The Visible Employee

Employers don't have it easy these days. If they fail to keep a close watch on what employees are doing, they can get into trouble and if they watch too closely what employees are doing, they can get into trouble. Jeffrey M. Stanton, an associate professor in the School of Information Studies at Syracuse University, has written a book called The Visible Employee. We'll talk on this week's program.

"For business owners, managers, and IT staff interested in learning how to effectively and ethically monitor and influence workplace behavior," Stanton's website says, "The Visible Employee is a roadmap to ensuring security without risking employee privacy or trust." The book discussed the misuse of information systems and the results of misuse such as leaked or corrupted data, crippled networks, lost productivity, legal problems, or public embarrassment.

The book's recommendations provide a range of practical security solutions for at-risk organizations based on judicious combinations of technology and policy.

To start our conversation, I asked Stanton to define what he means by "workplace surveillance". The entire conversation is part of today's podcast.

For more information on Stanton's book, The Visible Employee, visit his website.

Scary screen saver

The blue screen of death is almost always unwelcome. I added "almost" to the previous sentence because now there are times you'll look forward to seeing it. Perhaps wanting to show that as a corporation Microsoft has a sense of humor, the company posted Mark Russinovich's BSOD screen saver to TechNet after acquiring Russinovich's utilities company, Sysinternals.

Russinovich and Bryce Gogswell created the Sysinternals website in 1996 to host their advanced system utilities and technical information. Microsoft acquired Sysinternals in July, 2006. The Sysinternals Forum has answers to complex technical problems and also includes some powerful utilities such as the Rootkit Revealer.

Blue is as much anathema to Windows users as it is to George Bush and Ken Mehlman. The blue screen of death pops up when something has gone seriously wrong. The BSOD screen saver authentically mimics a BSOD and also simulates startup screens seen during a system boot. (To capture the image at the right, I had to use a digital camera instead of a screen capture program. Click it for a larger view.)

• On NT 4.0 installations it simulates chkdsk of disk drives with errors!
• On Win2K and Windows 9x it presents the Win2K startup splash screen, complete with rotating progress band and progress control updates!
• On Windows XP and Windows Server 2003 it present the XP/Server 2003 startup splash screen with progress bar!

The BSOD Screensaver cycles between various blue screens (each with a different error that references hardware or software that's on your computer) and simulated boots every 30 seconds or so. Because most of the information shown on the blue screens is obtained from the machine's system configuration, its accuracy will fool even advanced techies.

When it's running on my computer, there's always half a second of panic when I see it – is it real or is this just the screensaver?

Bluescreen runs on Windows NT 4.0, Windows 2000, Windows XP, Windows Server 2003 and Windows 9x (it requires DirectX). You can obtain it here.

Nerdly News

Have you noticed an increase in spam?

If so, you're not alone and you're definitely not imagining things. The majority of the crap seems to involve pump-and-dump stock schemes, but there's also the usual mix of porn, penis enlargement, and stolen software. The messages are being spewed by tens of thousands of hijacked computers. Is yours one of them?

Security experts say that 70,000 or more computers are part of a peer-to-peer botnet that's being run by organized crime in Russia. It's sophisticated. The Trojan that spreads the shit (sorry, but that's the kindest word I can think of to describe it) has its own anti-virus scanner. The creeps use a pirated copy of Kaspersky's security software to eliminate other malware.

According to Eweek magazine, "The bots are segmented into different server ports, determined by the variant of the Trojan installed, and further segmented into peer groups of no more than 512 bots." The criminals who are running the enterprise do this because it allows them to keep the overhead down.

The creeps maintain statistics where all their bots are located. More than half are in the United States and most of the infected machines are Windows XP systems with service pack 2 installed.

Why do these pump-and-dump schemes work?

In short, it seems to be because people are stupid. The criminals grab e-mail addresses from the computers they commandeer, which gives them access to millions of addresses that have never been victimized previously. Most of the messages include enough random text to fool anti-spam filters and present their message as a graphic. The subject line changes from week to week.

The bot-net Eweek described controls about 73,000 infected clients that is capable of sending a billion spams per day. Because most spams have multiple recipients, the actual number of messages sent is several times that. This is why something like 80% of e-mail traffic is spam. Barracuda Networks (which seems to allow many of these messages to slip through) says there has been a 67% increase in spam and a 500% increase in image spam since August.

I still haven't signed up for SpamArrest, a service I described last week. On Friday, power problems in Seattle made the SpamArrest system unavailable for several hours and service was unreliable for most of the day. Still, the best protection against spam seems to be a combination of server-based applications that analyze messages and a service such as SpamArrest that quarantine messages from unknown senders.

Wikipedia: Once again available in China

In the United States, the argument over Wikipedia is whether a user-written encyclopedia can be accurate. In China, the argument seems to be whether people should be allowed to read a user-written encyclopedia. This brings to mind the Great Soviet Encyclopedia that was the Soviet Union's national reference work until the fall of communism. Replacement pages were sent out to "correct" previously written articles. The earlier articles were cut out of the books and discarded.

The Chinese government recently allowed citizens view the English-language version of Wikipedia. Now it has decided to allow the Chinese-language version to be viewed. The Chinese Wikipedia recently exceeded 100,000 articles, many of which are contributions from Hong Kong and Taiwan.

Wikipedia is run by a nonprofit foundation and has refused to bow to Beijing's demands to censor material (unlike Yahoo and Google, which seem not to be bothered by turning in dissidents to officials in the Northern Capital.

Chinese authorities made no announcements about changes in their censorship policies and they continue to maintain the disingenuous position that the Internet is open and uncensored in China. N.B.: By saying "disingenuous", I am stating that the Chinese authorities are lying.

Despite making Wikipedia available, the government continues to use keyword filters to block topics such as the Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989, the Falun Gong movement, and the Communist revolution of the 1940s.

Will access continue to be free? Who knows. The Chinese version was available in 2005, but only briefly. The lesson here: Beware totalitarian governments, including those operating in "democratic" countries.

Annoying legal disclaimer

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