Hands-on Project 1 – 1 (Practical 1)

Objectives: Automatically receive latest security information

In order to keep our computer secure, it is important that we know the latest security threats. Instead of making constant visits to security Web sites and scanning the pages looking for information, a new approach automates this process and makes it easier to have the information delivered to you.

The approach: RSS (“Really Simple Syndication”) is an eXtensible Markup Language (XML) format for automatically retrieving content from a Web Page and delivering it to your browser. To understand what RSS is, click on the link http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0klgLsSxGsU to find out more.

Once you understand what RSS is, you can subscribe the information you want to this RSS feed. You can follow the steps below:

1) Use any browser of your choice (Internet Explorer or Firefox) and enter the URL www.google.com/reader. You will get something like this:

2) Log in if you already have a Google account. If you do not have an account, click on “Create an account” and create a Google account.

3) Click on “Add a subscription” and type the URL you want to subscribe and click “Add”.

4) You are now subscribe to this RSS feed.

When I had subscribed to Securosis Blog, one of the articles I have read is about Google being hacked.
(Citing from http://securosis.com/blog/)
"According to the New York Times, when Google was hacked during the recent China incident, their single sign on system was specifically targeted. The attackers may have accessed the source code, which gives them some good intel to look for other vulnerabilities. There's speculation they could have also added a back door to the source code, but I suspect that even if they did this, given how quickly Google detected the intrusion, any back doors probably didn't make it into backups and might be easy for Google to spot and remove."

Reflections
I find that the RSS feed is really very useful to me. This is because in the past I tend to go online to search for information that I need, but now I just need to subscribe to the information I want and I will get the information I need more quickly than before.