(U) Animal Rights Extremists Target UCLA Researcher in Arson Attack
LA Times
29 NOV 2008Animal rights activists destroyed one vehicle and badly damaged two others in a Palms-area arson attack last week, authorities said. The incident occurred Nov. 20 and appears to be part of a botched attempt to target a UCLA animal researcher, authorities said. Activists with the group Students and Workers for the Liberation of UCLA Primates claimed responsibility for the attack, stating on an animal rights website that the destroyed car belonged to Goran Lacan, a UCLA "vivisector." But on Friday, Los Angeles Police Department investigators said none of the cars belonged to Lacan. The attackers, they said, targeted the wrong home and doused the wrong car with fuel before setting it on fire. Anti-animal research extremists have increasingly targeted UCLA faculty and researchers with harassment. Past actions include firebombing a UCLA commuter van, flooding a UCLA scientist's home and placing a firebomb in the home of a UCLA researcher's neighbor. The Nov. 20 incident is being investigated by the FBI, the LAPD and the UCLA police. At UCLA, Chancellor Gene Block released a statement condemning the acts. "They are willing not only to risk the lives of those who spend their careers working to help others, but also the lives of the unsuspecting general public, including children," Block said.
Botnet master sees himself as next Bill Gates
... Now working for a small New Zealand software company, Walker has become a minor celebrity in his home country. He was profiled this week on New Zealand's TV3 60 Minutes program, which described him as "the teenage boy with a brain that's one in a billion."
Walker, who was known online as Akill, and in his hometown of Whitianga as Snow, comes across as a typical geek in the report. An early reader who loved books, he was diagnosed with Asperger syndrome as a child. He was teased so mercilessly at school that his mother eventually decided to home-school him. By 15, he was drawn to computer programming and was often spending eight to 10 hours on the computer after school.
Chinese city requires Net cafes to use legitimate software
Chinese news reports estimated that up to 600 Internet cafes in Nanchang, a city of around 4 million people, are affected by the order, which aims to stamp out the use of pirated software in local Internet cafes.
U.S. report sees major terror attack by 2013, ignores cyberattack risk
In stark and certain terms, a Congress-mandated commission today warned that the world's nations face the threat of a major terrorism attack using biological and nuclear weapons by 2013. The commission's report, titled "The World at Risk," skips over the threat of cyberattacks and focuses almost exclusively on nuclear and biological weapons.
Feds nab more members of alleged identity theft gang
Federal authorities say they have taken another step toward busting a multinational identity theft ring that is alleged to have used stolen personal data to withdraw millions of dollars from home equity line-of-credit accounts at dozens of financial institutions in the U.S., including some of the country's largest banks.
Four individuals were arrested last week in connection with the alleged scheme, which has resulted in more than $2.5 million being stolen from the affected financial institutions, according to law enforcement officials. Another $4 million worth of attempted withdrawals by the gang were unsuccessful, the U.S. attorney's office in New Jersey said in announcing the arrests last Wednesday (download PDF).
Will Mac Become a Virus Trap?PC World - 1 hour, 18 minutes ago
Apple has backed off its suggestion that Macs require antivirus software. Yesterday, the computer maker suffered a public relations nightmare after an article was discovered on the company's site encouraging Mac users to install antivirus software. Less than 24 hours later, Apple has quietly removed this recommendation from its KnowledgeBase.
http://lists.vmware.com/pipermail/security-announce/2008/000046.html
VMware Security Advisory
Advisory ID: VMSA-2008-0019
Synopsis: VMware Hosted products and patches for ESX and ESXi
resolve a critical security issue and update bzip2
Issue date: 2008-12-02
Updated on: 2008-12-02 (initial release of advisory)
CVE numbers: CVE-2008-4917 CVE-2008-1372
5 Must-Do Cyber Security Steps for Obama
As President-Elect Obama focuses on two wars and a hemorrhaging economy, security experts are urging him to address five weak security links in America's cyber infrastructure that threaten the nation's defenses and financial institutions.
Read more
Who Falls for those Nigerian 419 Scams Anyway?
This is the story of a woman who sent the scammers $400K:
She wiped out her husband's retirement account, mortgaged the house and took a lien out on the family car. Both were already paid for.
For more than two years, Spears sent tens and hundreds of thousands of dollars. Everyone she knew, including law enforcement officials, her family and bank officials, told her to stop, that it was all a scam. She persisted.
