tagged w/ Internet Security
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Though the search engine giant did not comply with those specific requests, a bigger concern is over how Google chooses which requests for "removal of content" it decides to honor, and which ones they refuse. After all, the report also shows that the company "complied" with 63% requests for content removal, and over 90% of "requests for user data."
http://veracitystew.com/2011/10/31/google-police-want-brutality-videos-removed/Though the search engine giant did not comply with those specific requests, a bigger... more
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An article by Bianca Bosker, a contributor to Huffington Post, First Posted: 7/27/11 12:23 PM ET Updated: 7/27/11 12:53 PM ET http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/07/27/randi-zuckerberg-anonymity-online_n_910892.html
"Randi Zuckerberg, Facebook’s marketing director, has a fix for cyberbullying: stop people from doing anything online without their names attached.
Facebook requires all members to use their real names and email addresses when joining the social network -- a policy that has been difficult at times to enforce, as the prevalence of spam accounts or profiles assigned to people’s pets suggest.
Zuckerberg, who is Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg’s sister, argued that putting an end to anonymity online could help curb bullying and harassment on the web.
“I think anonymity on the Internet has to go away,” she said during a panel discussion on social media hosted Tuesday evening by Marie Claire magazine. “People behave a lot better when they have their real names down. … I think people hide behind anonymity and they feel like they can say whatever they want behind closed doors........”
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Comments from Buckeye_Bill on the article in question:
This will piss off a whole lot of trolls and those who wish to post some of the most obnoxious comments and expect to get away with it by using the subterfuge of anonymity! I dare say that this would stop many of the ad hominem attacks that infect site after site of those who hide behind a facade to keep others from knowing who they really are! Perchance this could cut down on a lot of "clones" that roam the "intertubes" or someone who has multiple screen names to use as an attack on one particular thread or article.
What is your impression of this possibility to come? Are you for or against opening yourself up to the whole, entire World Wide Web for either acclaim or ridicule? For all to see the why, what, where, when and most especially who you are!
The "lines are open"..........fire away!
Ring, ring..."And we have our first caller! So, what's your name, caller?" LOL!An article by Bianca Bosker, a contributor to Huffington Post, First Posted: 7/27/11... more
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Anonymous attacks national Spanish police site
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A Gmail confirmation scam email is going around, asking you to verify your Gmail account. “Dear Account User,” the request starts out – and goes on to say that you need to confirm your Gmail account, or it will be closed down. Of course, the language is wrong, and it wasn’t even necessarily sent to your Gmail account, but still, people will be taken in by this scam, which asks for your account username and password, your date of birth, and your country of residence. Here’s the scam reproduced in full – if you get this, don’t reply!
http://ramanan50.wordpress.com/2011/05/24/scam-gmail-verification-email-is-identity-theft-effort-in-disguise/A Gmail confirmation scam email is going around, asking you to verify your Gmail... more
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There are viruses, worms, trojan horses and malicious programs waiting to infect your computer each and every day. When doing a search for anti-virus software, Google showed me 45,800,000 results! When doing the same search for FREE anti-virus software, it even gave me 69,600,000 results, so how do we know which one to get?
In fact, while going over countless options of both free and paid anti-virus software and even more independent reviews and testamonials, I discovered that THE best anti-virus programs are free. Find out which ones they are and where to get them by reading my article, Stop Wasting Money on Anti-Virus Software when You can get it Free, at http://undercoverweb.blogspot.com/2011/04/stop-wasting-money-on-anti-virus.htmlThere are viruses, worms, trojan horses and malicious programs waiting to infect your... more
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It's time to get out your pocket-squares and zit cream, Pwn2Own is coming up! This annual hacking competition, which takes place every March, gives hackers a chance to break into new systems, and to get paid for doing so. Companies like Apple, Google, and Firefox will offer up monetary prizes to geeks who can hack into their products.
In the past the prize money has been around $15,000. But this year is different. Google is offering $20,000 and a free Chrome CR-48 laptop to anyone who can successfully exploit two vulnerabilities in its code.
Two things. One, if Google really wanted to show confidence in Chrome, shouldn't the prize money be like, $2 million? And two, this seems like a great way to find and hire Google's next member of their security team. Let the hacking begin!
