Friday, May 30, 2008

Friday News Feed 5/30/08

Bank loses tapes with data on 4.5M clients A New York bank confirmed that it lost a box of data storage tapes containing the unencrypted personal information of 4.5 million people during transit to an off-site facility. Read more...






Researchers breach Microsoft's CardSpace ID technology





Apple patches 40 Mac OS X security bugs







Keeping security relevant in the free-content era
http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&articleId=9084988
Kelly goes on to explain eight "generatives," things that can't be copied and so still hold value on the Internet: Immediacy, Personalization, Interpretation, Authenticity, Accessibility, Embodiment, Patronage, and Findability.





Man charged with using cartoon names to defraud brokerages





Microsoft beta-tests free online diagnostic tools for Windows





Stanford Medical School's Rx: Anomaly Detection - 5/30/2008 1:24:00 PM Appliance helps minimize bot, malware infections






Gartner Forecasts the Next Big Threats - 5/29/2008 5:05:00 PM A peek at some of the types of attacks on the horizon that Gartner will reveal at next week's Security Summit






May 30, 2008 Police say banks not reporting cybercrime in effort to protect image
http://www.crime-research.org/news/30.05.2008/3394/






Symantec backs off claim, says current Flash Player safe from attack





Will proposed treaty make border agents copyright cops?

A Little Sunshine Brings Out Rapid And Well Deserved Anger Towards ACTA Treaty
from the spreading-the-word dept
Last week, I wrote a post highlighting the faulty premises behind a secretly negotiated treaty between the US and many other countries, the so-called Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA). Since then a bunch of news articles have been written about ACTA, with most of the focus on how it will have border guards going through your iPod and computers to see if you have any infringing content. A bunch of folks have been submitting stories on this all week, despite the fact that we wrote about it last week. However, what's most interesting to me is how quickly this turned from a little story -- first posted to Wikileaks and a few blogs, into something that's been in major newspapers (oddly, mostly focused in Canada). Even more interesting, however, is how this has so quickly turned into activism, with some newspapers already already calling for people to stand up against ACTA to protect our privacy rights. Think about that for a second. This was a treaty on the "boring" topic of copyright, that was basically pitched by the entertainment industry to politicians who wrote it up in secret. It leaked out to a single website, and within a week there were major newspaper editorials calling for people to stand up against it, and thousands, if not millions, of people informed about the potential harm this treaty could cause. So much for slipping it under the radar. This is really the culmination of a few different factors, including the entertainment industry's misguided and rapidly backfiring battle against consumers, that has catapulted copyright from a boring "wonkish" issue into one that people recognize effects so many aspects of their daily lives. Combined with the wonderful communications ability of the internet, it makes it harder for the entertainment industry to simply pull one over on people like this. Of course, as we've noted, the industry keeps on trying, and they love sneaking through legislation and treaties before anyone recognizes it -- but the rapid response to ACTA (which is far from over, of course) suggests that some of the industry's advantages are slipping away. Hopefully, this issue will continue to receive the attention it deserves so that there's a real debate on whether or not such a treaty is needed (it's not).
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Comcast Hackers Say They Warned the Company First
blog.wired.com — The computer attackers who took down Comcast's homepage and webmail service for over five hours Thursday say they didn't know what they were getting themselves into. In an hour-long telephone conference call with Threat Level, the hackers known as "Defiant" and "EBK" expressed astonishment over the attention their DNS hijacking has garnered.More… (Tech Industry News)







Web 2.0 Sites a Thriving Marketplace for Malware
Malicious software makers are using social networks, video sites, and blogs to peddle their wares to other online criminals. 29-May-2008






Good reference chart:
http://isc.sans.org/presentations/iscflyer.pdf







Electronic Crime Scene Investigation Handbook
Electronic Crime Scene Investigation: A Guide for First Responders, Second Edition, National Institute of Justice, U.S. Department of Justice, April 2008.







Hired gun blamed for business outage Robert Lemos, 2008-05-30 Video-content firm Revision3 accuses anti-piracy company MediaDefender -- known for its aggressive tactics against file sharers -- of attacking its servers over the weekend.






Barracuda hungry for OSS security developer Sourcefire
Security appliance maker Barracuda Networks has proposed a deal to acquire Sourcefire, the company behind the popular open source Snort and ClamAV security software. Barracuda is currently defending ClamAV from patent litigation and has a long history of contributing to open source security software projects.
May 30, 2008 - 09:09AM CT - by Ryan Paul








China hackers behind U.S. blackouts?
Larry Dignan: Chinese cyber-militia may have been behind power blackouts in Florida and the Northeast, according to a report in the National Journal.






Richard Koman: Did Chinese copy unattended U.S. laptop?






Reputation Is A Scarce Good... As Metallica Is Learning







Microsoft: It's Not The Broadcast Flag, It's A Different Flag
from the well,-that-makes...-um...-no-difference-at-all dept
After certain NBC TV shows wouldn't record on Microsoft's Vista Media Center a few weeks ago, Microsoft admitted that Media Center includes broadcast flag technology, while NBC Universal admitted that it accidentally set the flag. However, now Microsoft is trying to clarify, claiming that it's not actually the broadcast flag that it included, but an entirely different flag, called CGMS-A. NBC Universal concurs, saying that the mistake it made was in setting the CGMS-A flag. Of course... the real question is why does this matter at all? If the impact is identical (Microsoft willing to let TV networks declare a show un-recordable), then what does it matter which annoying copy protection scheme is used?
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What CSOs Can Learn From Estonia
Security researcher Gadi Evron reviews lessons of the Estonian cyber attacks he helped to investigate last year.
» full story

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