Re: security on the web

In article <v03102805af9cea5be60d@[207.87.104.26]>,
Sarra Mossoff <sarra@smallworld.com> wrote:
> Intercepting a credit card number that has been sent over the phone lines
> via a web connection is, in contrast, nearly impossible.  You'd need a

Well, it's indeed harder for the average thief to set up. For
someone with a good connection, and some knowledge, it shouldn't
be that hard to set up. I think you could even set up an 
automated filter that scans for packets with a known format (the
CC fill-in formats from the HTML forms of popular online shops)
and extract the information from that. 

I do think that someone who can pull that kind of stunt would 
be able to find a job as expert programmer, so he wouldn't need to
do it. :-)

> I see a "scare tactic" -- the vast majority of people are afraid of
> internet commerce, and ads like this certainly don't help.  I think

The main problem is that it's going through computers. A lot of
people don't know what computers can and cannot do. The stories
in the media do nothing to help this. The only serious risk I can
see is that automated scanning/intercepting is only possible on
the Internet, because there the data is digital and in standard format
so programs can be written to intercept it. For a telephone call,
that's not possible with the current state of voice recognition.

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Received on Monday, 12 May 1997 15:31:17 UTC