Personally, I am not impressed by the $20,000 award. That must mean they expect to give that money away, and have hedged their bet. What's also interesting is that both Firefox and Apple are only offering $15K to anyone who can hack their browser's security. That sounds like chump change.
Offer up $500K and you'll have my attention, and the top spot in my choice of browser. With each company worth billions, let's up the ante her folks and get some serious money on the table.
Of course this is all publicity for Chrome, which is currently third in popularity behind Internet Explorer and Firefox, but I think there's something more to it. What a great way to find the flaws in the system, and to find the guy who is smart enough to discover them!
When the Pwn2Own goes down, will Google hand out $20K, a laptop, and a job to the person who can hack Chrome? It seems natural.
If you fancy yourself a computer wiz, have time to take a 3-day trip to Vancouver in March, and have always wanted to work for Google, get packing, and get hacking. You're shot's coming up!
http://thestir.cafemom.com/technology/115951/google_offers_hackers_20k_toIt's time to get out your pocket-squares and zit cream, Pwn2Own is coming up!... more
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(CNN) -- It seemed so easy for Egypt. Just order a shutdown of the country's internet connections and -- bam -- it happens.
But is such an authoritarian action transferable? Could the U.S. government shut down American internet connections? And is it possible for the global internet to be toppled?
Technically, yes, internet experts said Wednesday, shortly after Egypt's government restored internet connections there as violent political protests continued. But it's highly unlikely.
"Could you break the internet? Yeah. Can you shut it down? No. Shutting down the entire internet would be pretty much impossible at this point," said Jim Cowie, co-founder of Renesys, an worldwide internet tracker.
Cowie spoke of the internet as if it were a giant, adaptable worm.
"The funny thing about the internet is even if you break it in half, the two halves will function as [separate] internets," he said.
How Egypt shut down the internet
Understanding what happened in Egypt helps frame the discussion about what could happen to the internet in the United States or around the globe.
According to internet traffic monitors and experts, Egypt's government likely called the country's five main internet service providers -- like on the phone -- late last week and ordered them to barricade online traffic.
That's sort of like calling all of the post offices in the country and telling them to throw the mail away instead of delivering it, said Robert Faris, research director at Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet & Society.
Google connects Egyptians to Twitter Egyptians cut off from internet
RELATED TOPICS
Egypt
Internet
Government and Politics
Technology
But instead of shredding paper mail, the Egyptian internet providers altered their Border Gateway Protocols, the software that routes online information.
"There's not an on-off switch," Faris said. "What it is, it's a list of IP addresses that route information between nodes on the internet. And what they did (in Egypt) is they changed all the software and the list in there to something called null routing. So all the traffic going in and out was essentially thrown away."
Faris called these measures extreme. They have been carried out in only two other instances, he said: In Myanmar during 2007 protests; and in Nepal in 2005, when the king seized power.
Iran and China filter the internet instead of blocking it, he said.
Could the United States do the same?
Technically, the United States could do the same thing Egypt did to block internet access, Faris said.
The government would have to call four or five top internet providers and order them to disrupt Border Gateway Protocols in a way that shut down the majority of American internet traffic, he said. Others said the government would have to deal with the country's thousands of internet providers in order to fully clamp down on internet access, which would be logistically difficult.
But that's unlikely to happen here, experts said.
For one thing, the internet in the U.S. is bigger. There are more companies involved, more data at play and more locations where the internet comes in and out of the country.
Moreover, U.S. law would prevent such an authoritarian shutdown.
"The internet is a network of networks," said Andrew Blum, a correspondent for CNN content partner Wired magazine and author of an upcoming book on internet infrastructure, "and they're all commercially operated.
"They're all businesses. Their autonomy is sort of their bread and butter. And they're mostly unregulated. So the idea of having to comply fully with any government order to shut them off is pretty extreme. It's as if there were a government order to close every McDonald's -- all at once."
A country's legal framework, not its technical infrastructure, determines whether it is able to shut down its citizens' access to the internet, said Cowie.
"It really comes down to the fact that somebody has to have the legal authority to go to a company that runs a large part of the internet in the United States and say, 'Turn off your connection to the outside world.' "
However, as CNET reports, three U.S. senators have submitted legislation to give the president emergency powers over the internet in the event of a cyberattack or other disaster scenario.
