Criminals pay top money for hackable Nokia phone Criminals are willing to pay thousands of euros for a discontinued Nokia mobile phone with a software problem that can be exploited to hack into online bank accounts, according to a fraud investigator in the Netherlands. Read more...
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New Symantec CEO Says Security Sells in Hard Times
Enrique Salem, who took the reins of Symantec Corp. as president and CEO this month, sat down with Computerworld's Scot Finnie and Lucas Mearian at the Storage Networking World conference here to talk about how his company is dealing with the recession and his vision of the future of Symantec and the technology business.
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FBI used spyware to catch cable-cutting extortionist
The FBI used spyware to catch a Massachusetts man who tried to extort money from Verizon Communications Inc. and Comcast Corp. by cutting 18 cables carrying voice and data in 2005, documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act by Wired.com revealed yesterday.
Although the man's name was redacted in the documents provided to the Web site, their description of the case matches that of Danny M. Kelly, an unemployed engineer who at the time lived in Chelmsford, Mass. According to federal court records, Kelly was accused of cutting a total of 18 above-ground communications cables between November 2004 and February 2005 as part of a plot to extort money from Verizon and Comcast.
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New Twitter worm targets celebrities
A worm referencing celebrities such as Ashton Kutcher and Oprah Winfrey is rapidly spreading across Twitter Inc.'s microblogging site, security firm Sophos PLC said on Friday.
The worm hacks into Twitter profiles and automatically sends unauthorized Twitter status updates to contacts from the hacked accounts. Users who look at infected profiles are then automatically infected, and unauthorized posts are automatically sent to their contacts.
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Va. man pleads guilty to selling $1M worth of counterfeit software
A Virginia man has pleaded guilty to charges related to selling counterfeit software with a retail value of about $1 million on eBay, the U.S. Department of Justice said.
Gregory William Fair, 46, of Falls Church, Va., pleaded guilty on Thursday to one count of criminal copyright infringement and one count of mail fraud in U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia.
Between 2001 and February 2008, Fair sold a "large volume" of counterfeit Adobe Systems software on eBay using multiple user IDs, the DOJ said in a news release. Fair has agreed to forfeit the proceeds of the software sales, including $144,000 seized from a safety deposit box and residence; one BMW 525i; one Hummer H2; one Mercedes CL600; and one 1969 Pontiac GTO, the agency said.
Fair is scheduled to be sentenced on July 8. He faces up to five years in prison on the criminal copyright infringement count and up to 20 years in prison on the mail fraud count. He also faces a maximum fine of $250,000 on each charge.
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Microsoft's RSA Message: Internet Needs Trust to Grow
Software vendor will update its End-to-End Trust vision at RSA this week.
Read more
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Study: Mistakes, Not Malicious Insiders, to Blame for Most Breaches
285 million records breached, most attacks came from external sources, according to Verizon study.
Read more
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Wanted: Computer hackers ... to help government AP - Sun Apr 19, 12:53 AM ET
WASHINGTON - Wanted: Computer hackers.
General Dynamics Information Technology put out an ad last month on behalf of the Homeland Security Department seeking someone who could "think like the bad guy." Applicants, it said, must understand hackers' tools and tactics and be able to analyze Internet traffic and identify vulnerabilities in the federal systems.
In the Pentagon's budget request submitted last week, Defense Secretary Robert Gates said the Pentagon will increase the number of cyberexperts it can train each year from 80 to 250 by 2011.
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10 Technologies That Survive Budget Cuts
Here are the recession-resistant needs of a well-equipped enterprise (run by a smart CIO).
Even in the midst of a recession, IT leaders realize they can't neglect certain technologies, according to Robert Half Technology, which recently polled 1,400 CIOs to learn in which areas they plan to invest 2009 budget dollars. Seventy-percent said their companies will invest in IT initiatives in the next 12 months, with 43% indicating that information security projects would be a top priority. Twenty-eight percent plan investments in virtualization and 27% will be looking to make their data centers more efficient with technology buys.
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Study: Green IT less important during recession
The prolonged global recession appears to be taking some of the steam out of IT spending on ecologically sensitive initiatives. According to a new study by Gartner, most firms still consider green important, but many -- including a third of the U.S.-based respondents to the study -- said cost-cutting has become the top priority since the economic slowdown began. PCWorld/Computerworld UK (4/19)
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Adobe's Flash comes to TVs, set-top boxes
Adobe creates a new version of its Flash multimedia player that can be embedded in TVs and set-top boxes. Sun, Apr 19 22:23:00 PDT 2009 Read full story
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Demigod publisher Stardock ran into a very unexpected problem when the game launched: around 100,000 more online players than expected. The number of legit connections? 18,000.
http://arstechnica.com/gaming/news/2009/04/demigod-hit-by-massive-piracy-review-scores-take-beating.ars
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HP, Microsoft, VMware to expand desktop virtualization
Dana Gardner: As the sour economy pushes more companies into the arms of virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) for cost cutting, the vendor community is eagerly wiping out obstacles to adoption by broadening the appeal of desktops as a service.
