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Archive for 2011/02/06
An international investigation into cyberactivists who attacked businesses hostile to WikiLeaks is likely to yield arrests of senior members of the group after they left clues to their real identities on Facebook and in other electronic communications, it is claimed
Posted: 2011/02/06 in Cybercrime, Education / Awareness, EnforcementBehind the scenes key Anonymous figures are fretting that they will soon face charges, which can bring sentences as long as 10 years.
Researcher Aaron Barr, head of security services firm HBGary Federal, said he penetrated Anonymous as part of a project to demonstrate the security risks to organisations from social media and networking. He is presenting his research later this month at a conference in San Francisco.
More: http://news.infoshop.org/article.php?story=20110206213730769
Anti-Berlusconi hackers block Italy government website
Posted: 2011/02/06 in Cybercrime, Education / Awareness, Organized CrimeAccess to the website http://www.governo.it appeared to be blocked briefly during the afternoon, although it was working normally by evening.
The hackers, calling themselves Anonymous Italy, criticised a number of Italian government policies and said they were responding to a cable leaked by anti-secrecy group WikiLeaks from the U.S. embassy in Rome.
http://af.reuters.com/article/worldNews/idAFTRE7151XS20110206
Boeing-owned, California-based company Narus sold Telecom Egypt, the state-run Internet service provider, “real-time traffic intelligence” equipment, more commonly known as Deep Packet Inspection (DPI) technology
Posted: 2011/02/06 in Education / Awareness, Public PolicyDPI is content-filtering technology that allows network managers to inspect, track and target content from Internet users and mobile phones as it passes through routers on the Web. The company is also known for creating “NarusInsight,” a supercomputer system allegedly used by the National Security Agency and other entities to perform mass surveillance and monitoring of public and corporate Internet communications in real time. Narus Vice President of Marketing Steve Bannerman said to Wired in 2006: “Anything that comes through (an Internet protocol network), we can record. We can reconstruct all of their e-mails along with attachments, see what web pages they clicked on, we can reconstruct their [Voice Over Internet Protocol] calls.”
Google, Facebook: End Passwords, Get Biometrics. Now!
Posted: 2011/02/06 in Education / Awareness, Privacy / Data Protection, Tech EvolutionGiven the continued importance of services such as Google Apps, FaceBook. Twitter and other services, as well as the amount of passwords that we now need to maintain, it’s starting to look like we need a biometric API, preferably Open Source, and preferably one which has government buy-in in terms of accepted standards.
I’d like to see Google, FaceBook, Microsoft and Apple as well as the Office of the CIO of the United States and equivalent organizations in the EU make this a priority.
There’s far too much identity theft and password compromises going on and it’s costing consumers, businesses and governments hundreds of millions if not billions of dollars a year, not to mention the aggravation and embarrassment of having your data compromised to your friends, family and harm to your business reputation when it occurs.
Much more: http://www.zdnet.com/blog/perlow/google-facebook-end-passwords-get-biometrics-now/15793
Google has received dozens of copyright infringement warnings from MPAA-affiliated movies studios. While most of these notices are directed at users of Google’s public Wi-Fi service, a few also appear to be directed at employees at Google’s headquarters
Posted: 2011/02/06 in Education / Awareness, Google, Illegal File Sharing, Stats / reportsThe process works as follows. The copyright holders hire companies such as BayTSP and MediaSentry to track down people who share certain titles on BitTorrent and other file-sharing networks. These companies then join the swarm and request files from others. When someone shares a piece of the file with them, they log the IP-address, look up the ISP and send out an infringement notice automatically. Most of the notices are sent out to the larger ISPs who are then asked to forward them to the customers in question, but search giant Google has also been receiving quite a few.
More: http://torrentfreak.com/mpaa-snags-google-downloading-torrents-threatens-to-disconnect-110205/
We present a technique for adding a high-frequency pattern to JPEG images that is imperceptible to the unaided eye, but turns into a clearly readable largeletter warning if the image is recompressed with some different quality factor
Posted: 2011/02/06 in Education / Awareness, Tech EvolutionTowards copy-evident JPEG images
Our technique aims to achieve a goal similar to copy-evident security-printing techniques for paper documents, namely to have an easily recognizable text message appear in lower-quality copies, while leaving the visual appearance of the original unharmed.
Survey: 32% admit mooching neighbor’s Wi-Fi
Posted: 2011/02/06 in Education / Awareness, Stats / reportsSharing an open Wi-Fi hookup might seem neighborly. But a nosy neighbor could use eavesdropping software to monitor your online haunts. A free, easy-to-use eavesdropping tool called Firesheep has been downloaded more than 1 million times since last year.”With Firesheep, almost anyone can effectively hack into your Facebook, Twitter and other accounts,” says Randy Abrams, director of technical education at anti-virus firm ESET. “Almost anyone has the skill to use Firesheep to be a nosy neighbor.”
More: http://www.usatoday.com/tech/news/2011-02-04-wifimoochers04_ST_N.htm
