Category Archives: Current Events

U.S. Intelligence wants to monitor WoW chat

Posted on February 24, 2008 by sky

Called The Reynard project, it is a series of plans for the U.S. Intelligence to monitor more internet traffic, most notably, data mining from several major MMORPGs, including WoW. The goal being to eventually create a system that can “automatically … Continue reading →

Posted in Current Events, Policy, Privacy | 2 Comments

Security Researchers Crack Wireless GSM Encryption

Posted on February 24, 2008 by esoteric

Security researchers have announced the development of a ultra-fast method of cracking wireless GSM encryption in 30 minutes or less.  The 64-bit encryption algorithm was cracked in theory over 10 years ago, but the development of new technology has exploited … Continue reading →

Posted in Current Events, Privacy | Tagged , , , , | 6 Comments

Now that we are being listened to

Posted on February 24, 2008 by joyleung

The government has decided to continue wiretapping phones with assistance from phone companies. These companies are also pushing a bill for immunity from lawsuits for participating in the tapping. What is the line at which informational surveillance pushes too far … Continue reading →

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16 hackers got arrested in Quebec recently

Posted on February 24, 2008 by felixctc

Recently, the police department in Quebec, Canada, busted an international hacking network. 16 people that were between the ages of 17 and 26 were arrested and this was the biggest hacking scam in Canadian history according to the police. These … Continue reading →

Posted in Current Events, Ethics, Integrity | 2 Comments

Amazon’s S3 Outage: Usage spike or DDoS attack?

Posted on February 17, 2008 by iddav

Amazon’s Simple Storage Service (S3) experienced an outage on the morning of February 15th, causing inaccessible content in the thousands of websites that rely on S3 for data storage. According to Amazon’s official explanation, the outage was due to a … Continue reading →

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Insignia Photo Frame, Complete with Pre-installed Malware

Posted on February 16, 2008 by jkivligh

An Insignia digital photo frame has been pulled off the shelves once it was discovered that the units were shipped with trojans. Installed by the (Chinese) manufacturer, the trojan bypasses Windows Firewall and anti-virus software and collects gaming passwords. We … Continue reading →

Posted in Current Events | 1 Comment

ISP vs. BitTorrent

Posted on February 16, 2008 by Kris Plunkett

Since ISPs, most notably Comcast, some time ago began identifying and purposefully destroying or severely throttling BitTorrent connections passing through their networks, the struggles on both sides of the fence have been nothing short of a game of cat and … Continue reading →

Posted in Availability, Current Events, Privacy | 2 Comments

Number of Rogue DNS Servers Increasing

Posted on February 15, 2008 by robertm2

Researchers from Google and the Georgia Institute of Technology have published a paper indicating the increasing number of attacks from the use of rogue DNS servers (the paper estimates that there are currently about 68,000 of these servers). 

Posted in Current Events | 1 Comment

Valentine’s Day Malware

Posted on February 14, 2008 by chrislim

Human beings are often considered one of the weakest links in a security system, and this vulnerability is typified (and exploited) by the proliferation of Valentine’s Day malware (and their associated delivery mechanisms). The first article referenced below describes two … Continue reading →

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OpenBSD Refuses to Fix Pseudo-Random Number Generator Weakness

Posted on February 10, 2008 by bche

According to an article from Slashdot, a serious weakness in the random number generator provided by OpenBDS has been found. It is apparently also used in several other BSD operating systems. Some of them has released a fix or are … Continue reading →

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