Author Archives: Space Rogue

About Space Rogue

With over two decades of experience, Space Rogue (Cris Thomas) has testified before the U.S. Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs, and has been interviewed by Wired, CNBC and even MTV. He created the wildly popular websites the Whacked Mac Archives and Cyber Squirrel 1. He produced the weekly podcast SpiderLabs Radio, and the critically acclaimed weekly news video program the Hacker News Network. His writing has appeared in Network Computing, New Statesman, The Hill, and the Christian Science Monitor. He has spoken at security conferences such as Def Con, Blackhat, and Shmoocon. Space Rogue currently works as the Global Lead of Policy and Special Initiatives for the legendary IBM X-Force.

CitiBank Card Numbers and PINS Stolen in Server Breach

Many years ago, (like ten or more) there was a major US bank (BoA, CitiBank I don’t remember) that had a major security breach. I don’t remember all the details, and Google has been less than helpful, but the bank … Continue reading

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Only You Can Prevent ID Theft

I was at Autozone yesterday getting a set of Upper Strut Mounts for my 167K mile old Saturn when the sales guy asked me for my phone number. I didn’t hesitate a bit and just rattled off ten digits. The … Continue reading

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Interview with The Bug Magazine

About a month or so ago I did an email interview with an online ezine known as The Bug Magazine. They are based in Brazil so most of the magazine is in Portuguese however the editors graciously published my interview … Continue reading

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More POS Hacks Grab CC Numbers

Everyone gets a kick out of TV shows and news reports that feature stupid criminals. People who get themselves locked inside the store they are trying to rob or stuck in the air vent attempting to break in. For some … Continue reading

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Cyber UL – Reloaded

So about nine years ago Tan at the L0pht first wrote about the creation of a Cyber Underwriters Laboratory. Like the real UL the Cyber UL would be tasked with independently testing and evaluating software, specifically security related software without … Continue reading

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Security Ethics? Are there any?

I have a list of websites that I read as part of my morning ritual just like everybody else. It helps fritter away the first few minutes of the day as I wait for my tea to cool to a … Continue reading

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Defacement Archive May Close

One of the more popular features of HNN (The Hacker News Network) was the daily list of web page defacements that was maintained at the time by Attrition.org. Maintaining such an archive soon overwhelmed Attrition and the task was taken … Continue reading

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SourceBoston WrapUp

I had been waiting for the folks at Source Boston to update their website with relevant materials before I posted a recap but they are probably waiting until Monday and I know I won’t have time to post anything then. … Continue reading

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More USB Snake Oil

I’m still busy recovering from the excellent Source Boston conference and I will post a recap soon but I wanted to get this out there. Last week I wrote about RFID enabled external hard drives that supposedly offered secure encryption … Continue reading

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Last Day for Source2008

Yesterday I unfortunately missed James Atkinson’s talk at Source Boston but evidently it scared a few people and pissed off a few others. I did manage to catch Carole Fennelly’s talk about Incident Response Plans which was very informative even … Continue reading

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