"Hundreds of private e-mails and documents hacked from a computer server at a British university are causing a stir among global warming skeptics, who say they show that climate scientists conspired to overstate the case for a human influence on climate change.
The e-mails, attributed to prominent American and British climate researchers, include discussions of scientific data and whether it should be released, exchanges about how best to combat the arguments of skeptics, and casual comments — in some cases derisive — about specific people known for their skeptical views. Drafts of scientific papers and a photo collage that portrays climate skeptics on an ice floe were also among the hacked data, some of which dates back 13 years.
In one e-mail exchange, a scientist writes of using a statistical “trick” in a chart illustrating a recent sharp warming trend. In another, a scientist refers to climate skeptics as “idiots.”
Some skeptics asserted Friday that the correspondence revealed an effort to withhold scientific information. “This is not a smoking gun, this is a mushroom cloud,” said Patrick J. Michaels, a climatologist who has long faulted evidence pointing to human-driven warming and is criticized in the documents.
Portions of the correspondence portrays the scientists as feeling under siege by the skeptics’ camp and worried that any stray comment or data glitch could be turned against them."
The world is being conned into a global carbon tax under the guise of saving the planet. Its a Ponzi scheme created by Al Gore and Ken Lay that all the big polluting corporations support."Hundreds of private e-mails and documents hacked from a computer server at a British... more
The e-mail system of one of the world's leading climate research units has been breached by hackers.
E-mails reportedly from the University of East Anglia's Climatic Research Unit (CRU), including personal exchanges, appeared on the internet on Thursday.
A university spokesman confirmed the email system had been hacked and that information was taken and published without permission.
An investigation was underway and the police had been informed, he added.
"We are aware that information from a server used for research information in one area of the university has been made available on public websites," the spokesman stated.
Clearly communicate that, in fact, there are secrets. Once employees understand that they have a responsibility to protect the enterprise, the chasm between the security professional and the rest of the staff not only shrinks, it disappears. Far too often, security policies arrive as a reaction, as opposed to a proactive management of risk. Through this process, the enterprise will acknowledge security as forethought, not an afterthought.
Reading through a Windows security log or any other log can be very difficult and time consuming, so a lot of companies have created their own tools to analyze windows event logs. But before you start going commercial, there is a tool that will get you going without any cost. Against all odds, it’s a tool made by Microsoft!
I started looking on e-bay and found plenty of new and used ATMs ranging from $500-2500 but quickly determined I didn’t want to pay $300 for shipping. Next was Craigslist, where I quickly found an ad from a bar north of Boston. They were selling pool tables, Budweiser neon signs and an ATM for $750.
“First, the President is correct in his appreciation of the need to view cyber security as not just a technical and security issue, but as an economic one as well. In the 21st century - the digital century - economics and security are opposite sides of the same coin. You cannot affect one without impacting the other.” ~ Congressional Testimony
Acquisition and deployment of real solutions is now within grasp of business owners (seemingly) without the need for conventional IT delivery and support. But many questions may go unanswered without engagement of EA, and latent risks (such as compliance and security) may turn into real issues.
In its recently released Global CIO Study, IBM found that 83% of respondents identified business intelligence and analytics as the best way to help enhance their organizations’ competitiveness. At the company’s Information on Demand conference in Las Vegas, IBM outlined a series of new products and services. It includes tools to analyze the increasing volumes of unstructured data found on Web sites, on social networking sites and in digital files.
Kellogg, Brown & Root (KBR) was responsible for the kickback fraud that occurred in the US v. Khan case, and has been the focus of many other cases of procurement fraud within the LOGCAP project. Since combat operations began in 2001, DCAA has referred to criminal investigators 32 cases of suspected fraud that were associated with all wartime-support contracts. Of those, the vast majority were related to the Logistics Civil Augmentation Program.
Hackers come together to develop applications for use in natural disasters and emergency situations.Hackers come together to develop applications for use in natural disasters and... more
Larry Clinton, president of the Internet Security Alliance (ISA), will testify tomorrow at a U.S. Senate Judiciary Terrorism and Homeland Security Subcommittee hearing titled, Cybersecurity: Preventing Terrorist Attacks and Protecting Privacy in Cyberspace.
People who generally have to much time on their hands read my posts. Or they simply enjoy my train wreck world view. Anyway there are some fantastic resources that I draw from that help me to break down the complicated issues revolving around how to keep the bad guy from draining your bank account. The following make me look good (not to insult them):
Wouldn’t it be a good idea to have privacy certifications for the organizations that are part of the large smart grid and for the smart meters to help ensure they are appropriately addressing privacy and providing households with informed decision-making capabilities for how the information collected from their homes through these devices are used?
