STE WILLIAMS

Rebel hackers seize Libyan domain name registry

As fighting rages around Colonel Gaddafi’s compound in Tripoli, hackers have taken the fight online to the country’s domain name registry nic.ly.

The site’s homepage now hosts an image of the rebel flag and the message “bye bye Gaddafi”, as well as the date 17 February, the day Libyan protestors started demonstrations and were shot at by security forces, computer security firm Sophos reported.

The hackers’ flipped bird (click to enlarge)

Heavy fighting is being reported in the streets of Tripoli today after rebels seized large parts of the city on Sunday. Gaddafi’s whereabouts remain unknown, but it has been widely reported that the rebels claim to have captured his son Saif al-Islam.

Today’s fighting has followed a sustained push by rebels to topple the Gaddafi regime. Protests in early February in Benghazi turned violent when security forces opened fire on the protestors, leading to the first military action at the end of the month when Anti-Libyan government militias took control of Misurata.

In March, the Libyan National Council declared itself the sole representative for the country and began gaining recognition from Western nations, as well as Middle Eastern states including Qatar. By mid-March, NATO began its military intervention with airstrikes in the country.

Over the summer, the fighting continued as rebels slowly made their way towards Tripoli while the International Criminal Court in The Hague issued arrest warrants for Gaddafi, his son Saif al-Islam and his head of intelligence.

Finally, on Sunday, rebels entered the city, facing little real resistance according to reports on the ground. This was despite calls from Gaddafi on national television for supporters to take the streets and fight for him.

Hacking, social networks and the internet have become a growing social and political tool in the Arab world, galvanising protests and helping protestors to make wide-reaching statements. At the beginning of the war, Gaddafi attempted to strangle rebel communication by cutting Libyans off from the internet, but they are back online today after 150 days.

Messages such as “Libya is free” and “The tyranny is over” have been appearing on Twitter and Facebook in the last hour. ®

Article source: http://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.co.uk/2011/08/22/rebel_hacker_leaves_message_for_gaddafi/

  • 22/08/2011
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LinkedIn Changes Default Privacy Parameters

LinkedIn has become the latest social networking site to decide that new features can be added and switched on by default, and users don’t have to be notified.

The feature allows LinkedIn to use profile information like names and photos in third-party advertising, and seems to have been first noticed by blogger Steve Woodruff here.

The feature – hidden away in the Orwellian-named “Manage Social Advertising” option – has to be switched off through a user’s account settings. Permission for this is tucked away in a new condition in LinkedIn’s Terms of Use, which makes it an opt-out feature.

Already, Radio Netherlands Worldwide has reported that the new profile setting may breach Dutch privacy law. The CBP, The Netherlands’ data protection agency, says the use of LinkedIn members’ photographs can only be used in advertising material with the users’ explicit consent.

The Radio Netherlands piece notes that the Dutch view is in line with that of the EU Data Protection Working Party, and also states that LinkedIn failed to properly notify users of the change.

SOURCE

  • 11/08/2011
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Hong Kong Stock Exchange Hacked

Hackers took down a website belonging to the Hong Kong stock Exchange, prompting Asia’s third-largest securities exchange to suspend trading in the shares of London-based HSBC and six other companies.

“Our current assessment is that this is the result of a malicious attack by outside hacking,” HKEx Chief Executive Charles Li, said, according to The Financial Times. Li added it was unclear who the hackers were or what they hoped to gain from their actions.

“We’re digging into that particular question right now,” he said.

The attack crashed a website that locally listed companies used to announce price sensitive news, the FT reported. HKEx responded by suspending trading of seven companies that were scheduled to make announcements during the lunch break. Among them was HSBC, which on Wednesday confirmed the sale of its US credit card business and retail services unit to Capital One Financial. Trading was also suspended for stocks of China Power International, Cathay Pacific, and HKEx itself.

HKEx is at least the second major exchange to be targeted by hackers this year. In February, Nasdaq admitted attackers planted malware on one of its portals. Nasdaq was quick to say that none of its trading systems were affected and no customer information had been accessed. HKEx officials gave almost identical assurances on Wednesday.

After the HKEx website came down, officials instructed market participants to use an older bulletin board to obtain announcements being released by listed companies. If the website isn’t restored by market opening on Thursday, the stock exchange plans to rely on the legacy system again, but has no plans to suspend trading of any shares.

Additional coverage is here and here.

SOURCE

  • 11/08/2011
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NotW Hacked Milly Dowler’s Voicemail

Pressure on the News of the World over phone-hacking allegations intensified still further on Tuesday after allegations surfaced that journalists at the paper intercepted the voicemail messages of murdered schoolgirl Milly Dowler.

