Category Archives: overreactions

Missouri Governor Doesn’t Understand Responsible Disclosure

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The Missouri governor wants to prosecute the reporter who discovered a security vulnerability in a state’s website, and then reported it to the state.

The newspaper agreed to hold off publishing any story while the department fixed the problem and protected the private information of teachers around the state.

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According to the Post-Dispatch, one of its reporters discovered the flaw in a web application allowing the public to search teacher certifications and credentials. No private information was publicly visible, but teacher Social Security numbers were contained in HTML source code of the pages…

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Needless Panic Over a Wi-FI Network Name

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A Turkish Airlines flight made an emergency landing because someone named his wireless network (presumably from his smartphone) "bomb on board." In 2006, I wrote an essay titled "Refuse to be Terrorized." (I am also reminded of my 2007 essay, "The War on the Unexpected." A decade later, it seems that the frequency of incidents like the one above is… Continue reading Needless Panic Over a Wi-FI Network Name→

How the Media Influences Our Fear of Terrorism

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Good article that crunches the data and shows that the press’s coverage of terrorism is disproportional to its comparative risk. This isn’t new. I’ve written about it before, and wrote about it more generally when I wrote about the psychology of risk, fear, and security. Basically, the issue is the availability heuristic. We tend to infer the probability of something… Continue reading How the Media Influences Our Fear of Terrorism→