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LulzSec gone, Anonymous back; releases files from U.S. Counter Terrorist Program – International Business Times

June 27, 2011 By Leave a Comment

Hacking group LulzSec went out of the scene, but another collective of hackers, Anonymous, continues with its job. The hacking group has released a set of files containing documents and links to security and hacking resources on the internet. The released files also include various hacking and counter hacking tools along with the addresses of FBI bureaus in the U.S.

 

The size of the released file is 625 MB, and it seems to have come from the U.S. FEMA (Federal Emergency Management Agency) Counter Terrorism Defence Initiative training program. Although the hackers linked to the CDI SENTINAL program page, they didn’t mention the exact source of the file, ITProPortal reported.

Anonymous gained over 60,000 new followers in the last few hours, as LulzSec persuaded its Twitter followers to follow the @AnonymousIRC account after declaring its suspension.

via LulzSec gone, Anonymous back; releases files from U.S. Counter Terrorist Program – International Business Times.

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LulzSec calls it quits after 50 days of ‘mayhem’ – Computerworld

June 26, 2011 By Leave a Comment

The computer hacking group LulzSec said Saturday it had ended its campaign of cyberassaults on government and corporate websites and that it was time for it to “sail into the distance.”

Its announcement came three days after LulzSec released its latest trove of internal documents, stolen from the Arizona Department of Public Safety computer network, and four days after U.K. police said they had made the first arrest of a man allegedly affiliated with the group.

“Our planned 50 day cruise has expired, and we must now sail into the distance, leaving behind – we hope – inspiration, fear, denial, happiness, approval, disapproval, mockery, embarrassment, thoughtfulness, jealousy, hate, even love,” the group said in a post on the Pastebin website.

“If anything, we hope we had a microscopic impact on someone, somewhere. Anywhere.”

LulzSec spent the last several weeks attacking websites and computer networks of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency, the U.S. Senate, the U.K.’s Serious Organised Crime Agency, the Brazilian government and the energy giant Petrobras, among others.

via LulzSec calls it quits after 50 days of ‘mayhem’ – Computerworld.

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Microsoft Could Benefit From Google Antitrust Probe: Analysts – Desktops and Notebooks – News & Reviews – eWeek.com

June 26, 2011 By Leave a Comment

Microsoft’s Bing search engine could benefit from a federal probe into Google’s business practices, according to analysts.

According to The Wall Street Journal, the FTC will soon subpoena Google for information, which in turn could lead into an antitrust inquiry into the search engine giant’s search advertising practices. The FTC will also apparently send formal requests for information to companies that work with Google. (Neither Google nor the FTC provided comment to eWEEK on the matter.)

U.S. Sens. Herb Kohl, D-Wisc., and Mike Lee, R-Utah, also want Google CEO Larry Page and Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt to appear at their July hearing on the search industry. Google plans to send Chief Legal Officer David Drummond, who has testified before about Google’s acquisitions and policies. But the two senators, in a June 10 letter, remained insistent that either Page or Schmidt appear to answer “fundamental questions about business operations rather than merely legal matters.”

That congressional drama is dovetailing neatly with the FTC’s recent focus on Google’s business practices, although The Wall Street Journal noted that any formal FTC investigation could take more than a year to unfold and result in no formal charges.

According to research firm comScore, Google held 65.5 percent of the search market through May, compared with Yahoo at 15.9 percent and Bing at 14.1 percent. Google continues to lure more than 1 billion unique visitors a month to its properties, versus Microsoft with 905 million.

But Microsoft has been notably aggressive of late in building out Bing’s capabilities. Bing now presents Facebook information on the search-results page. Search for a particular city, for example, and the search engine will tell you which Facebook friends live there. Given Microsoft’s minority stake in Facebook, this leveraging of the latter’s data should come as no surprise; for its own part, Microsoft seems determined to graft a social layer into search as a means of differentiating its own offering from its Mountain View, Calif., rival.

New features and slow-but-steady market share gains aside, a federal probe into Google’s practices could also help Bing gain share.

