January 2011
39 posts
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Kill-switch: Egypt vs. the US →
In response to protests, the Egyptian government took the unprecedented step of disconnecting its Internet from the rest of the world. Egyptians can no longer reach Twitter, Facebook, or other “subversive” websites. While Iran and Tunisia partially restricted the Internet during their protests, they did not go to this extreme of turning it off completely. While extreme, this is...
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Communicate if Your Government Shuts Off Your... →
Scenario: Your government is displeased with the communication going on in your location and pulls the plug on your internet access, most likely by telling the major ISPs to turn off service. This is what happened in Egypt January 25 prompted by citizen protests, with sources estimating that the Egyptian government has cut off approximately 88 percent of the country’s internet access. What...
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Egypt: Looting as Counter-Insurgency →
There have been a growing number of reports of looters/thugs conducting smash and grabs across Cairo. Interestingly, there’s also a growing number of reports that when these thugs are caught, they have police/interior ministry identification on them. If this is so, the reasons for it are:
It tars the insurgency as a group of criminals and thugs.
It provides a reason for a reluctant army...
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What's in all that tear gas we've been selling... →
If you’ve been watching any coverage of the Egyptian protests, you’ve no doubt seen the tear gas plumes as canisters are shot at protestors—often to be picked up and hurled back moments later. Many of those tear gas containers falling on the bridges and streets of Cairo aren’t local products, however; they come from Jamestown, Pennsylvania, home of Combined Tactical Systems....
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US reported 'routine' police brutality in Egypt,... →
Police brutality in Egypt is “routine and pervasive” and the use of torture so widespread that the Egyptian government has stopped denying it exists, according to leaked cables released today by WikiLeaks. The batch of US embassy cables paint a despairing portrait of a police force and security service in Egypt wholly out of control. They suggest torture is routinely used against...
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Indian police raid monastery of top Tibetan monk →
Indian police said Friday they had raided the monastery of a top Buddhist monk seen as the possible next spiritual leader for Tibet and had seized hundreds of thousands of dollars in cash. Police swooped on the Karmapa’s monastery in Dharamshala, a hill station in northern India, on Thursday and returned Friday to question staff about the origins of local and foreign bank notes discovered...
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WikiLeaks broke no rules, Visa study finds →
A study into WikiLeaks by a third-party consultant commissioned by credit card company Visa has cleared the site of any illegal activity. Visa blocked donations to WikiLeaks last month, saying that it would have to examine the legality of the site. Visa hired Norway-based financial services company Teller AS to investigate WikiLeaks and its Icelandic fundraising body the Sunshine Press....
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[Wikileaks] Cables Expose U.S. Dealings With Egypt... →
It was Hillary Rodham Clinton’s first meeting as secretary of state with President Hosni Mubarak, in March 2009, and the Egyptians had an odd request: Mrs. Clinton should not thank Mr. Mubarak for releasing an opposition leader from prison because he was ill. In fact, a confidential diplomatic cable signed by the American ambassador to Egypt, Margaret Scobey, advised Mrs. Clinton to avoid even...
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Egypt Leaves the Internet →
Confirming what a few have reported this evening: in an action unprecedented in Internet history, the Egyptian government appears to have ordered service providers to shut down all international connections to the Internet. Critical European-Asian fiber-optic routes through Egypt appear to be unaffected for now. But every Egyptian provider, every business, bank, Internet cafe, website, school,...
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Google censoring US search for realz →
Today google rolled out search censoring on the request of Big Media. What is being reported is that they are just censoring auto complete; but when combined with google instant this change leeks in to which results users see.
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Stealing SIM Cards from Traffic Lights →
Johannesburg installed hundreds of networked traffic lights on its streets. The lights use a cellular modem and a SIM card to communicate. Those lights introduced a security risk I’ll bet no one gave a moment’s thought to: that criminals might steal the SIM cards from the traffic lights and use them to make free phone calls. But that’s exactly what happened. Aside from the...
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What's the Point of Conferences? →
The 2011 security conference season is upon us, with Black Hat DC already fading in the rear-view mirror. As I embark upon a busy couple months, I can help but reflect a bit on what is to come and question the value (perceived and real) of all this hoopla. Sure, I love getting the chance to travel a bit and catch-up with friends whom I typically only see at these events, but beyond the social...
