Reformed hacker Kevin Mitnick on his new tell-all book
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Thu, 28 Aug 2008 10:01:00 -0700
There was a time when the name Kevin Mitnick represented everything that the world's chief security officers feared most: a reckless geek with the power to break any network in the world.
In the mid 1990s, Mitnick became the world's poster boy for the "hacker threat" when he was identified as the guy sneaking into and stealing code from networks including those belonging to Sun Microsystems, Motorola, Novell and Fujitsu.
Prosecutors and journalists, including the New York Times' John Markoff, further aggrandized his cybercrime exploits, claiming he was a criminal hacker mastermind who had wiretapped the FBI to stay ahead of his pursuers, hacked into Pentagon computers ... |
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iPhone Security Flaw Is the Tip of the Iceberg
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Thu, 28 Aug 2008 07:57:29 -0700
We previoiusly reported on a security hole in the latest iPhone software exposes e-mail, text, and voice messages to whoever gets a hold of the device despite it being password-protected. Basically, clicking emergency call and double-clicking the home button brings up the favorites on iPhone 2.0.2. In actuality, however, passcodes can actually be cracked in every version of iPhone software to-date. While the method utilizing emergency calls is likely to disappear in the next version of the firmware, other security bypasses are readily accessible. READ MORE |
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OffTopic: How to store your files online
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Thu, 28 Aug 2008 06:50:21 -0700
Thanks to a growing range of services, it's now possible to keep all your personal digital information in the Internet "cloud", as they're calling it these days. Everything from documents and e-mails to photos and music can be stored -- often for free.
The benefits of storing your digital life this way are considerable. You're no longer tied to a particular computer or location, and you can access your data from any Internet-connected device.
There are a vast number of Internet-based storage services available and growing user demand is leading to some of the world's biggest IT companies offering more. Interest surged recently when Microsoft launched its SkyDrive ... |
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Distraught McKinnon loses US extradition appeal
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Thu, 28 Aug 2008 06:48:25 -0700
Gary McKinnon has lost his European Court of Human Rights appeal against extradition to the US. McKinnon, 42, is charged in the US with unauthorised access to computers and causing damage to a protected system. He has fought attempts to try him in the US, where he fears he could be treated as a terrorist, tried in a military tribunal and ultimately imprisoned at Guantanamo Bay.
The European Court of Human Rights held up his extradition earlier this month and called for a meeting today to decide whether attempts to try him in the US should be blocked. However, the court ruled this morning that he must face US courts, and he now faces extradition within two weeks. |
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Linux servers under the Phalanx gun: A problem with people, not code
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Thu, 28 Aug 2008 04:37:37 -0700
As The Register reports Wednesday, Linux servers are increasingly under attack from Phalanx2, a "self-injecting kernel rootkit designed for the Linux 2.6 branch that hides files, processes and sockets and includes tools for sniffing a tty program and connecting to it with a backdoor."
According to The Register:
The attacks appear to use stolen SSH keys to take hold of a targeted machine and then gain root access by exploiting weaknesses in the kernel. The attacks then install a rootkit known as Phalanx2, which scours the newly infected system for additional SSH keys. There's a viral aspect to this attack. As new SSH keys are stolen, new machines are potentially vulnerable to ... |
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Judges consider whether FBI violated free speech
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Thu, 28 Aug 2008 04:36:19 -0700
A panel of federal appeals court judges pushed a U.S. government lawyer on Wednesday to answer why FBI letters sent out to Internet service providers seeking information should remain secret.
A panel of three judges from the U.S. Second Circuit Court of Appeals heard arguments on whether a provision of the Patriot Act, which requires people who are formally contacted by the Federal Bureau of Investigation for information to keep it a secret, is constitutional.
The American Civil Liberties Union filed suit in 2004 on behalf of an undisclosed Internet service provider against the U.S. government challenging the so-called National Security Letters (NSL) as well as gag ... |
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Gaping hole opened in Internet's trust-based BGP protocol
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Thu, 28 Aug 2008 04:35:23 -0700
For all the viruses, malware, and exploits that crawl around the web, fundamental flaws in the system are supposed to be few and far between, but the last two months have proven to be an exception to the rule. In July, Dan Kaminsky revealed his discovery of a DNS flaw that could be exploited to direct unwitting users to malicious web addresses, Now, practically on the heels of that announcement, a hacker team that presented at DEFCON has demonstrated how a fundamental design error in the Internet's border gateway protocol (BGP) can be used to invisibly eavesdrop on all traffic originating from a particular set of IP blocks.
Neither of these attack vectors are hacks in the typical ... |
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