Category Archives: Current Events

Reporters use Google, find breach, get branded as “hackers”

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Call it security through absurdity: a pair of telecom firms have branded reporters for Scripps News as “hackers” after they discovered the personal data of over 170,000 customers—including social security numbers and other identifying data that could be used for identity theft—sitting on a publicly accessible server. While the reporters claim to have discovered the data with a simple Google search, the firms’ lawyer claims they used “automated” means to gain access to the company’s confidential data and that in doing so the reporters violated the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act with their leet hacker skills.

via Reporters use Google, find breach, get branded as “hackers” | Ars Technica.

How the 2013 World Press Photo of the Year was faked with Photoshop

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Basically, as far as we can surmise, Hansen took a series of photos — and then later, realizing that his most dramatically situated photo was too dark and shadowy, decided to splice a bunch of images together and apply a liberal amount of dodging (brightening) to the shadowy regions. For what it’s worth, Hansen claims that the light in the alley was natural — and to be fair, sometimes magical lighting does occur. I think most of you will agree, though, that the photo simply feels fake — there’s just something about the lighting that sets off a warning alarm in your brain. As for why World Press Photo didn’t forensically analyze the photo using freely available, advanced, accurate analysis tools such as FourMatch or FotoForensics… who knows.

via ExtremeTech » How the 2013 World Press Photo of the Year was faked with Photoshop.

Space Station Leaking Vital Coolant, NASA Says

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The space station uses chilled liquid ammonia to cool down the power systems on its eight giant solararray panels. A minor leak of this ammonia was first noticed in 2007, and NASA has been studying the issue ever since. In November 2012 two astronauts took a spacewalk to fix the problem, rewiring some coolant lines and installing a spare radiator due to fears the original radiator was damaged by a micrometeorite impact.

via Space Station Leaking Vital Coolant, NASA Says | Weather Underground.

Update: Astronauts Complete Spacewalk to Repair Ammonia Leak

A little more than 2 1/2 hours into the spacewalk, Cassidy and Marshburn removed the 260-pound pump controller box from the P6 truss and replaced it with a spare that had been stowed nearby on the port-side truss, or backbone of the station. Mission Control ran the new pump while the spacewalkers watched for any ammonia snowflakes, but so far there have been no new signs of a leak. Long-term monitoring of the pump will be required to determine whether the pump replacement has fixed the leak.

Dutch police may get right to hack in cyber crime fight

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Under a new bill, investigators would be able to hack into computers, install spyware, read emails and destroy files.

They could also break into servers located abroad, if they were being used to block services.

via BBC News – Dutch police may get right to hack in cyber crime fight.

This is no threat to a properly secured system.  AV software is not a panacea for securing a system.

Use a Software Bug to Win Video Poker? That’s a Federal Hacking Case

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It’s the latest test of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, a 1986 law originally intended to punish hackers who remotely crack defense or banking computers over their 300 baud modems. Changes in technology and a string of amendments have pushed the law into a murky zone where prosecutors have charged people for violating website terms-of-service or an employer’s computer use policies.

via Use a Software Bug to Win Video Poker? That’s a Federal Hacking Case | Threat Level | Wired.com.

Under the relevant section of the CFAA, Kane and Nestor aren’t charged with hacking into the Game King from the outside, but rather with exceeding their otherwise legitimate access “to obtain or alter information in the computer that the accesser is not entitled so to obtain or alter.”

EVE Online | Stories From The First Decade

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The decade of history of EVE Online is unique. It has its heroes, scoundrels, heists and intrigue. Unlike other games, those are not stories written by developers and acted out by NPCs. They are true stories about the actions of the players that inhabit this world.

via EVE Online | Stories From The First Decade.

Go to this site and read some stories.  This game has always amazed me with the news it generates through the stories it has produced throughout the years.   I find games like this very complicated.  The stories do read like a novel or possible screenplay.

LivingSocial Hacked — More Than 50 Million Customers Impacted

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The hack includes customer names, emails, birthdates and encrypted passwords.

via LivingSocial Hacked — More Than 50 Million Customers Impacted – Kara Swisher – Commerce – AllThingsD.

I’d like to read a post mortum on this.  Knowing names and emails will allow for more precise phishing attacks against those 50 million customers.  Hopefully people know to lie about their birthday and if this attack was caught fast enough the bad guys might not have had time to decrypt the encrypted passwords to exploit the accounts.

One positive note in a not-so-positive situation: The email sent to employees and customers noted that neither customer credit card nor merchant financial information was accessed in the cyber attack.

That Internet War Apocalypse Is a Lie

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CloudFlare CEO Matthew Prince tells a harrowing story of warding off the internet attack after Spamhaus hired him—which is certainly true—but warns us of existential threats to the net still lurking out there, like lost Soviet nukes:

via That Internet War Apocalypse Is a Lie.

This would be so terrifying if it weren’t advertising. Prince, of course, is in the business of selling protection against online attacks. And his company is, as far as I can tell, pretty good at this business. But he’s also clearly in the business of scaring people: in his blog post today, he warns that the Spamhaus attack “may prove to be relatively modest” compared to what comes next. Bigger nukes, I suppose.

Here’s an another excerpt on the latest DDoS kerfuffle that made a lot of news recently.

So what’s the answer? Short of shutting down all 27 million resolvers, the Open DNS Resolver Project and others such as DNS service providers Afilias recommend the implementation of source address validation. An IETF RFC, BCP-38, exists that spells out how to use source address validation and build such an architecture to defeat IP source address spoofing.

via Open DNS Resolvers Center Stage in Massive DDoS Attacks | threatpost.

According to the article one component to implementing this requires cooperation from ISPs who may not see this as a priority.

No, free Wi-Fi isn’t coming to every US city

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We’ve written about White Spaces on numerous occasions. The FCC gave its thumbs up in 2008. We wrote about test networks in 2010, and by December 2011 the FCC had approved the first White Spaces broadband device.

via No, free Wi-Fi isn’t coming to every US city | Ars Technica.

LOL.  I read the free Wifi story in the Chicago Tribune and even on slashdot.