“Direct injunctions could prevent Google from doing certain things,” Roger Kay, an analyst with Endpoint Technologies Associates, told eWEEK June 24. Federal action could also spark “excessive caution on the part of Google trying to avoid getting near the tripwire, once the Department of Justice or whoever sets up such a thing.”

via Microsoft Could Benefit From Google Antitrust Probe: Analysts – Desktops and Notebooks – News & Reviews – eWeek.com.

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Sony Hacker Said to Land Facebook Job | PCWorld

June 26, 2011 By Leave a Comment

Techunwrapped revealed that Hotz, the hacker known as Geohot who pioneered jailbreaking the iPhone and became embroiled in a lawsuit with Sony after publishing the PlayStation 3′s root keys, has taken a position at Facebook.

Joshua Hill (P0sixninja), a member of the Chronic-Dev Team — the group responsible for greenpois0n, the premiere iOS jailbreak software — said in a video that Hotz declined an iOS jailbreak challenge (finding a boot ROM exploit in the iPad 2) to keep out of the media spotlight and also to focus on his new job at Facebook.

Then Gabe Rivera of Techmeme confirmed Techunwrapped’s report in a tweet by sending readers to Hotz’s Facebook page, where, on June 22, Hotz wrote: “Facebook is really an amazing place to work…first hackathon over.” Speculation has it that Hotz is working on the long-awaited Facebook app for the iPad.

Facebook’s hiring of Geohot signifies a shift in corporate temperament when it comes to hackers. The days of lawsuits and retaliation may be ending as more tech giants partner with rather than punish the anonymous hunters on the Web.

via Sony Hacker Said to Land Facebook Job | PCWorld.

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The theology of iCloud | Tablets | Macworld

June 26, 2011 By Leave a Comment

We’re now in the calm, cozy eye of the iCloud storm. The anticipation and speculation period was followed by the day of the announcement and the Getting of the Facts, which was followed by the analysis of the announcement and the grinding but not-at-all necessary process of converting one’s initial enthusiasm into an endless list of reasons to be deeply concerned about the future of our great Republic.

Each of these things is stressful. The next step after this is the most stressful yet: it’s the bit when iOS 5 actually ships and we get our first chance to see how iCloud might destroy our day-to-day lives for real, instead of just hypothetically.

But as I say, at the moment the skies are blue and the winds are still. It’s a brief bit of time in which we should stroll the yard, tracing bursts of confused clucking and mooing to animals that have been halfway-embedded in trees, and effect a humanitarian rescue, and think about the larger issues while we await the possible end of the world.

Technology, when done ambitiously, is a form of art and as with painting, it’s always interesting to see how three different artists have approached the same subject. All art is autobiographical in nature, or so I heard in between naps during my Art History classes. It’s hard for me not to look at iCloud and the other new cloud services offered by Google and Amazon and think of them as emblematic of the companies’ views on the world.

What I find most remarkable about iCloud is that (unless there’s a lot more that Apple hasn’t shown us yet) it’s not a destination: it’s a highway system. Yes, technically my iCloud contains loads of information and files, but that fact chiefly articulates itself when I pick up my iPad, launch Pages, and resume work on an article right from the point I left it on my MacBook earlier in the day. We understood iDisk (and even Dropbox) as a directory on a remote server that we could attach to our local file system and use for storage. Despite Apple’s positioning of iCloud as a Huge Thing, we’re not meant to even think of iDisk at all. We’re meant to just have our data where we need it, when we need it. iCloud is the reason why when I got back to my hotel room I found that my bed had been turned down and there was a bottle of Coke already on ice. It’s not the phone call I make to a hotel service to make those things happen.

via The theology of iCloud | Tablets | Macworld.

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Internet Security Experts Introduce Secure DNS in Singapore – NYTimes.com

June 25, 2011 By Leave a Comment

A small group of Internet security specialists gathered in Singapore this week to start up a global system to make e-mail and e-commerce more secure, end the proliferation of passwords and raise the bar significantly for Internet scam artists, spies and troublemakers.

“It won’t matter where you are in the world or who you are in the world, you’re going to be able to authenticate everyone and everything,” said Dan Kaminsky, an independent network security researcher who is one of the engineers involved in the project.

