Friday 12/19/08

RIAA shifts gears on music piracy, says it won't file more suits
The Recording Industry Association of America said it will stop filing lawsuits against suspected music pirates and start working with ISPs to identify and try to stop alleged copyright infringers. Read more...






Undersea cable cuts disrupt Internet access
December 19, 2008 (IDG News Service) Internet and telephone traffic between Europe, the Middle East and Asia was hampered today after three major underwater data lines were cut, according to France Telecom.

The cuts occurred between 07:28 and 08:06 Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) (2:28 a.m. and 03:06 a.m. Eastern) on lines in the Mediterranean Sea that connect Sicily to Tunisia and Egypt, the telecommunications company said.

The cuts were to the Sea Me We 4 and Sea Me We 3 lines, which connect countries between Singapore and France as well as the Flag Telecom cable route, which stretches from the U.K. to Japan, according to a France Telecom spokeswoman who asked not to be named.

France Telecom isn't sure what caused the cut, she said. "We have two assumptions. The first is that it could be an underwater earthquake," she said. "Or it could be simply a ship in the area which has cut the cable."






State Department worker gets probation for passport snooping






Mozilla plugs 13 holes in Firefox, retires older 2.0 browser







Thousands of legitimate sites SQL injected to serve IE exploit
Dancho Danchev: During the past few days, Chinese hackers have launched massive SQL injection attacks affecting over 100,000 web sites.






iPhone 3G successfully unlocked by hackers Macworld.com - Tue Dec 16, 11:13 AM ET
Five months after the release of the iPhone 3G last July, a team of hackers has finally figured out a way to alter the device’s software so that it can be unlocked for use on networks other than AT&T’s. That team is, of course, the infamous iPhone Dev-Team, most recently seen hacking the iPhone to run Linux.






As Phishing Evolves, Criminals Switch to Malware PC World - Thu Dec 18, 12:50 PM ET
The scammers began to see serious problems with their phishing scams sometime around April.






About 90 percent of all email is spam: Cisco






Researchers Hone In On 'Dropzones' For Stolen CredentialsDec 18,2008
One-third of "impersonation attack" victims from the U.S. and Russia, research finds







Greetings from Amazon.com.

We have recently learned that Samsung has issued an alert affecting its SPF-85H 8-Inch Digital Photo Frame. Our records indicate that you have purchased one of the digital photo frames through the Amazon.com website and are therefore affected by this alert.

The alert involves the SPF-85H 8-Inch Digital Photo Frames w/1GB Internal Memory, designed to work with Windows-based PCs via a USB connector. They were sold between October and December 2008 for about $150.The alert concerns discovery of the W32.Sality.

AE worm on the installation disc SAMSUNG FRAME MANAGER XP VERSION 1.08, which is needed for using the SPF-85H as a USB monitor. If you are using Vista or a different version of Frame Manager, this issue does not affect you.
...






Yahoo Adopts New Search Engine Retention Policy
Yahoo announced that, after 90 days, it will obscure some elements in the records that it keeps about all Internet users who use the company's services. The search company will continue to keep modified record locators, time/date stamps, web pages viewed, and a persistent user identifier, known as a "cookie" for an indefinite period. Yahoo is also retaining much of the IP address, which typically identifies a user's device, such as a laptop or a mobile phone. Privacy rules classify IP addresses as "personal data." Experts have criticized the partial deletion of IP address data as insufficient to protect search engine consumers, and called for complete deletion.
Yahool Limits Retention of Personal Data, New York Times, December 18, 2008







Hundreds of Stolen Data Dumps Found
http://blogs.washingtonpost.com/securityfix/
A comprehensive new study that peers into huge troves of financial data stolen by cyber thieves confirms what experts have surmised from looking at much smaller, isolated caches of digital loot: That criminals can make hundreds, even thousands, of dollars a day selling data stolen with the help of widely available software toolkits.

Recent reports by security firms Finjan, RSA, SecureWorks and Symantec have shown that stolen identities, bank accounts and credit card numbers are sold in bulk every day in shadowy online forums, often for pennies on the dollar. In its analysis, Symantec found in 2007 that the going rate for the keys to assuming someone else's identity was between $14 and $18 per victim.
Those reports either presented conclusions based on examining a single cache of stolen data, or by observations based on watching transactions between cyber thieves. But a report released today by researchers at the University of Mannheim, Germany, offers a disturbing glimpse at the sheer abundance of this stolen data.






Security Cartoon: Overly Specific Countermeasures
At President Bush's press conferences.






A Canadian business man is on the hook for a $52,000 phone bill after someone hacked into his voice mail system and found a way to dial out. The hacker racked up the charges with calls to Bulgaria. The business owner noticed an odd message coming up on his call display (Feature 36), and alerted his provider, Manitoba Telecom Services. They referred him to their fraud department, who discovered the breach. MTS said that they would reverse the charges if the hacked equipment was theirs, but in this case it was customer owned. The ironic part is that the victim's company, HUB Computer Solutions is in the business of computer and network security. They even offer to sell, configure and secure Cisco VoIP systems. Looks as though they even couldn't manage to secure their own system, which doesn't bode well for their customers.







Social Networking MalwareDecember 17, 2008
The bad guys are currently using social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace to distribute malware.






How Many More Ways Can Axl Rose Piss Off Fans?
from the keep-trying dept
Axl Rose of Guns N' Roses has a funny way of trying to sell his album: his strategy seems to basically revolve around pissing off fans who want to interact with the music. There's been plenty of coverage over the arrest and subsequent guilty plea of a blogger who was actually doing a fantastic job of promoting the new album by leaking it online. Since then, Rose has apparently been unwilling to do much to actually promote the album, other than putting angry rants on various websites. The latest is that he's apparently threatening legal action against Activision for including some GNR songs in Guitar Hero. Apparently no one pointed out to Rose that having songs in Guitar Hero tends to help sell more albums. And, that would be useful for Rose right now, as reports are that his long-awaited album has been a tremendous flop. So, once again, it's worth pointing out that the last thing any musician wants to do these days is appear to be anti-fan.






Public and private sectors join in cyberattack simulation
Angela Moscaritolo December 19, 2008
A simulation this week demonstrated the need for better collaboration among public and private security groups.
...
The event, called Cyber Strategic Inquiry (CSI'08), was a war game simulating simultaneous cyberattacks targeting the financial sector and critical infrastructures, and was hosted by Booz Allen Hamilton and the nonprofit Business Executives for National Security (BENS).

Some 230 participants, including government defense and security agency members, private companies and civic groups brainstormed ways to mitigate the attacks.






No more landlines, only cell phones:
17.5% of Households Wireless Only






China Aggressively Pursuing Cyber Warfare Says 2008 U.S.-China Economic & Security Review Commission






FBI warns of holiday cyber scams