On Wednesday, the bill's authors tried to distance themselves from what's happened in Egypt, issuing a statement:
"Our bill already contains protections to prevent the president from denying Americans access to the Internet -- even as it provides ample authority to ensure that those most critical services that rely on the Internet are protected."
What about elsewhere?
Shutting down the global internet would be more of a trick, requiring a level of global coordination that would be extremely unlikely if not impossible, the experts said.
"If you really wanted to turn off the global internet, you'd have to seek out people on every continent and every country," said Cowie from Renesys. "The internet is so decentralized that there is no kill switch."
"No you can't do that," said Harvard's Faris. "The internet is designed to be robust. Certain links break and then other links are opened."
In Egypt, for example, people who couldn't access the broadband internet were able to place international phone calls to Europe to log on to dial-up internet service, he said, which, of course, operates on phone lines.
Google even announced a service that would let people in Egypt use landline telephones to post to Twitter using voice messages.
"Communication continues and people revert to other modes," he said. "You can shut the internet down but it's not the end of organization. People are still there in the square, and they're figuring out how to do it."(CNN) -- It seemed so easy for Egypt. Just order a shutdown of the country's... more
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Remember that time when you drank too many tequila slammers and pretended to be a bouncer at the bar - feeling everyone up and ending up nearly being arrested - only for the photos of your shame ending up on Facebook the next day?No? Maybe that's just me then. Well for all us who seem unable not to be snapped during our most embarrassing moments of madness there is now a useful program that ensures that these photos will eventually be taken off social network sites. German researchers have created a piece of software called X-Pire that gives images an expiration date by tagging them with an encrypted key.Once this date has passed the key stops the images being viewed and copied."More and more people are publishing private data to the internet and it's clear that some things can go wrong if it stays there too long," said Professor Michael Backes of the Information Security and Cryptography department at Saarland University, who led development of X-Pire.
How X-Pire works
X-Pire creates encrypted copies of images and asks those uploading them to give each one an expiration date. Viewing these images requires the free X-Pire browser add-on, but currently only a version that works with Firefox is available. Those without the viewer will be unable to see any protected image.When the viewer encounters an encrypted image it sends off a request for a key to unlock it. This key will only be sent, and the image become viewable, if the expiration date has not been passed.Images given an expiration date with X-Pire have been successfully uploaded to Flickr, Facebook and many other websites, said Prof Backes.This testing was essential because the different ways that sites treat uploaded images added lots of complications."Facebook, for instance, does a huge amount of post-processing and whatever protection you deploy has to cope with that treatment," he said.The X-Pire program should be available in late January and will cost 2 euros (£1.68) a month. Those who stop paying will not see their images suddenly become viewable, he said, instead they will just not be able to put expiration dates on new images.
Remember that time when you drank too many tequila slammers and pretended to be a... more
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DECEMBER 29--As part of an international criminal probe into computer attacks launched this month against perceived corporate enemies of WikiLeaks, the FBI has raided a Texas business and seized a computer server that investigators believe was used to launch a massive electronic attack on PayPal, The Smoking Gun has learned.
The FBI investigation began earlier this month after PayPal officials contacted agents and “reported that an Internet activist group using the names ‘4chan’ and “Anonymous” appeared to be organizing a distributed denial of service (“DDoS”) attack against the company,” according to an FBI affidavit excerpted here.
The PayPal assault was part of “Operation Payback,” an organized effort to attack firms that suspended or froze WikiLeaks’s accounts in the wake of the group’s publication of thousands of sensitive Department of State cables. As noted by the FBI, other targets of this “Anonymous” effort included Visa, Mastercard, Sarah Palin’s web site, and the Swedish prosecutor pursuing sex assault charges against Julian Assange, the WikiLeaks founder.
On December 9, PayPal investigators provided FBI agents with eight IP addresses that were hosting an “Anonymous” Internet Relay Chat (IRC) site that was being used to organize denial of service attacks. The unidentified administrators of this IRC “then acted as the command and control” of a botnet army of computers that was used to attack target web sites.
