TaoSecurity Blog

For many years, private organizations in the West have endured attacks by the Chinese government, its proxies, and other parties. These intruders infiltrated private organizations to steal data. Those not associated with the targeted organizations were generally not directly affected. Today an action by the Chinese government is affecting millions of users around the world. This is unacceptable. You may be aware that an American technology company, GitHub , is suffering a massive distributed denial of service attack, at the time of writing. According to Insight Labs , Internet traffic within China is being manipulated, such that users are essentially attacking GitHub. They are unwittingly requesting two sites hosted by GitHub. The first is a mirror of the Chinese edition of the New York Times (blocked for several years ). The other is a mirror of the GreatFire.org Web site, devoted to discovering and exposing Internet filtering by China's "Great Firewall." As n...

Recently Bloomberg published an article titled The Dark Science of Interrogation . I was fascinated by this article because I graduated from the SERE program at the US Air Force Academy in the summer of 1991, after my freshman year there. SERE teaches how to resist the interrogation methods used against prisoners of war. When I attended the school, the content was based on techniques used by Korea and Vietnam against American POWs in the 1950s-1970s. As I read the article, I realized the subject matter reminded me of another aspect of my professional life. In intelligence, as in the most mundane office setting, some of the most valuable information still comes from face-to-face conversations across a table. In police work, a successful interrogation can be the difference between a closed case and a cold one. Yet officers today are taught techniques that have never been tested in a scientific setting. For the most part, interrogators rely on nothing more than intuition, experienc...

I noticed an AFP story posted by Al Jazeera America titled  Iran could allow in Google, other tech companies if they follow rules . It included the following: Iran could allow Internet giants such as Google to operate in the the country if they respect its "cultural" rules, Fars news agency said on Sunday, quoting a senior official. "We are not opposed to any of the entities operating in global markets who want to offer services in Iran," Deputy Telecommunications and Information Technology Minister Nasrollah Jahangard reportedly told Fars. "We are ready to negotiate with them and if they accept our cultural rules and policies they can offer their services in Iran," he said. Jahangard said Iran is "also ready to provide Google or any other company with facilities" that could enable them to provide their services to the region. These statements caught my eye because they contrast with China's actions, in the opposite direct...