For Immediate Release Contact: sameer@c2.org 510-601-9777 COMMUNITY CONNEXION OFFERS REWARD FOR EXPOSING ENCRYPTION FLAWS Sept 19 1995 - Community ConneXion, a privacy server and ISP in Berkeley, California, today announced that it will be offering an incentive to the net to expose security flaws in some software that is advertised on the net as secure. This weekend a member of the cypherpunks community, Ian Goldberg, and his officemate, David Wagner, revealed a method which would allow someone to break the encryption used by Netscape Navigator in 25 seconds. Netscape Communications Corporation has been advertising their products as a "secure" way of communicating sensitive information over the net. People have been using this Netscape software to send their credit card numbers over the net, communicate with their brokers, and other tasks requiring security. "Netscape was apparently relying on security by obscurity in this case," said Community ConneXion's founder, Sameer Parekh. In light of this recent break and the earlier two brute force attacks on the encryption used in the international version of Netscape Navigator (crippled because of restrictions on the export of cryptography from the United States) Community ConneXion has offered a challenge to the net community to find more holes. Ian, David, and the people responsible for the brute-force attacks will be receiving free limited-edition T-shirts for their work. "The more holes people find, the more holes will get fixed. Netscape makes the most widely used commercial WWW software out there, so it is in the net's best interest for netscape to have good security. By exposing the holes in netscape, we will hopefully get them fixed," said Sameer. Details about the HackNetscape promotion are available from http://www.c2.org/hacknetscape, or by sending mail to hacknetscape@c2.org. Community ConneXion is the premier internet privacy ISP. They offer anonymous accounts, remailers, and psuedonym servers, in addition to the standard ISP fare of webspace and dialup IP access. Information is available from http://www.c2.org or mailing info@c2.org. Netscape and Netscape Navigator are trademarks of Netscape Communications Corporation. This promotion is not affiliated with NCC.