contributed by eprime and John
Reliable Software Technologies, a Sterling, Va., software-security company, needed just eight hours break the encryption Netscape Mail uses to scramble users' passwords. The problem affects all current versions of Netscape. Chris Saito, the senior director for product management at Netscape, said that the option to save a password locally was included for convenience. Saito added that Netscape didn't use a stronger encryption algorithm to protect passwords so that "computer experts could still access the information, in case someone forgot their password." (Damn, now that's a Cover Your Ass maneuver if I ever saw one. Netscape must be taking spin lessons from Microsoft.)

ZD Net
RST Corp - Press Release

contributed by Simple Nomad
After receiving complaints from various companies and privacy watchdog groups regarding the White House's November 19 proposal on relaxing crypto rules, it looks like the White House is ready to actually live up to the promises made last September when they announced relaxing controls for crypto export.

USA Today

contributed by Maggie
A new report containing a brief summary of the status of 29 bills proposed during the First Session of the 106th Congress has been released. Some of the topics covered by these bills include Digital Signatures, Encryption, Privacy, Security, Telecommunication/Electronic Commerce and others. Some of these bills are already law and others will be a priority for the second session of the 106th Congress.

Status of Key IT Legislation

contributed by Evil Wench
Ira Winkler wrote, in his 1997 book "Corporate Espionage," that there were fewer than 200 'computer geniuses' in the world who actually could find software vulnerabilities and another 1,000 talented individuals who could take those findings and use them to attack computer networks. He has since updated those numbers to 500 to 1,000 computer "geniuses" capable of finding vulnerabilities in software, 5,000 talented people capable of taking advantage of that information and 100,000 'clueless' script kiddies.

Washington Post - via Spokane Review

contributed by Evil Wench
Bruce Schneier and Counterpane Internet Security, Inc. have released the latest issue of the Crypto-Gram. This issue contains some cool articles on Echelon, Crypto Export Restrictions and much more.

CryptoGram