Federal investigators noted that “multiple, severe DDos attacks” had been launched against PayPal, and that the company’s blog had been knocked offline for several hours. These coordinated attacks, investigators allege, amount to felony violations of a federal law covering the “unauthorized and knowing transmission of code or commands resulting in intentional damage to a protected computer system.”
The nascent FBI probe, launched from the bureau’s San Francisco field office, has targeted at least two of those IP addresses, according to the affidavit sworn by Agent Allyn Lynd.
One IP address was initially traced to Host Europe, a Germany-based Internet service provider. A search warrant executed by the German Federal Criminal Police revealed that the “server at issue” belonged to a man from Herrlisheim, France. However, an analysis of the server showed that “root-level access” to the machine “appeared to come from an administrator logging in from” another IP address.
“Log files showed that the commands to execute the DDoS on PayPal actually came from” this IP, Agent Lynd reported. Two log entries cited in the affidavit include an identical message: “Good_night,_paypal_Sweet_dreams_from_AnonOPs.”
Investigators traced the IP address to Tailor Made Services, a Dallas firm providing “dedicated server hosting.” During a December 16 raid, agents copied two hard drives inside the targeted server. Court records do not detail what was found on those drives, nor whether the information led to a suspect or, perhaps, a continuing electronic trail. In a brief phone conversation, Lynd declined to answer questions about the ongoing denial of service probe.
Search warrant records indicate that agents were authorized to seize records and material relating to the DDoS attacks “or other illegal activities pertaining to the organization “Anonymous” or “4chan.”
A second IP address used by “Anonymous” was traced to an Internet service provider in British Columbia, Canada. Investigators with the Royal Canadian Mounted Police determined that the Canadian firm’s “virtual” server was actually housed at Hurricane Electric, a California firm offering “colocation, web hosting, dedicated servers, and Internet connections,” according to its web site.
FBI Agent Christopher Calderon, an expert on malicious botnets who works from the bureau’s San Jose office, is leading the probe of the second IP (and presumably has seized a server from Hurricane Electric). Hurricane’s president, Mike Leber, did not respond to a message left for him at the firm’s office in Fremont, which is about 20 miles from PayPal’s San Jose headquarters. (5 pages)DECEMBER 29--As part of an international criminal probe into computer attacks launched... more
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Well, today I was doing one of my every 10 minutes check up on my granddaughter, who's visiting from Chicago, as she listened to you tube videos and "lo' and behold", she was in our office “faceBooking” her butt off.Well, today I was doing one of my every 10 minutes check up on my granddaughter,... more
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The attackers, who briefly disabled websites for MasterCard and Visa a day earlier, also focused on PayPal, which accepts payments for 8 million businesses, said Tal Beery of Web security firm ImpervaThe attackers, who briefly disabled websites for MasterCard and Visa a day earlier,... more
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Not only did it take "University of Michigan professor J. Alex Halderman and his graduate students just 36 hours to hack and obtain almost total control of the system. They were able to change all the votes that had been cast, and they obtained the names and passwords of voters eligible to use the online system. Most chilling, as Mr. Halderman told a D.C. Council committee, was the discovery that computer users in Iran and China were also trying to infiltrate the system."
The enemy within, the enemy without.
The internet: good for arguing moot points, following sports, watching porn and buying shit. Not so good for decisions that affect the fates of nations........ yet.
And happy birthday Dizz. We truly do miss you.Not only did it take "University of Michigan professor J. Alex Halderman and his... more
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David Perry, from Trend Micro discusses threats to your computer and how you can improve your Internet Security. Video from Trend Micro.David Perry, from Trend Micro discusses threats to your computer and how you can... more
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A man has been convicted of murdering his ex-wife after she taunted him on Facebook about paying child support.
Adam Mann used a hammer to batter Lisa Beverley, 30, before slashing her neck with a knife, the Old Bailey was told.
Jurors heard she had been online at her home in Plumstead, south London, on 15 September but the session came to an abrupt end at 2200 BST.
Mann, 29, of Springfield Road, Welling, Kent, was found guilty of murder and is due to be sentenced on 4 October.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-london-11001943A man has been convicted of murdering his ex-wife after she taunted him on Facebook... more
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