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A judge has dismissed most of the charges against a former San Francisco network administrator accused of hijacking the city's computer network he designed and maintained.
Sweden's Economic Crimes Bureau has begun an investigation into some of the events surrounding the planned acquisition of The Pirate Bay by Global Gaming Factor X. Swedish newspaper SvD reported Saturday that authorities are looking for possible insider trading after Global Gaming's stock rose sharply a week before Global Gaming announced plans to acquire The Pirate Bay--the best known BitTorrent tracker in the world, which was used by millions to pirate films.
Last week, the Portuguese Ministry of Culture decided to shut down or block 28 file-sharing sites. The original complaint came from local anti-piracy outfit MAPiNET. In what appears to be a revenge attack, hackers targeted their website and diverted it to some of the world
Two people have been successfully prosecuted for refusing to provide authorities with their encryption keys, resulting in landmark convictions that may have carried jail sentences of up to five years. The government said today it does not know their fate.
The White House's acting cybersecurity czar announced her resignation Monday, in a setback to the Obama administration's efforts to better protect the computer networks critical to national security and the global economy. The resignation highlights the difficulty the White House has had following through on its cybersecurity effort.
File-sharing site The Pirate Bay suffered further setbacks this week, after Italian lawyers reportedly announced plans to sue the site's owners, and a court in the Netherlands ruled that the site must block all access for Dutch users within 10 days.
Here's another perspective on the attacks against US government institutions. Do you believe it was North Korea, from the UK, or elsewhere? Perhaps not by some organized effort at all?The U.K. was the likely source of a series of attacks last week that took down popular Web sites in the U.S. and South Korea, according to an analysis performed by a Vietnamese computer security analyst.
File this one under "Government Security" -- a nice and succinct article about the recent attacks against US government institutions, and what the US is battling.North Korea celebrated America
After The Pirate Bay defendants lost a high-profile copyright infringement trial in Sweden, they charged that the judge belonged to pro-copyright groups and was therefore biased against them. A Court of Appeals ruling today disagrees; there will be no retrial.
Three judges are currently reviewing the judge that handled the Pirate Bay trial to discover if he was biased or not. No decision has yet been made but the New York Times and several other publications report inaccuracies and plain wrongs that claim otherwise. Time to get the facts straight.
Jeff Moss, founder of the Black Hat and Defcon hacker and security conferences, was among 16 people sworn in on Friday to the Homeland Security Advisory Council. The HSAC members will provide recommendations and advice directly to Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano.
What kind of far-reaching implications does this have? Can organization's, working with the government, really be allowed to monitor communications unencumbered? Can they watch for some sort of illegal activity, terrorist or not, and then arrest someone, without having previously had a warrant?A federal judge on Wednesday threw out 46 civil lawsuits filed against telecommunications companies for allowing the National Security Agency to probe their networks for terrorist communications without approval from a court. Companies such as AT&T were granted immunity under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act Amendments Act (FISAAA), signed into law in July 2008, ruled U.S. District Court Chief Judge Vaughn R. Walker in a 46-page opinion.
Interesting article. Do you agree that such a position needs to be created? Will the official have enough of a technology clue to make the right decisions?President Obama used a White House speech yesterday to try to raise national concern about threats to computer networks, drawing praise from some industry executives and lawmakers but criticism from others who said his initiatives do not go far enough.
Don't tools like this already exist on the Internet and through open source that enable script kiddies to launch an attack? The U.S. military is putting together a suite of hacking tools that could one day make breaking into networks as easy for the average grunt as kicking down a door. That
This could set an interesting precedent. I understood that European adoption of open source was very high. In fact, higher than in some areas in the US. Is Red Hat fighting a losing battle?
The request from four major record labels to fine the Pirate Bay operators for every day the site remains up and running was declined by the Swedish District Court today. Contrary to what the labels had requested, the court said it wants to hear the defendants before it will take any action.
The U.S. government has dropped -- for now -- a plan to classify the use of "proxy" servers as evidence of sophistication in committing a crime. Proxy servers are computers that disguise the source of Internet traffic. They are commonly used for legitimate purposes, like evading Internet censors and working from home. However, they can also be used to hide from law enforcement. The U.S. Sentencing Commission was considering a change to federal sentencing guidelines that would have increased sentences by about 25 percent for people convicted of crimes in which proxies are used.
A pretty good read: So we can't help but wonder: What is the point of certification? How can federal agencies ensure that their cybersecurity staffers, and their contractors' staff, have the right skill sets? What do you think?
Too funny (or scary, depending on your point-of-view). Apparently Iran thinks so poorly of Microsoft Windows they won't even use it. "Secondly, Microsoft software has a lot of backdoors and security weaknesses that are always being patched, so it is not secure. We are also under US sanctions. All this makes us think we need an alternative operating system."
While not specifically related to "Linux Security" I came across this news late last week and would like to share it here. I am amazed -- and appalled -- that this story is not getting more (any) national coverage: According to the indictment, these alleged criminal actions affected the outcome of federal, local, and state primary and general elections in 2002, 2004, and 2006. You read that right: this is exactly the type of voting fraud that many of the experts, such as Bruce Schneier, have been talking about for years. It's no longer theory, it's practical and has actually affected the outcome of elections. With that being said, where is the national outrage? Sure it was only state- and local-level elections in Kentucky, but now that we see vulnerabilities in these electronic voting machines being used in real life, how do we know for sure it's not affecting us in our state?
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