A federal judge has blocked three MIT students from presenting a paper at the Defcon 16 security conference on hacking the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority’s CharlieCard
system
Google said it has resolved an issue with its contacts system that caused many users of its Gmail service to have trouble accessing their online e-mail. The problems began at about 5.00pm EDT and an announcement on the company’s Gmail Help Centre
site said the issue is now resolved
Life takes Visa, says the credit card company’s catchy and ubiquitous TV ads. And now, according to a group of security researchers speaking at the DefCon hacker conference Friday in Las Vegas, Medeco high-security locks take Visa, too. As well as MasterCard, American Express and Discover cards. To be more precise, the researchers say that plastic used in all of these credit cards can be easily fashioned into simulated keys that open three kinds of M3 high-security locks made by the Virginia-based Medeco Security Locks company — locks that are used to secure sensitive facilities in places such as the White House, the Pentagon, embassies and other buildings. Virtually all conventional pin-tumbler locks are vulnerable to this method of attack, and frankly nobody has really considered it or looked at it before,
says Marc Weber Tobias, one of the researchers
Three journalists for a French security magazine were kicked out of the Black Hat security conference after they allegedly sniffed the press room computer network
The Pirate Bay has been censored
in Italy following an urgent decree from a deputy public prosecutor. Pirate Bay’s IPs and the domain name are inaccessible, as they are blocked by ISPs all over the country. Whether these blocks will be very effective, however, is doubtful, since The Pirate Bay has already announced several countermeasures
Yahoo said it will start letting users opt out of receiving customised advertising later this month, in an announcement the company made along with its response to a congressional inquiry about online privacy practices
Mozilla has launched a prototype messaging Firefox extension that it says could eventually enable users to keep track of all of their electronic communications, including email, RSS, social networks and web discussions. Snowl
enables users to prioritise messages by importance and have a search-based interface for message retrieval, according to Mozilla developer Myk Melez
The Pew Internet & American Life Project is reporting an increase in the percentage of users who access search engines on a daily basis. Pew states that search engine use is fast approaching e-mail use. The percentage of Internet users who search on a typical day, according to Pew, grew 69 percent from January 2002 until May 2008
Google’s Vint Cerf today offered some positive thoughts about how to do traffic management. In his view, it’s all about the minimum guarantee, and users can do with that minimum bandwidth whatever they want
New microchipped passports designed to be foolproof against identity theft can be cloned and manipulated in minutes and accepted as genuine by the computer software recommended for use at international airports. Tests for The Times exposed security flaws in the microchips introduced to protect against terrorism and organised crime. The flaws also undermine claims that 3,000 blank passports stolen last week were worthless because they could not be forged
What do you get when you combine images from Google Earth and the brainpower from researchers at Oak Ridge National Labs? Well in this case you get a tool that enables real-time status of the national electric grid that federal state and local agencies can use to coordinate and respond to major problems such as wide-area power outages, natural disasters and other catastrophic events
In a windowless underground computer lab in California, young men are busy cooking up viruses, spam and other plagues of the computer age. Grant Joy runs a program that surreptitiously records every keystroke on his machine, including user names, passwords, and credit-card numbers. And Thomas Fynan floods a bulletin board with huge messages from fake users. Yet Joy and Fynan aren’t hackers — they’re students in a computer-security class at Sonoma State University. And their professor, George Ledin, has showed them how to penetrate even the best antivirus software. The companies that make their living fighting viruses aren’t happy about what’s going on in Ledin’s classroom. Managers at some computer-security companies have even vowed not to hire Ledin’s students. The computer establishment’s scorn may be hyperbolic, but it’s understandable. Malware is spreading at an exponential rate
More than a thousand hacked Web sites are serving up fake Flash Player software to users duped into clicking on links in mail that’s part of a massive spam attack masquerading as CNN.com news notifications. The bogus messages, which claim to be from the CNN.com news Web site, include links to what are supposedly the day’s Top 10 news stories and Top 10 news video clips from the cable network. Clicking on any of those links, however, brings up a dialog that says an incorrect version of Flash Player has been detected and that tells users they needed to update to a newer edition
A ring of identity thieves that targeted US retailers used sophisticated and multifaceted attacks to steal more than 40 million credit and debit card numbers from TJX, OfficeMax, Barnes & Noble and other companies. The attacks cost retailers and credit card companies tens of millions of dollars. Members of the ID theft conspiracy used wardriving techniques to find holes in wireless networks operated by retail stores. Once inside the networks, the thieves located and stole credit card transaction information stored on the retailers’ networks
Flawed software patches from Nokia Siemens Networks have crippled Optus’s 3G mobile network in Brisbane. Since 6.00am yesterday, Optus subscribers in Brisbane suffered from intermittent transmission of data and voice services as Australia’s number two telco battled to reconfigure a recent upgrade to its new 3G software platform. The upgrade, which has been applied to all Optus 3G mobile switches nationwide, was supposed to provide efficiency gains in speed and capacity load. Instead, it triggered three separate network failures which combined to cause chaos for Optus customers in Queensland, NSW, the ACT and Victoria last week. As a result subscribers were left without mobile phone services for about 10 hours
Reporters covering the Beijing Olympics who are frustrated by Chinese Internet censorship can use free software tools developed to help Chinese users circumvent these controls, according to a representative of a group that develops such software
Australian consumers have been given a new advocate to represent their interests in the telecommunications sphere. Consumer law and small business experts have joined forces with representatives of indigenous and disabled Australians to form a new peak body aimed at giving the community a stronger platform to raise concerns about telecommunications issues. The federal Government announced the new organisation, the Australian Communications Consumer Action Network (ACCAN), today
Search giant Google today defended the incomplete Australian coverage provided by its Street View add-on to its Google Maps and Earth tools, after launching the service early Tuesday morning. Street View allows users of Google Maps and Earth to view street-side photos of the geographic locations they are viewing with the tools. The service has previously been available in the US and several other countries, but Australia only received the additional functionality today
Researchers and academics in Australia have been given a ten-fold bandwidth boost thanks to a network upgrade by Australia’s Academic and Research Network (AARNet). The improvements will see users’ 1Gbps link increased to 10Gbps. At this speed, it’s about 10,000 times faster than normal ADSL2+ connections,
AARNet chief executive Chris Hancock said
The FBI removed computer records from the C Burr Artz Library this week. Darrell Batson, director of Frederick County Public Libraries, said two FBI employees came to the downtown Frederick library either Wednesday or Thursday. The agents removed two public computers from the library’s second floor. They told him they were taking the units back to their office in Washington, DC
RSS – Posts