At 3:46 AM -0500 5/15/04, Bruce Schneier wrote:

The Doghouse: IQ Networks

In general, the Doghouse is a showcase for stupid security companies or products. Snake-oil cryptography, nonsense computer security, that sort of thing. But this month we have something different: a company committing out-and-out fraud.

IQ Networks claims to have an impressive advisory board: Ross Anderson, Mihir Bellare, Steve Bellovin, Shafi Goldwasser, Peter Gutmann, Doug Stinson, Ron Rivest, and Markus Kuhn. Unfortunately, none of these people had ever heard of the company. Nor did they agree to have content of theirs on the site. They also claim to be involved with the Honeynet Project -- none of the Honeynet guys had ever heard of them -- and Password Safe: I've never heard of them, either.

They have an impressive customer list. I'll bet anything that all of them are fabrications, too. Oh; they're under investigation by SANS for pirating SANS training material.

The rest of the site is also amusing, with a lot of generic security gobbledygook and not a whole lot of information. The company claims to do pretty much anything.

Would you buy your security services from a company that lies about, um, everything?

Website: <http://www.iq-net-works.com/>

Customer list (hard to find, and will probably be deleted soon): <http://www.iq-net-works.com/clientes_english.html>

Peter Gutmann sent this link to me a few weeks ago, and has challenged the company about their use of his name. In response, the company has pulled their list of technical advisors from its website. It forgot, however, to pull the list from the Spanish website. <http://www.iq-net-works.com/spanish/equipo.html> Look quickly, I expect it will be gone soon.

You can also look them up on archive.org, which has saved the company's list of advisors (also in Spanish) from 2003. (This website is great for finding old versions of webpages, or webpages that are no longer around.) <http://web.archive.org/web/20030705082011/www.iq-net-works.com/equipo.h tml> or <http://tinyurl.com/2dbwj>

-- ----------------- R. A. Hettinga <mailto: rah@ibuc.com> The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation <http://www.ibuc.com/> 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA "... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity, [predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'