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Congress Ponders Cybersecurity Power Grab
There was a lot of attention paid last week to a new "cybersecurity" bill that would drastically expand the government's power over the Internet. The two provisions that have probably attracted the most attention are the parts that would allow the president to "declare a cybersecurity emergency" and then seize control of "any compromised Federal government or United States critical infrastructure information system or network." Perhaps even more troubling, the EFF notes a section that states that the government "shall have access to all relevant data concerning (critical infrastructure) networks without regard to any provision of law, regulation, rule, or policy restricting such access." Read literally, this language would seem to give the government the power to override the privacy protections in such laws as the Electronic Communications Privacy Act and the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. Thankfully, Congress can't override the Fourth Amendment by statute, but this language poses a real threat to Fourth Amendment rights.
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Regarding using TigerDirect as a vendor:
Dell Uses the Whip on Tiger Direct
MANHATTAN (CN) - Tiger Direct falsely claims that its goods are covered by a Dell warrant, and falsely claims to sell new Dell equipment obtained directly from the computer maker, "when in fact they are old, out of date, obtained from resellers and not from Dell, used and/or refurbished," Dell claims in Federal Court.
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DEPT. OF IRONY.
I offer for your amusement, the following words and one phrase: "impuissant," "perscrutation," "sockdolager," and "free-floating bubble of discretion." Pretty cool, huh? The nifty language comes from a U. S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit ruling by Judge Bruce Selyer called In Re Sony BMG Music Entertainment in which the court said that a civil trial over allegedly illegal file-sharing of music on the Internet could not be webcast live on the Internet. The music company doesn't want to share its trial for free either. The logical next step: trial pirates illegally sharing court hearing downloads. The Internet is so much fun.
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Obama appoints federal CTO, industry applauds choice
Angela Moscaritolo April 20, 2009
President Obama appointed the first-ever federal chief technology officer during the weekend.
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Like Postini?
Microsoft Forefront now in the clouds
Angela Moscaritolo April 16, 2009
Microsoft has extended its Forefront brand and is now putting messaging security into the cloud.
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DoJ Nixed Investigation of Congresswoman to Get Support for NSA Wiretapping
Those who have long felt there was a suspicious backstory behind Congress's support of the Bush Administration's warrantless wiretapping may feel their suspicions are closer to being confirmed this week.
Congressional Quarterly's Jeff Stein has an explosive story about how the Justice Department thwarted a criminal investigation of Representative Jane Harman (D - California) in order to guarantee her support for the NSA's warrantless wiretapping program.
According to CQ, in 2004, Harman had helped lobby the New York Times to kill its NSA warrantless wiretapping story, which the newspaper had originally intended to publish on the eve of the 2004 elections.
The story was published a year later in December 2005...
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FoxNews.com Serving Up Infected Ads?
Banner ads hoisting bogus AV scamware on users...
10:07AM Monday Apr 20 2009 by Karl Bode
Users in our security forum have discovered that advertisements delivered via the FoxNews.com website have been using popup malware to force-deliver artificial anti-virus malware onto the PCs of unsuspecting visitors (of which Fox has countless millions). One of our more skilled scambusters and "malvertising" gurus has further dissected (with photos) the exact scumware delivery mechanism at work here -- and notes that users don't even need to click on an ad banner at the website in order to get infected. The vsm_free_setup.exe forced download the ads are instituting originates from Russia or the Ukraine, and appears to involve a keylogger.
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StealthMBR gets a makeover
Sunday April 19, 2009 at 6:22 pm CST
New variants of the StealthMBR trojan aka Mebroot rootkit have recently been spotted in-the-wild. These new variants are significantly different from earlier ones.
StealthMBR has arguably been dubbed as the stealthiest rootkit ever seen. The new variants are using even ‘deeper’ techniques to evade detection. Broadly speaking, they are hijacking kernel objects (device object) to filter out access to the master boot record and prevent detection and repair. As opposed to earlier variants, which installed lower level hooks on the IRP table of \driver\disk, these new variants are able to hook the IRP table of an even lower driver. And these hooks too are not present all the time but only installed on an on-demand basis. The hijacked disk device object is used to facilitate this. Detection is not the only problem; this threat also poses cleaning challenges by installing watching mechanisms to re-infect the machine.
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Lastly, today is Adolf Hitler's Birthday, which makes it a target day for nutjobs and kooks. Keep a watch out.
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