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Ethics of password cracking/dissemination →
Anybody who follows my blog/work regularly know that I collect, crack, and disseminate password breaches. I have a wiki page devoted to breaches and dictionaries and I occasionally do talks on the subject. And if you follow me on Twitter, you’ll see regular updates about password dictionaries. The issue is, not everybody agrees with what I do (I was hoping to have more links in that sentence,...
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Peep show: inside the world of unsecured IP... →
If you’re in public, you’re on camera. If you walk into a coffee shop, the owner gets you at the register. Visit a larger store, and chances are they have your face as soon as you cross the threshold. At least one or two of your neighbors catch you on camera when you walk around your neighborhood, and many cities monitor traffic using red light cameras at major intersections. The question is no...
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Leaked: US government strategy to prevent leaks →
The US government’s 11-page document on how to get various US government agencies to prevent future leaks has been leaked to MSNBC. It doesn’t get any more ironic than that. After the various leaks made by WikiLeaks, the US government understandably wants to limit the number of potential leaks, but their strategy apparently isn’t implemented yet. Here’s the crux of the...
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Facebook Enables HTTPS So You Can Share Without... →
Facebook announced Wednesday it would begin supporting a feature to protect users from having their accounts hijacked over Wi-Fi connections or snooped on by schools and businesses. Facebook users will now have the option of using Facebook over HTTPS, the encryption protocol used to protect online banking sessions and user logins for services of all kinds on the web. The announcement comes just...
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Can an Open Source Revolt Topple Egypt? →
Is is possible to replicate what happened in Tunisia in other countries, like Egypt? Global guerrillas in Egypt are working on it. Here’s what is going on.
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Mozilla Leads the Way on Do Not Track →
Earlier today, Mozilla announced plans to incorporate a Do Not Track feature into their next browser release, Firefox 4.1. Google also announced a new privacy extension today, but we believe that Mozilla is now taking a clear lead and building a practical way forward for people who want privacy when they browse the web.
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The Dubai Job →
One year ago, an elite Mossad hit squad traveled to Dubai to kill a high-ranking member of Hamas. They completed the mission, but their covers were blown, and Israel was humiliated by the twenty-seven-minute video of their movements that was posted online for all the world to see. Ronen Bergman reveals the intricate, chilling details of the mission and investigates how Israel’s vaunted spy...
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[repost] EFF's Guide to Protecting Electronic... →
Amid recent reports that security researchers have experienced difficulties at the United States border after traveling abroad, we realized that it’s been awhile since we last discussed how to safeguard electronic devices and digital information during border searches. So just in time for holiday travel and the 27th Chaos Communication Congress in Berlin, here’s EFF’s guide for...
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Obama officials caught deceiving about WikiLeaks →
Whenever the U.S. Government wants to demonize a person or group in order to justify attacks on them, it follows the same playbook: it manufactures falsehoods about them, baselessly warns that they pose Grave Dangers and are severely harming our National Security, peppers all that with personality smears to render the targeted individuals repellent on a personal level, and feeds it all to the...
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The OkCupid Hack: Dating “Denial of Service”... →
A day ago this post went up on Reddit and then got reposted to Hacker News, both sites I lurk on. I’ve been watching the comments with much interest: some admire the way this guy hacked OkCupid (it’s a social engineering hack, not an attack on OkCupid) – and some are strongly saying that it is unethical. Calling the guy a liar, etc. There are thousands of comments on this. He just Tweeted that...
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Sony Attempt to 'Restrain' PlayStation 3 Hackers... →
Sony’s clearly readying the hounds to foil recent hacks that lay bare the PlayStation 3’s once impregnable security routines. But in light of recent rulings about ‘jailbreaking’, do they have a legal leg to stand on? Their lawyers certainly think so. They’ve gone ahead and filed papers against George Hotz, a hacker who helped author and popularize a radical root kit...
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Indian Government “give us access to all email!”,... →
I have expressed concern in the past with RIMs position that it would explore providing access to communications between it’s devices in some countries. My concern had usually stemmed from the fact that RIM has a proprietary encryption system and has sold itself to the business community as being the most secure communication medium for cellular devices. As China, India, and Germany have pushed...
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Hackers find new way to cheat on Wall Street -- to... →
High-frequency trading networks, which complete stock market transactions in microseconds, are vulnerable to manipulation by hackers who can inject tiny amounts of latency into them. By doing so, they can subtly change the course of trading and pocket profits of millions of dollars in just a few seconds, says Rony Kay, a former IBM research fellow and founder of cPacket Networks, a Silicon...