The Singapore event included an elaborate technical ceremony to create and then securely store numerical keys that will be kept in three hardened data centers there, in Zurich and in San Jose, Calif. The keys and data centers are working parts of a technology known as Secure DNS, or DNSSEC. DNS refers to the Domain Name System, which is a directory that connects names to numerical Internet addresses. Preliminary work on the security system had been going on for more than a year, but this was the first time the system went into operation, even though it is not quite complete.

The three centers are fortresses made up of five layers of physical, electronic and cryptographic security, making it virtually impossible to tamper with the system. Four layers are active now. The fifth, a physical barrier, is being built inside the data center.

via Internet Security Experts Introduce Secure DNS in Singapore – NYTimes.com.

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E-Discovery Malpractice Is More Common Than Perceived, LeClairRyan Partner Says – News – ABA Journal

June 25, 2011 By Leave a Comment

Lawyers beware: the pitfalls of e-discovery may be more complicated than many litigators—even experienced partners—expect or are prepared to handle.

“In short, this is a complex, high-risk task that requires specialized skills and experience. It is not something one does once a year and gets good at,” LeClairRyan partner Dennis Kiker wrote at The e-Discovery Myth. Kiker’s post started with a mention of a malpractice suit against McDermott Will & Emery for alleged failures in managing an e-discovery case that resulted in the inadvertent disclosure of over 3,000 privileged documents.

via E-Discovery Malpractice Is More Common Than Perceived, LeClairRyan Partner Says – News – ABA Journal.

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IBM Escalates E-Discovery Arms Race | Law.com

June 25, 2011 By Leave a Comment

IBM is expanding its role in e-discovery through deeper integration with subsidiary PSS Systems, which makes legal hold and risk-management products, and the issuance of new industry reports expected from the IBM-controlled Compliance, Governance and Oversight Council.

The expansion is good news for customers, especially those whose clients already use Big Blue’s databases and storage. It’s also part of a wider trend — mainstream IT companies seeing themselves as players in the burgeoning e-discovery market.

IBM acquired PSS in October 2010 for its legal-industry customers and Atlas software suite. It will soon announce Atlas 6.0, CEO Deidre Paknad said. New features include single-click issuance of legal holds, automated escalation of hold follow-up communications, and visual analysis for hold monitoring.

Paknad said she sees at least two challenging aspects come up when e-discovery attorneys and IT departments work together. In database management systems, “The ability to actually figure out which fields and rows and tables you’d want to collect for e-discovery purposes is very complicated,” she explained. In e-discovery implementation, “I think the delivery route is also important,” she added.

via IBM Escalates E-Discovery Arms Race.

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Apple patches 36 bugs in Snow Leopard, preps OS for Lion upgrade – Computerworld

June 25, 2011 By Leave a Comment

Apple on Thursday released the final feature update for Snow Leopard as it prepared users’ Macs for the upcoming Lion upgrade set to ship next month.

Included in the update to Mac OS X 10.6.7 were patches for 36 vulnerabilities in Snow Leopard and Snow Leopard Server.

Apple also issued a security-only update for Mac OS X 10.5, better known as Leopard, that fixed 13 flaws in the 2007 operating system.

But most Mac users will be interested in the update because it’s a prerequisite for Lion, the $30 Mac OS X upgrade Apple plans to sell through the Mac App Store in July.

via Apple patches 36 bugs in Snow Leopard, preps OS for Lion upgrade – Computerworld.

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Patriot Act Debate: Is the FBI Collecting Your Phone Data? – TIME

June 24, 2011 By Leave a Comment

The U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee is weighing fresh concerns about the sweeping nature of domestic spying using one controversial section of the Patriot Act. This particular part of that law is notable because it has been divisive for years — and because during those years President Obama has quietly moved from being a Senator skeptical of the provisions to being an enthusiastic spy chief whose Administration embraces them.

Last Tuesday the committee met to consider the worries of some members, mostly Democrats, who say the Justice Department has drafted a breathtakingly broad interpretation of Section 215 of the Patriot Act.

(See a photographic history of cell phones)

That section allows the FBI to seize without a warrant “any tangible things,” like documents, so long as they are part of an effort to protect the country against international terrorism. The FBI can order a private company to turn over data as long as the bureau can convince a special national-security court, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, that the information is “relevant” to antiterrorism work.

via Patriot Act Debate: Is the FBI Collecting Your Phone Data? – TIME.

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