On October 28th President Obama signed into law the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2010. OK, so more people are needed. Now, let’s talk money. How much money is provided in the 2010 Defense Authorization Act for Cyber Defense? A lot.
Once a predator uses your Internet connection to go to into the bowels of the web, your Internet Protocol address, which is connected to your ISP billing address, is now considered one that is owned by a criminal. If law enforcement happens to be chatting with that person, who’s using your Internet connection to trade lurid porn, then someone may eventually knock on your door at 3 AM with a battering ram. And in freakish and relatively new twist, hackers can use a virus to crack your network and gain remote control access, and then store illicit porn on your hard drive.
The question is not lack of process but whether or not security is being used to help enforce business process in the relevant areas of product safety, customer service, employee workplace security and information protection in business-to-business relationships.
These new regulations come at a time when healthcare breaches are on the rise; according to the 2009 ITRC Breach Stats Report healthcare breaches account for over 66 percent of all records breached this year, up from 20 percent in 2008. In fact, some of the largest names in healthcare suffered data breaches.
The U.S. Justice Department indicted eight Russian and Eastern European computer hackers, alleging they were part of a crime ring that allegedly broke into ATMs in hundreds of cities world-wide and stole $9 million in a matter of hours.
Criminal indictment of the eight hackers
Prosecutors in Atlanta announced indictments Tuesday in a scheme that is among the most brazen and damaging electronic-bank heists disclosed to date. One of the men accused was arrested and is awaiting extradition from Estonia. The others are thought to be at large.
The alleged hackers cracked a computer system at RBS WorldPay Inc., the U.S. payment processing division of Royal Bank of Scotland Group PLC, and cloned prepaid ATM cards, which thieves then used to withdraw cash from 2,100 ATMs from 280 cities around the world, including in the U.S. The synchronized operation, which began Nov. 8, 2008, took no more than 12 hours.
The RBS case is part of a boom in online theft from financial institutions. "More money is stolen electronically or [in] data breaches than through bank robberies," Shawn Henry, assistant Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation's Cyber Division, said in an interview.
The alleged hackers targeted payroll debit cards that companies issue employees for withdrawing their salaries. Once the hackers entered the systems, they boosted the maximum allowed withdrawal and then tried to destroy data on the systems to cover up the break-in, prosecutors alleged.
Bloomberg
.The most serious charges in the 16-count grand jury indictment were against four conspirators and ranged from wire fraud to aggravated identity theft. Others faced lesser charges. RBS ensured that its customers were reimbursed for stolen funds.
The losses could have been much greater had the hacker ring been able to assemble a larger network of accomplices, Mr. Henry said. "The size of the human network was a limiting factor, [because] some of the ATMs ran out of money," Mr. Henry said.
The RBS hackers are one of two major cyber gangs law enforcement officials have targeted in recent years for wreaking havoc on U.S. financial companies. The second is the group responsible for online attacks on TJX Cos., Heartland Payment Systems Inc., and others. That gang's ringleader, U.S. citizen Albert Gonzalez, was indicted in August along with his conspirators.
Security sleuths say the RBS gang was considerably more sophisticated than Mr. Gonzalez's crew. "This investigation has broken the back of one of the most sophisticated computer hacking rings in the world," said Acting U.S. Attorney Sally Quillian Yates of the Northern District of Georgia.
A class-action lawsuit against RBS WorldPay is pending in the same district, alleging the company failed to adequately protect customer data.
One alleged leader of the gang is Viktor Pleshchuk, 28, of St. Petersburg, Russia, who manipulated the data and managed the hackers' use of the RBS WorldPay computer network with the help of several others, according to the indictment. He developed a method used to reverse-engineer personal identification numbers from encrypted data on the network of RBS WorldPay, the indictment said.
.Another of the key conspirators, Sergei Tsurikov, 25 years old, of Tallinn, Estonia, was responsible for conducting reconnaissance on the RBS WorldPay system and supported other hacking activities, according to the indictment. He shared information with Mr. Pleshchuk.
Mr. Tsurikov is awaiting extradition to the U.S. from Estonia. In a new arrangement between the U.S. and Estonia, he would be the first cybercriminal to be extradited from Eastern Europe, which has become a haven for the cyber underground.The U.S. Justice Department indicted eight Russian and Eastern European computer... more
This is the second promo video for DAYCON PACKET WARS. This was the 3rd Annual Dayton Security Summit and hacker games.This is the second promo video for DAYCON PACKET WARS. This was the 3rd Annual Dayton... more
Congress is still considering the Informed P2P User Act, a law that would supposedly make it safer to use peer-to-peer file sharing software, an effort that is similar to banning mosquitoes from sucking blood. It just isn’t happening…
