"From the Russian translation of one of your service manuals"

Peter Gutmann pgut001 at cs.auckland.ac.nz
Sat Jan 5 04:46:13 EST 2008


There's a great exchange in "Never Say Never Again" that pokes fun at
unnecessary secrecy preventing access by legitimate users:

Bond: "Commander Peterson are you equipped with the new XT-7B's?"
Peterson: "That's top secret.  How do you know about them?"
Bond: "From the Russian translation of one of your service manuals"

Reading through a recent malware paper I think I've found the computer
equivalent: "An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Internet
Miscreants" contains a section (section 3.1.1) in which the researchers try to
determine compromised card information by country:

  The official BIN number database is not available to the public.  We use a
  BIN list containing information for 52,492 banks [...] which we acquired as
  part of the source code of a channel service bot.

("From the Russian source code of the people the security measure is designed
 to protect against").

Peter.

---------------------------------------------------------------------
The Cryptography Mailing List
Unsubscribe by sending "unsubscribe cryptography" to majordomo at metzdowd.com



More information about the cryptography mailing list