An interesting article was posted describing the today's top ten botnets and summary information describing there characteristics. The interesting thing is where conficker showed up (10th) and the percentage of these botnets whose criminal purpose is to collect valuable and sensitive information (1/10). Looks like most of these are intended to provide control - and then be capable of what ever the controller wishes.
Recently, new types of credit card security features have be debuted, such as this one from Visa. And as some of the comments on Bruce Schneier's blog point out, its questionable how effective this is. I want to figure out what the motivation is behind these ideas, as it appears banks and the major credit card brands are not completely transparent about the benefits to the consumer. My example is this, one source has that in 2005 $2.8 million was lost due to credit card fraud from Visa and MasterCard in Canada alone. These costs are absorbed by the credit card companies as they protect their cardholders from liability, but as can be expected these costs are directly applied to the card brand customers, people and merchants, in the form of fees and interest rates. Now lets say that card brands can deploy a technology to eliminate 90% of this fraud and associated insurance and liability costs. Likely a large savings both in Canada and globally. Would we, the public and mercha
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