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Antimatter caught streaming from thunderstorms on... →
A space telescope has accidentally spotted thunderstorms on Earth producing beams of antimatter. Such storms have long been known to give rise to fleeting sparks of light called terrestrial gamma-ray flashes. But results from the Fermi telescope show they also give out streams of electrons and their antimatter counterparts, positrons.
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[repost] No Secrets - Julian Assange's mission for... →
The house on Grettisgata Street, in Reykjavik, is a century old, small and white, situated just a few streets from the North Atlantic. The shifting northerly winds can suddenly bring ice and snow to the city, even in springtime, and when they do a certain kind of silence sets in. This was the case on the morning of March 30th, when a tall Australian man named Julian Paul Assange, with gray eyes...
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Home Internet with Anonymity Built In →
Many political activists, nonprofits, and businesses use an anonymity system called Tor to encrypt and obscure what they do on the Internet. Now the U.S.-based nonprofit that distributes Tor is developing a low-cost home router with the same privacy protection built in. The Tor software masks Web traffic by encrypting network messages and passing them through a series of relays (each Tor client...
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EFF Calls for Immediate Action to Defend Tunisian... →
Demonstrations and protests over unemployment and poor living conditions have been ongoing in Tunisia since the beginning of December, but last week the Tunisian government turned up the heat on bloggers, activists, and dissidents by launching a JavaScript injection attack that siphoned off the usernames and passwords of Tunsians logging in to Google, Yahoo, and Facebook. The Tunisian government...
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Unconventional Wisdom - Homeland Security Hasn't... →
Hardly anyone has seriously scrutinized either the priorities or the spending patterns of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and its junior partner, the Transportation Security Administration (TSA), since their hurried creation in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks. Sure, they get criticized plenty. But year in, year out, they continue to grow faster and cost more — presumably...
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Twitter’s Response to WikiLeaks Subpoena Should Be... →
ANALYSIS: Twitter introduced a new feature last month without telling anyone about it, and the rest of the tech world should take note and come up with its own version of it Twitter beta-tested a spine. On Friday, it emerged that the U.S. government recently got a court order demanding that Twitter turn over information about a number of people connected to WikiLeaks, including founder Julian...
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The Man Who Spilled the Secrets →
The collaboration between WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, the Web’s notorious information anarchist, and some of the world’s most respected news organizations began at The Guardian, a nearly 200-year-old British paper. What followed was a clash of civilizations—and ambitions—as Guardian editors and their colleagues at The New York Times and other media outlets struggled to corral a...
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Mobile Device Security: I can haz your mobile →
As we start 2011, a friend pointed out that my endpoint research agenda (including much of my work on Positivity) is pretty PC platform focused. And relative to endpoint security that is on point. But the reality is that nowadays we cannot assume that our only threat vectors remain PC-like devices. Given that pretty much all the smart phones out there are as powerful as the computers I used 5...
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Wikileaks volunteer detained and searched (again)... →
Jacob Appelbaum, a security researcher, Tor developer, and volunteer with Wikileaks, reported today on his Twitter feed that he was detained, searched, and questioned by the US Customs and Border Patrol agents at Seattle-Tacoma International Airport on January 10, upon re-entering the US after a vacation in Iceland.
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Can't hide love for WikiLeaks →
I recently put the proposition, to a senior frontbencher in Federal Parliament, that the WikiLeaks horse had bolted, and that shutting down Julian Assange could not reverse a fundamental shift in the balance of power towards the citizens and away from the institutions that govern them. His response was: ”The Catholic Church shut down Galileo for a hundred years. I think we can shut down...
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Thoughts on the DOJ wikileaks/twitter court order →
The world’s media has jumped on the news that the US Department of Justice has sought, and obtained a court order seeking to compel Twitter to reveal account information associated with several of its users who are associated with Wikileaks. Communications privacy law is exceedingly complex, and unfortunately, none of the legal experts who actually specialize in this area (people like Orin...
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How WikiLeaks Enlightened Us in 2010 - World Watch →
WikiLeaks has brought to light a series of disturbing insinuations and startling truths in the last year, some earth-shattering, others simply confirmations of our darkest suspicions about the way the world works. Thanks to founder Julian Assange’s legal situation in Sweden (and potentially the United States) as well as his media grandstanding, it is easy to forget how important and...