Secure your email and keep your software up to date. Running an alternate operating system such as Ubuntu can help to reduce your exposure to these sorts of attacks. Though as with all operating systems it is still vitally important that you keep your systems up to date, using the automatic update feature.
On December 1, 2005, two e-mail messages were sent from a computer in Western Australia to members of two different human rights organizations. Each e-mail message carried a Microsoft Word document with a previously unknown exploit that would take control of the targeted person’s computer and open up a beachhead into the group’s network.
SecurityFocus – Targeted Trojan attacks on the rise
Worldchanging.com has an excellent article covering the tools you can use to publish securely and anonymously.
Indeed, Tor is a hugely useful tool for people in China trying to evade the Great Firewall, or for people trying to publish online with a persistent, untraceable psuedonym. Roger was interested in meeting a group of dissidents to understand what their needs are and how future versions of Tor could be more useful in enabling access to information and free speech in repressive nations.
The session was a real education for both of us. I’ve given three of these workshops in the past year, but this was the first with attendees all focused on the same nation, facing the same constellation of problems. We outlined many of the topics covered in the Secure NGO in a Box CD-ROM (which we may need to translate into the native language of this country – more on NGO in a Box here), covering disk wiping (Eraser), encrypted storage (BestCrypt), password management (Password Safe), as well as topics I covered in a training with Nart Villeneuve earlier this year: web filtering, filter circumvention using open and anonymized proxies, and secure publishing. Roger gave a great overview of the state of the art in cryptography, a detailed introduction to Tor and future directions for development, and an introduction to secure messaging through Off the Record Messaging.
Using Technology to Protect Free Speech in Dangerous Places
