Monday 05/04/09

http://www.bankinfosecurity.com/articles.php?art_id=1412
First Bank of Beverly Hills had assets of $1.5 billion and deposits of $1 billion and an estimated $179,000 of uninsured deposits. First Bank of Beverly Hills is the fourth California bank to fail this year.

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'Managing' passwords doesn't make them less unsafe
In his newsletter last week my colleague M.E. Kabay points us to a draft release of a new paper from the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) called the "Guide to...

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The new ground zero in Internet warfare
The power grid is an obvious target for terrorists, but experts disagree about how to secure it.

Related:
Internet warfare: Is the focus on the wrong things?
The fog of (cyber) war
Could a cyber blockade happen to the U.S.?
U.S. needs transparent policies for carrying out cyberattacks
How serious is threat to power grid? Depends who you ask

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Bypassing Big Brother Isn't Easy
May 01 2009 by Karl Bode
As a growing number of countries consider filters to clean the Internet of its naughty bits, the New York Times reports that even in filter-happy Iran and China, users are finding a way around government Internet filters. That's thanks in large part to groups like the Global Internet Freedom Consortium, which has ties to the Falun Gong and has been at the lead of developing tools to help Chinese avoid censorship. The Times offers an interesting read on how their path hasn't been an easy one for the project's developers. Reporters Without Borders notes that 20 countries now use some type of content filter systems.

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EFF Agrees That Copyright In Second Life Is A Mess
Way back in 2003, when Second Life first announced that its users owned the copyright on anything they produced in the world, we pointed out what a bad idea it was. In the early days it was cheered on, because people thought it was better than what they considered the alternative to be (i.e., Second Life creators Linden Lab owns the copyright on everything). But as I noted at the time, the problem was that putting real world copyright into a virtual world, where the fundamentals of physics are entirely different, is bound to cause problems. You have property rights in the real world to deal with the efficient allocation of scarce goods. Putting them into a world where there is no scarcity at all on those goods is backwards, and only leads to massive problems.

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A secure USB disk from Lenovo
Having examined some low cost USB crypto hard disks and found them disappointing we take a look at a more up-market product from Lenovo more…

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Shaky security of Swiss biometric passports
Biometric passport readers have failed a test by the Swiss supervisory authority for communications, and now require more work. In mid-May, the Swiss will be voting on the introduction of the "E-Pass" or biometric passport more…

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Googling Justice Scalia
Nice hack:
Last year, when law professor Joel Reidenberg wanted to show his Fordham University class how readily private information is available on the Internet, he assigned a group project. It was collecting personal information from the Web about himself.

This year, after U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia made public comments that seemingly may have questioned the need for more protection of private information, Reidenberg assigned the same project. Except this time Scalia was the subject, the prof explains to the ABA Journal in a telephone interview.

His class turned in a 15-page dossier that included not only Scalia's home address, home phone number and home value, but his food and movie preferences, his wife's personal e-mail address and photos of his grandchildren, reports Above the Law.

And, as Scalia himself made clear in a statement to Above the Law, he isn't happy about the invasion of his privacy:

"Professor Reidenberg's exercise is an example of perfectly legal, abominably poor judgment. Since he was not teaching a course in judgment, I presume he felt no responsibility to display any," the justice says, among other comments.

Somehow, I don't think "poor judgment" is going to be much of a defense against those with agendas more malicious than Professor Reidenberg.
Posted on May 1, 2009 at 12:52 PM

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Demand for Increased Transparency for DOJ's use of Network Surveillance

The Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) is seeking an investigation of the Department of Justice's failure to make public statistics detailing federal use of "pen registers" and "trap and trace" devices, which record "non-content" information about telephone calls, email and web traffic. In a letter to the Chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, EPIC observed that the Attorney General is required to provide to Congress detailed statistics concerning the use of these techniques. Yet, "the DOJ does not publicly disclose pen register reports as a matter of course." EPIC also raised questions regarding the agency's compliance with reporting requirements for the period 2004-2008. The lack of public accountability for these network monitoring techniques contrasts with the U.S. Courts' routine public reporting of federal wiretaps, EPIC said. The Courts released the most recent wiretap report on April 27, 2009.

DoJ Faulted for Failing to Follow Surveillance Reporting Requirements, Kim Zetter, Wired News, April 30, 2009

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More Swine/Mexican/H1N1 related domains
Just a reminder to be ever vigilant in your browsing for Swine/Mexican/H1N1 flu information. We show over 1000 new domains containing those keywords registered in the last 24 hours.

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Two brothers among indictees in $4M spam case

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Simple Steps to Hack a Smartphone
CSO recently sat down with Trust Digital, a firm that specializes in mobile security, for a demonstration on how to hack a smartphone with no more ...
clipped from Google - 5/2009

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