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Naming Risks

Jerome Kerviel seems to be on the edge of getting a risk named after him. This is not the sort of distinction that will make his mummy proud, but it is a distinction nonetheless. About the only other named risk I can think of immortalises the otherwise obscure Herstatt Bank closed by regulators in 1974 before it had paid out on its forwards settling that day.
Kerviel's activities are set out in the Mission Green report, and if you were following the story at the time, it's interesting to see how wrong the initial spin was: He wasn't stealing passwords, he wasn't modifying control spreadsheets. He was exploiting his back office knowledge, but at a higher level: he knew how to use cancellations and corrections -- all the points where control can't be watertight because trading isn't -- to get his positions off the records, and he'd been doing it for some time. (It was only right at the end that he started to fake forwarded email -- nothing complicated, just editing a real forwarded email.) So this gives us a useful term: Kerviel risk is exploitable vulnerabilities -- uncompleted cycles of review and follow-up -- in a control system. A short name for a rather complicated concept, so maybe it'll stick.
No this definition means that Kerviel's name is not correct for authentication-abused-to-approve-fraudulent-actions risk. But Jagmeet Channa has come along just in time to help us out. He stole a couple of passwords to approve his multi-million pound transfers to his accomplices in N. Africa and Manchester.
The problem is figuring out what risk we're naming here. Channa's not talking so we can't tell if it's:

• Password stealing? -- he certainly did, but maybe that's not the point
• Inserted Insider?
• Coerced Insider?
• Criminal Mastermind who recruited outside help?

I'm going with the authentication, for the present. Channa Role Risk.....
And what makes this a security story? Well, the investigation started by interviewing the colleagues whose passwords Channa used. Don't fancy being in an interview like that? Then guard your password.

The Visitor

If you care to watch out, the light evenings expose one of our regular visitors -- a barn owl cruises the paddocks a little after nine. It looks like a ghost, a big white bird flapping hard so as to fly slowly but totally silent. In the three years it's been coming, I've never seen it stoop but I suppose these summer visits must pay off.

In the winter, when I'm walking across the fields well before dawn, I hear owls calling in the dark, but I can't tell what sort, or whether they're hunting or socialising. Sometimes they sound like they have a warning for me.

Fargo

Everyone raves about Fargo but I never saw it until last night. It is funny, and the premise of this very ordinary copper rolling up a complex, ugly situation almost without any difficulty is attractive.

For me, the best bit in the film is the shot where we see the William Macy character pull up in front of his father-in-law's body. By now, he's so depraved and so far out of his depth, that it takes him just a second to pop up the boot of his car....

Club Penguin Without Being Mad

Club Penguin is an MMPORG a bit like Second Life. Except that you can't use bad language. And your avatar is a Penguin. And it's owned by Disney. This is right up the Not-Mad-At-All-Just-Stubborn Daughter's street and for her ninth birthday treat she was subscribed.
So that's lovely except that the browser applet wouldn't connect.
Now by rights I ought to go off on a LUA rant here about the daftness of software for children that has to be admin to run. Except that CP is fine as an ordinary user and in fact I had an inkling what was wrong as soon as I saw the message.
So I went off searching and found this support page. Take a look at point four.

4. If none of these things work, you should call your Internet Service Provider (ISP). That is the company that you pay to connect to the Internet. They might be using a firewall that is blocking the ports that lead to Club Penguin. When you call them, tell them to open up these ports for TCP traffic, inbound and outbound: 3724, 6112, 6113, and 9875.

That's right, you have to open the ports, inbound and outbound without any limitation by address! "Sure I've got a hardware firewall, except that if you scan these ports you can reach a closed source server written by security numbskulls running on my daughter's PC..."
Long faces all round in the U household.
But it's actually OK. All it really seems to need is those ports open outbound, and it runs fine, with the NMAAJSD playing the mini games to her heart's content.
And that's the reply I expected to get when I opened the reply to my support enquiry. I'd asked for the server server addresses so I could limit the inbound traffic. What I got was a different list of ports (843, 9875, 6112, 3724, 6113 and 9339) with no reference to my questions about direction or limitation. This is software that's intended to be safe for children.
Nice try Walt. But Mad Aggy's happy, and that's what matters.