Spears said she kept sending money because the scammers kept telling her that the next payment would be the last one, that the big money was inbound. Spears said she became obsessed with getting paid.
An undercover investigator who worked on the case said greed helped blind Spears to the reality of the situation, which he called the worst example of the scam he's ever seen.
Outraged aussies will hold simultaneous protests across Australia in opposition to the government's plans for mandatory ISP internet content filtering. The plan will introduce nation-wide filtered internet using blacklists operated by a government agency, away from public scrunity. Politicians and ISPs will join protesters in the streets to voice their opposition to the government's plan, which has ploughed-ahead, despite intense criticism that the technology will crippled internet speeds and infringe on free speech.Opponents said the most accurate filter chosen by the government will incorrectly block up to 10,000 Web pages out of 1 million.
Ant recommends a Wired piece on the background story of the Kaminsky DNS bug and its (temporary) resolution, decreasing the odds of a successful breach from 1 in 2^16 to 1 in 2^32. We've discussed this uber-hole a number of times. Wired follows the story arc from before Kaminsky's discovery of the bug to his public presentation of it in Las Vegas.
Online market share of the dominant Windows operating system has taken its biggest monthly fall in years to drop below 90%, according to Net Applications Inc. Computerworld reports that Microsoft's flagship product has been steadily losing ground to Mac OS X and Linux, and is at its lowest ebb in the market since 1995. 'Mac OS X... [ended] the month at 8.9%. November was the third month running that Apple's operating system remained above 8%.' The stats show that while some customers are 'upgrading' from XP to Vista, many are jumping ship to Apple, while Linux is also steadily gaining ground. A Net Applications executive suggests the slide may be caused by many of the same factors that caused the fall in Internet Explorer use. 'The more home users who are online, using Macs and Firefox and Safari, the more those shares go up,' he said. November has more weekend days, as well Thanksgiving in the US, a result that emphasizes the importance of corporate sales to Microsoft.
Remote searches of suspect computers will form part of an EU plan to tackle hi-tech crime. The five-year action plan will take steps to combat the growth in cyber theft and the machines used to spread spam and other malicious programs. It will also encourage better sharing of data among European police forces to track down and prosecute criminals. Europol will co-ordinate the investigative work and also issue alerts about cyber crime sprees.
Vista SP2: What's inside?
Mary Jo Foley: Microsoft is adding to Windows Vista SP2 features such as built-in Hyper-V hypervisor, a Windows Vista Feature Pack for Wireless, and improved power settings for Windows Server 2008.
Ed Bott: Vista SP2, Microsoft's back on track
New virtualized sandbox, Vista SP2 and other PDC-week leftovers
Device Designed To Annoy Young People Can Now Annoy Everyone
from the bzzzz dept
We've written about the Mosquito device a few times in the past. Originally launched back in 2005, the device emitted a high pitched annoying noise that could only be heard by those under 25 (or thereabouts). As people get older, we lose the ability to hear noises at higher pitches. So the device tried to take advantage of this, so that shopkeepers could use the device to ward off loitering kids. It was pretty obnoxious, though it hardly seemed like a violation of human rights, as some claimed. If annoying a certain age group with sound is a human rights violation, I'd imagine playing certain types of music would be seen as a human rights violation.
Of course, some kids realized that rather than being a violation of their rights, such a noise could be used to their advantage. Some turned the noise from the Mosquito into a ringtone that their parents and teachers couldn't hear.
However, the makers of the device have apparently released a new version of the Mosquito that has an option where the pitch is lowered a bit so that it can annoy pretty much everyone. You've got to imagine that such a product is not targeted at shop owners and the like this time around, unless they'd prefer no business whatsoever. It seems that right now the new version is being used in places like parking garages, where actual customers are quick to leave anyway, and proprietors are trying to get homeless people to move along. Of course, as with any such thing, there's apparently a group of folks who are pushing for legislation to ban the devices. It's difficult to see why such legislation is needed. Eventually, people will realize that driving people away from a business probably isn't a very good business idea.
UK Says You Can't Have Some Kinds Of Porn, But It Determines What Kinds
Christmas worm uses McDonalds and Coca Cola as bait
Writing an Effective Security Policy (Part 1)
by Ricky M. Magalhaes
Articles / Misc Network Security
How to write an effective security policy.
China Aggressively Pursuing Cyber Warfare Says 2008 U.S.-China Economic & Security Review Commission By Grey McKenzie 11/24/2008
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