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Welcome to the City of Seattle's Information Security Homepage!
Protecting the city's computing systems, computer networks and the
information that these systems host is critical for the successful
delivery of city services.
This website is designed to help you as citizens of Seattle or visitors to our site learn what you can do to
help protect against the many emerging threats found in today's computer and network environments both in the
workplace and at home.
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Be on the Lookout!
Information Security bulletins about the latest threats to your computer security are now posted on our site.
We have decided that you, our subscribers, would be better served if we simply update this news bulletin with timely and
important messages as they arise. New and significant threats don't tend to wait until we have time to publish our
newsletter!
So, we will be posting new items as they arise and as we are able, and will only use email notifications if there is a
particularly dangerous threat. We will keep notices on this letter for about a week and then archive them.
You can find our newest information security news in our current
newsletter
NOTE: We now provide the ability to subscribe to an RSS feed. The summary above is being fed by that RSS system to
give you a preview of some of the items in the latest newsletter. Enjoy!
In case you don't know how to subscribe to RSS feeds and missed the tip where I gave instructions on how to do so - I've archived
that tip here.
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City of Seattle - Your Internet Safety Partner
New Cyber Security Mailing List
Newsletter with tips and stategies to stay safe
The City of Seattle's Office of Information Security (OIS) has setup a computer security mailing list. We will post
a periodic newsletter with cyber security tips and strategies to keep you safe on your work and home computers. We'll
also send out notices of critical new threats and information on how to protect yourselves.
If you would like to sign up for this new service, please click on the following link and then create a New User account.
Computer Security Mailing List
New Security Tip O' d'Week!
The Dangers of URL Shortening
I just read a great article and a related blog on the dangers and problems inherent in using URL shortening tools such as TinyURL, or Bit.ly.
We've seen the popularity of the new Web 2.0 applications such as Twitter growing, and subsequently becoming the latest attack vector. Many of these apps use short messaging for communications between users. With only a limited number of characters available, it is often necessary to shorten URLs if you are sending out links in a message.
There are many sites out there that will let you do that. The oldest and most well known is TinyURL. But there are also some called tr.im and notlong.com, as well as the new Twitter default mentioned above, bit.ly.
However, all of these raise concerns both for reliability and trust. In order for these short links to work, both the service that created them and the destination server must be up. So, if one of these services goes out of business or has some kind of server issues, all of the links created there simply go away or are not available and no longer work.
But the worse problem from a security perspective, is that the user clicking on the link has no way of knowing where that link is actually taking them. There have been scams where these short links were used to direct people to poisoned or nefarious websites resulting in the compromise of the user's computer.
We strongly recommend against using these services. But if you have to, we suggest using ShuURL, and installing Web of Trust in your browser. ShuURL will not let you redirect a link to a bad site, and Web of Trust is a great add-on that warns you if you are hitting a site with a bad reputation.
If you'd like to read the AP article by Rachel Metz on URL shorteners, you can find it here.
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Last Updated: June 23, 2009
Website Contact: David Matthews
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