was"Password123", don't make your new password "Password456".

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Category: Security Services
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So much information that we use and access on a daily basis is protected by passwords.  But how do you know if that password is secure and unique enough that it cannot be easily guessed?

There are many programs that are used by malicious hackers to attempt to break into password protected services.  These use what is called a dictionary list or word list; simply a text file with one word per line, which the program reads through, trying each word in turn as the password.  If your password is in a wordlist possessed by the attacker, it will be broken.

CB Services has been collecting and appending wordlists, building one of the biggest wordlists available on the Internet.  This wordlist isn't currently available for complete download, although it may be at some point in future.  Currently, however, you can enter your passwords and passphrases, and see if they are in the list.

Now, if you're security paranoid, like me, then you'll immediately suspect that this is just a way to collect people's passwords.  If you're not security paranoid, you should be, because it could easily be that.

But it's not.  If it makes you more comfortable, enter a completely random garbage series of characters, like "#W$Tgwerv#$B#q"  This shouldn't be in the wordlist, so it will return no hits.  Then, when you know it doesn't say everything is in the wordlist, you can enter your favourite password and see if it's in a dictionary list somewhere.  If you get results, then you might want to rethink how you pick passwords.