Anonymous activists are using a specially crafted web page which sends mass requests to the justice.gov domain for a DDoS attack launched on Thursday on the US Department of Justice web site. When a user visits the web page, a short piece of JavaScript causes the user’s browser to flood the government department’s server with HTTP requests. The web page is being hosted at sites including PasteHTML, where users can post HTML code anonymously.

The misguided proponents of the disastrous Internet blacklist bills have blinked. Today, Senator Harry Reid announced he would postpone a cloture vote on PIPA scheduled for next Tuesday, which means, as a practical matter, that the bill is dead for now. Shortly after that announcement, Representative Lamar Smith issued a statement conceding PIPA’s evil House stepsister, the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), also wasn’t ready for prime time.

A day after the Internet was abuzz with protests of the proposed SOPA and PIPA anti-piracy bills, the Department of Justice took a major action against many of the top executives of Megaupload, a popular file-sharing site that the government says was the basis for an “international organized criminal enterprise allegedly responsible for massive worldwide online piracy of numerous types of copyrighted works”. Prosecutors revealed indictments against seven people, all of whom are foreign nationals, as part of the case. As a result of the indictments and shutdown of Megaupload, Anonymous retaliated with a series of DDoS attacks against sites owned by Justice, Universal Music and the Motion Picture Association of America.

Yesterday, in the largest online protest in Internet history, more than 115,000 websites altered millions of web pages to stand in opposition to SOPA and PIPA, the Internet blacklist bills. Some sites — Wikipedia, Reddit, Boing Boing, Craigslist and others — completely shut down for the day, replacing their sites with material to educate the public about the bill’s dangers. Others, like Google and Mozilla, sent users to a petition or action center to express their concerns to Congress. While the final results are still being tabulated, EFF alone helped users send over 1,000,000 emails to Congress, and countless more came from other organizations. Web traffic briefly brought down the Senate website. 162 million people visited Wikipedia and eight million looked up their representatives’ phone numbers. Google received over 7 million signatures on their petition. Talking Points Memo has a great round up of more of the staggering numbers. The sum of the protest, as the New York Times declared, sent “an unmistakable message to lawmakers grappling with new media issues: Don’t mess with the Internet.”

Megaupload, the popular file-sharing site, was shuttered Thursday and its executives indicted by the Justice Department in what the authorities said was “among the largest criminal copyright cases ever brought by the United States.” Seven individuals connected to the Hong Kong-based site were indicted on a variety of charges, including criminal copyright infringement and conspiracy to commit money laundering. Four of the members of what the authorities called a five-year “racketeering conspiracy” were arrested Thursday in Auckland, New Zealand, the authorities said.

Cyber Espionage: A Buzzword Of’t Overused and Now Reinvented by Certain Players Ok, so over the last few days I have had this story from Island sticking in my craw. I went to the source and told him he was misinformed and made a statement that was wrong. His prevarications after my statement SHOULD have told me that he had no intention of even entertaining the idea that he was wrong, so, here I sit this morning post seeing a re-tweet of his slipshod reporting, writing this polemic.

Today was a truly inspiring day in Internet history. Working together, we sent a powerful message to Big Media and the misguided proponents of the Internet blacklist legislation: we will not stand idly by and let you hamper innovation, kill jobs, wreak havoc on Internet security, and undermine free speech. Supporters of SOPA and PIPA say the Internet Blackout day was a “publicity stunt.” We say it was a wake-up call.

Earlier this month, I detailed at some length why claims about the purported economic harms of piracy, offered by supporters of the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and PROTECT-IP Act (PIPA), ought to be treated with much more skepticism than they generally get from journalists and policymakers. arstechnica My own view is that this ought to be rather secondary to the policy discussion: SOPA and PIPA would be ineffective mechanisms for addressing the problem, and a terrible idea for many other reasons, even if the numbers were exactly right. No matter how bad last season’s crops were, witch burnings are a poor policy response. Fortunately, legislators finally seem to be cottoning on to this: SOPA now appears to be on ice for the time being, and PIPA’s own sponsors are having second thoughts about mucking with the Internet’s Domain Name System.

Join EFF and websites across the world in protesting the dangerous censorship legislation currently pending in Congress. On January 18th, EFF will join websites across the world in standing up against the proposed blacklist bills (SOPA in the House and the PROTECT IP Act in the Senate). EFF is calling on websites to be part of the protest by blacking out their logos, posting statements opposing the bills, and linking to our action center. Websites are also encouraged to follow the powerful examples of Reddit, Wikipedia and others by “blacking out” their entire site for a day. If you do choose to take down your website in protest, please be sure to post a message about why you oppose the blacklist bills and consider linking to the EFF action center so site visitors can take the next step and contact Congress.

Over the weekend, the Obama administration issued a potentially game-changing statement on the blacklist bills, saying it would oppose PIPA and SOPA as written, and drew an important line in the sand by emphasizing that it “will not support” any bill “that reduces freedom of expression, increases cybersecurity risk, or undermines the dynamic, innovative global Internet.” Yet, the fight is still far from over. Even though the New York Times reported that the White House statement “all but kill[s] current versions of the legislation,” the Senate is still poised to bring PIPA to the floor next week, and we can expect SOPA proponents in the House to try to revive the legislation—unless they get the message that these initiatives must stop, now. So let’s take a look at the dangerous provisions in the blacklist bills that would violate the White House’s own principles by damaging free speech, Internet security, and online innovation:

On Thursday, AntiSec supporters published nearly a million records, including usernames, email addresses, home addresses, phone numbers, credit card details, and hashed passwords - taken during the Christmas Eve attack against the open source intelligence firm, Stratfor. Strategic Forecasting Inc., better known as Stratfor, is an intelligence gathering firm located in Austin, Texas. On Christmas Eve, AntiSec attacked, leaving a defaced page in their wake, which lasted for a little over an hour before Stratfor was forced to pull it offline.

Last week, The Tech Herald reported on the Indian group Lords of Dharmaraja, and their plan to release information taken from a recent breach of servers maintained by India’s military intelligence division. The story focused on Symantec’s source code, but has since expanded to India’s use of communication intercept protocols. As it turns out, the Lords of Dharmaraja released a memo where a group of vendors known as RINOA (RIM, Nokia, and Apple), are said to have provided India with backdoors into their technology in order to them to maintain a presence in the local market space. These backend offerings allowed the military to conduct surveillance (RINOA SUR) against the US-China Economic and Security Review Commission.

As email, documents, and almost every aspect of our professional and personal lives moves onto the “cloud”—remote servers we rely on to store, guard, and make available all of our data whenever and from wherever we want them, all the time and into eternity—a brush with disaster reminds the author and his wife just how vulnerable those data can be. A trip to the inner fortress of Gmail, where Google developers recovered six years’ worth of hacked and deleted e‑mail, provides specific advice on protecting and backing up data now—and gives a picture both consoling and unsettling of the vulnerabilities we can all expect to face in the future.

This morning I happened to overhear a conversation and a phone call that spurred it that, once all was said and done, had me thinking “WTF?” The phone call came in to a *NIX admin who, was asked to verify the number of pages within a pdf file that had been sent to them by the salesman on the phone. *blink*

Internet giant VeriSign was hacked repeatedly in 2010 resulting in the theft of undisclosed information and raising questions about the integrity of security certificates issued by the company as well as its domain name service. The breaches were disclosed in vague language in a Securities and Exchange Commission filing last October in accordance with new SEC guidelines requiring companies to report intrusions to investors, according to Reuters.