Wednesday 07/15/09

Sino-Turkish cyber conflict in the making?
Published by Heike under Nationalism, Other attacks
On 11 July 2009, Turkish hackers defaced China’s National Satellite Meteorological Center website. Even though the motivations behind the attack were unclear, Chinese netizens viewed it as the opening salvo in an online war over Xinjiang.

On 13 July 2009, a Chinese hacker calling himself the Mafia Baron defaced the Turkish Embassy in China and posted a message on their website demanding they stay out of China’s internal affairs: ...

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Microsoft delivers 9 patches, but leaves one hole open
Microsoft today delivered six security updates that patched nine vulnerabilities. The patches fix...

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Background articles:
Considering remote access for IT professionals
by Jesper M. Christensen
Articles / Firewalls & VPNs
Taking a look on some different types of remote access solutions that you can use for internal and external support.

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DirectAccess: Microsoft's Newest VPN Solution - Part 1: Overview of Current Remote Access Solutions
by Thomas Shinder
Articles / Authentication, Access Control & Encryption
Taking a look at DirectAccess, Microsoft’s latest VPN solution and assessing the current Remote Access Solutions.

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AT&T boasts new backbone recovery capability
AT&T says it has successfully demonstrated the ability to recover from a major backbone outage by...

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Researchers to Spotlight Darknets at Black Hat
In one of the first talks at this year's Black Hat USA, Billy Hoffman and Matt Wood, both security...

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Oracle issues security patches across seven product lines
Chuck Miller July 15, 2009
Oracle issued "Critical Patch Updates" Tuesday for 30 security vulnerabilities in seven of its product lines, part of its regular quarterly patch cycle.

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Investigation of government DDoS attacks deepens
Angela Moscaritolo July 14, 2009
A Vietnamese security vendor says it has traced the recent DDoS attack on U.S. and South Korean websites to a server in the U.K., but another cybersecurity expert says the ultimate source of the attacks is still unknown.

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D.A. Showed Around Photos of Girl's Sexual Assault, Family Says
By BRIDGET FREELAND
(CN) - A county attorney in Kansas violated a girl's privacy by showing around photos of her sexual assault, the teen and her mother claim in Topeka Federal Court. The Anderson County Attorney refused to prosecute the assailant, but showed other parents photos of the sexual assault, and was suspended from practicing law for 6 months for it, the family says.

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Texting Teen Partially Liable for Manhole Fall?
By MATTHEW HELLER
Sewer workers in Staten Island, N.Y., may not be solely responsible for the injuries of a multitasking teenager who fell into an uncovered manhole while apparently walking and text-messaging at the same time. more

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Your Rights Online: India To Issue Over a Billion Biometric ID Cards
"The Unique Identification Authority is a new state department in India charged with assigning every living Indian an exclusive number and biometric ID card. The program is designed to alleviate problems with the 20 current types of proof of identity currently available. These problems range from difficulties for the very poor in obtaining state handouts, corruption, illegal immigration, and terrorism issues. Issuing the cards may be difficult, however, as less than 7% of the population is registered for income tax, and voter lists are thought to be inaccurate, partly due to corruption. The government has said the first cards will be issued in 18 months."

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China Bans Shock Treatment For Internet Addiction
"China has banned the use of shock therapy to treat Internet addiction after its use at one hospital sparked nationwide controversy. The hospital drew wide media coverage in recent months after Internet users claiming to have received the treatment wrote in blogs and forums about being tied down and subjected to shocks for 30 minutes at a time."

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Possible DNS Hack at Ireland's Largest ISP [UPDATED]
Customers of Eircom, the largest Internet service provider in Ireland, experienced serious DNS slowdowns and weirdness over the weekend. Users from different parts of the country reported that trying to open legit URLs in browsers redirected them to advertising pages.Some of them suggested on forums that there were two separate incidents related to Eircom's DNSs. The first reports appeared around July 1st, when multiple customers complained about significant DNS slowdowns and timeouts. "I'm having terri...

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RFID passports: A tragedy waiting
Robin Harris: In a recent article Todd Lewan accompanied ethical hacker Chris Paget as he found chipped tourists around San Francisco's Fishermans Wharf - from a van. Your Canadian flag patch won't save you now.

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1 billion of Apple's app downloads may be bogus

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Ancient global warming shows the limits of our knowledge
... In the end, the numbers they came up with indicated that the amount of carbon in circulation went up to about 1.7 times the level just prior to the PETM. Using the best estimates of the atmospheric carbon levels at that time, they calculate that 3,000 Petagrams of carbon were involved. That took atmospheric CO2 levels from 1,000 parts-per-million up to 1,700 ppm (it was much warmer during the Paleocene than it is now, so atmospheric CO2 was likely to be higher). In contrast, human activity has taken current levels from 280ppm to 390ppm.

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RIAA: Tenenbaum "fair use" defense is laughable
July 14, 5:31 p.m. UTC - by Nate Anderson Posted in: Law & Disorder
The first P2P trial in the US ended with a $1.92 million verdict. The second begins in two weeks, but the recording industry has just moved for summary judgment on the issue of "fair use," hoping to undermine one of the key defense strategies.
Read more

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New Hardened Thumb Drive Self-Destructs When Breached
Jul 14,2009
IronKey's new S200 includes strong encryption, anti-malware controls, and security policy management

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Make sure you update that Java
One of our readers, Tom Ueltschi, sent an e-mail with details about an exploit that is exploiting a Java vulnerability. While such exploits are not rare, this particular exploit targeted a vulnerability that was published in December 2008 by iDefense, and a reliable exploit became publicly available couple of months ago, in April this year.

However, it took some time for the bad guys to start using this exploit in their attack kits. The vulnerability exists in Java JRE release 6, in update versions lower than 13 and release 5, update versions lower than 18.
...

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