Reality…is it what you think is going on until a tragic moment of clarity, usually brought on by some trauma, shatters the comfortable blur that you’ve put over the imperfections of this world? Like a car crashing into a snow covered tree, the empty boughs suddenly laid bare as the mink and lingerie of snowflakes and icicles come crashing down. The trunk shudders from impact, and then the topiary column stands stark and exposed, no greens, reds or gold draping and adorning its cold wooden tendrils. Nothing hides the poverty of winter anymore. It was peaceful a moment ago, it was violent a second ago, and now its awkward…a ticking and steaming wreck  of metal wrapped around this cold torso. This is what it’s like when your world is suddenly blown open with a realization that you’ve been asleep at the wheel, or asleep as your leaves were slowly replaced with snow.

It’s also the feeling you get when you realize that a man-in-the-middle attack intercepted and manipulated your private data as it passed over a supposedly secure communication between your computer and an online application- this Man in the middle employing the use of a Trojan embedded in your browser application that he programmed to trigger when you accessed a specific site, mainly the site you do your online banking on.

Man in the middle attacks have become some of the most elusive and frightening security threats online, and what’s really scary is that the very fundamental underpinnings of the entire information superstructure we depend on is what actually makes these attacks possible. It’s not some new invention or Jeff Moss, founder of Black Hat says: any particular failing, or vendor implementation. This is something that happens because we’re using it all“. It’s almost like we have carrier pigeons, and some kind of pigeon master can intercept the pigeons, replace info, obtain info, before they get to their intended perch- neither side being the wiser that pigeon master duped them. Black Hat Briefings have demonstrated how sly MITM or MITB (Man in the browser) attacks can be- duping an entire conference of some of the most hard core computer geeks you may ever have the fortune of stumbling upon earlier this year. These kinds of attacks have been particularly common in the US, Europe and most of all Australia and New Zealand. Recently in Canada a Black Hat consultant from Edmonton duped a room full of delegates at an Ottawa internet security conference, tapping into their hand held devices while they sat listening.

But all is not lost! According to PC World A U.K. security company is giving to banks FREE security software that it says can block malicious software from manipulating online banking transactions or stealing data, even if the computer is infected.

The product, called SafeOnline, comes from Prevx, of Derby, England.

I wonder if the banks will bother to do any background checks on these guys?

Reality, there’s a whole lot of it going on that we don’t see.