Wednesday 08/19/09

Government informant is called kingpin of largest U.S. data breaches
A government informant who helped put away nearly 30 fellow hackers five years ago is considered by U.S. law enforcement officials to be the kingpin of the biggest data breaches in U.S. history.

Albert Gonzalez, 28, of Miami was indicted yesterday for the third time in connection with the data breaches. Two Russian citizens were indicted along with Gonzalez by a grand jury in New Jersey yesterday on charges of running an international scheme to steal more than 130 million credit and debit card numbers as well as personally identifying information from five companies, including Heartland Payment Systems Inc., 7-Eleven Inc. and Hannaford Bros. Co.

----------

Miami man indicted for massive credit hack
A 28-year-old Miami man was indicted Monday for the largest credit and debit card theft ever prosecuted in the U.S., with data from more than 130 million credit and debit cards stolen, the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) said.

Albert Gonzales, also know as segvec, soupnazi and j4guar17, was charged, along with two unnamed co-conspirators, with using SQL injection attacks to steal credit and debit card information. Among the corporate victims named in the two-count indictment are Heartland Payment Systems, a New Jersey card payment processor; 7-Eleven, the Texas-based convenience store chain; and Hannaford Brothers, a Maine-based supermarket chain.

----------

Nominum to offer DNS 'blacklist' capability
Nominum's Trusted Response and Universal Enforcement (TRUE) architecture is already in use by several ISPs supporting a combined 100 million broadband households. Nominum wouldn't identify these ISPs, but its Web site says its carrier customers include Verizon, Sprint, NTT Communications and other major industry players.

----------

Security start-up Rohati extending access-control gear to the cloud
Rohati plans to extend its on-premises capabilities to an off-premise environment to support application access control and user entitlements in cloud-based computing, says Prashant Gandhi, CEO and president of Rohati.

"It could be applied to either a public or a private cloud," said Gandhi about Rohati's strategy. "Our vision moving forward is to use our technology for trusted cloud-bursting."

----------

Bomb Threat Procedures
These are the detailed bomb threat procedures for a U.S.-based non-profit organization that promotes environmental activism and causes. A bomb threat procedure was drafted in 2000 after the organization received a threat

----------

Workplace Violence Prevention Policy Template

----------

MS09-039 exploit in the wild?
TCP port 42 is used for WINS replication. It's also interesting that the number of sources isn't that high as well.

----------

Sysinternals Procdump Updated
Sysinternals has released v1.4 that fixes a bug that was introduced in v1.3. This update fixes the compatibility problem with Windows XP and Windows Server 2003.
technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/dd996900.aspx

----------

Forensics: Mounting partitions from full-disk 'dd' images

----------

Cisco Security Advisory: Cisco IOS XR Software Border Gateway Protocol Vulnerability

----------

Woman arrested for juicy craigslist ad targeting teen girl
August 19, 1:18 p.m. UTC - by Chris Foresman Posted in: Law & Disorder
Missouri was the first state to enact anti-cyberbullying legislation after MySpace harassment led a 13-year-old to commit suicide. Now a woman faces felony cyberbullying charges after posting a fake Craigslist ad with photos and contact information for a 17-year-old girl.
Read more

----------

Court offers guidelines on when to unmask anonymous posters
August 18, 10:35 p.m. UTC - by John Timmer Posted in: Law & Disorder
A company that was accused of software piracy has turned around and sued the anonymous tipster that first leveled the accusation, accusing the John Doe of defamation. An appeals court has ruled the case may go forward, with firm guidelines on determining whether or not to unmask the tipster.
Read more

----------

CSI Fraud: researchers craft fake DNA evidence
August 18, 7:24 p.m. UTC - by John Timmer Posted in: Nobel Intent
Researchers have demonstrated it's possible to remove all the DNA from samples like blood and saliva, and replace it with genetic material from a different individual—even when the only source of this material is a used cigarette butt. Their methodology was good enough to fool a lab that does crime-scene DNA testing.
Read more

----------

P2P Banned In Antarctica?
We know that there's been an ongoing effort by entertainment industry lobbyists to convince politicians (and others) that file sharing and P2P apps are somehow to blame for stupid government staffers accidentally leaking files via those programs. Apparently the propaganda campaign has worked in at least one area: employees of the United States Antarctic Program (USAP) were sent an alert that they need to stop using all P2P programs. The "scenarios" described in the note are the same ones that entertainment industry lobbying group Arts+Labs has been spewing for a few years now. However, rather than assume that the real lesson is that users should actually understand the software they're using on their computer, and make sure not to use it in a dumb way (such as exposing sensitive documents), the director of IT simply told everyone that while on Antarctica, they must disable any P2P apps on their computer. Hope no one there uses Skype to keep in touch with family...

----------

Ex-Secret Service Agent Loses Security Clearance
By NICK DIVITO
(CN) - A former Secret Service agent has no legal recourse to force the agency to reinstate her Top Secret security clearance after she passed counterfeit money, the Federal Circuit ruled.

----------

Facebook accused of violating privacy laws
Chuck Miller August 18, 2009
Facebook has been accused of violating California privacy laws and seeking to "disseminate private information to third-parties for commercial purposes."

----------

WSJ: AT&T Is Dying
Baby bell doesn't have many friends these days...
09:13AM Wednesday Aug 19 2009 by Karl Bode
The Wall Street Journal gives AT&T a solid one-two punch this morning, insisting that the baby bell is "dying," then proclaiming th at AT&T is "dragging down the rest of us by overcharging us for voice calls and stifling innovation in a mobile data market critical to the U.S. economy...

----------

Chinese hacker schools growing bolder
In the last few days, there have been several articles covering China’s domestic hackers and their schools. In the past, this type of recruiting activity was confined to the online world and kept out of view of the general public. Now it is popping up all over the street.

----------

Under Agreement, UBS to Give Up Over 4,000 Names
By LYNNLEY BROWNING 9 minutes ago
U.S. regulators will receive the names as part of an investigation of Americans avoiding taxes through the use of offshore accounts.

----------

Which Windows is more secure?
Ed Bott: Over the past couple years, I've been regularly checking in to measure whether Windows Vista is living up to its promise of being more secure than its predecessor, Windows XP. Now Windows 7 is added to the mix.
21 months later, Vista is still more secure than XP
Windows 7's Achilles' heel - XP Mode
Special Report: Windows 7

----------