Hacks working for the NoTW allegedly deleted voicemail messages sent to Dowler at the time she went missing in March 2002, interfering with police inquiries into her disappearance in the process. The deletion of phone messages, an action apparently taken to free up space for extra messages, gave her family false hope that she might be alive in addition to hampering a police investigation, The Guardian reports.

Police would be interested in preserving voicemail messages to murder victims not least because of the possibility that the murderer themselves might leave a message in an attempt to cover their tracks.

Scotland Yard is investigating the allegations as part of its re-opened inquiry into phone hacking by the paper. Previously these allegations have largely centred on charges that hacks at the paper used private investigators to hack into the voicemail messages of celebrities and public figures in a hunt for gossip.

The Dowler hack allegations are, to put it mildly, far more serious and are likely to place renewed pressure on senior managers at the paper at the time including then-editor of the paper, Rebekah Brooks, now Rupert Murdoch’s chief executive in the UK. Her deputy at the time, Andy Coulson, resigned as the prime minister’s media adviser in January at the same time police re-opened an investigation into phone hacking at the News of the World. Brooks ran a controversial name-and-shame child abusers campaign during her stint editing the paper.

In the days after Milly’s abduction, the Dowler family spoke of their hope that their daughter might still be alive in an exclusive interview with the News of the World.

The Dowlers’ family lawyer, Mark Lewis, described the News of the World‘s alleged activities as “heinous” and “despicable”. The family intends to sue the paper for damages.

Dowler, 13, was abducted on her way home to Walton-on-Thames, Surrey, on 21 March 2002. Police initially thought that she might have run away from home. The deletion of mobile family messages gave substance to this suggestion and served to cloud the picture about what happened to her in the crucial first few days after she was abducted. Levi Bellfield, 43, was jailed for life for murdering Dowler last month. Former bouncer Bellfield was previously convicted of murdering two other young women, Marsha McDonnell and Amelie Delagrange: both crimes happened in the two years after Dowler’s murder.

Evidence that News of the World hacks may have intercepted and deleted messages sent to Dowler comes from a collection of notes kept by Glenn Mulcaire, the disgraced PI jailed for hacking into the voicemail messages of royal aides at the behest of the News of the World.

The paper made little attempt to hide its activities at the time of Milly’s abduction. For example, it ran a story in early April that year about a woman allegedly pretending to be Dowler who left her number as a point of contact when she applied for a job with a recruitment agency. Police at the time realised that tabloid hacks must have had access to Dowler’s voicemail in sourcing the story but saw it as an isolated incident and decided to do nothing, The Guardian reports.

In a statement over the latest mobile phone hacking allegation, News International (which publishes the NotW) said: “We have been co-operating fully with Operation Weeting since our voluntary disclosure in January restarted the investigation into illegal voicemail interception. This particular case is clearly a development of great concern and we will be conducting our own inquiry as a result.”

SOURCE

  • 05/07/2011
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Microsoft Patent Points to Snooping

A new Microsoft patent points towards Skype becoming equipped for lawful interception, which could be important as the service grows up to challenge traditional telcos.

The patent was filed back in 2009, but granted last week and picked up by Computerworld. Titled “Legal Intercept”, it covers one way in which a VoIP-based communications system might enable a call to be intercepted and covertly recorded, naming Skype as one of the services to which it could be applied.

Microsoft bought Skype back in May, but only received approval for the deal in June – so hasn’t had much time to do anything with the VoIP leader. Skype is hugely successful, with 170 million registered users, but it’s been very secretive about its protocols and security, refusing interoperability and asking users to just trust in Skype for their security.

That won’t wash in the real world, and neither will denying governments the right to listen in on their citizens. Most of us accept that security forces need to occasionally tap into phone lines, hopefully with suitable judicial oversight, but Skype’s apparent reluctance to permit such taps has resulted in rumours of secret deals and government-backed attacks on the cryptography used to protect Skype calls.

The patent describes how client, or network, software can be surreptitiously alerted that incoming and/or outgoing calls are to be monitored for a specific user. Such calls are then copied (packet by packet) to the monitoring server without the user being aware. The patent suggests the interception software could be placed in a NAT or router, but also incorporated into the VoIP client itself.

India has made it clear that Skype risks being kicked out of the country unless it sorts out some sort of lawful intercept capability, and other countries will be quick to follow India’s lead. So if Microsoft wants to see Skype spreading around the world then it will need to have just what’s described in the Legal Intercept patent.

Citizens aghast that their VoIP calls could be intercepted might be annoyed, but they’d be better off petitioning their governments, rather than raging against the companies trying to obey the law.

  • 29/06/2011
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Travelodge Customer Data Stolen

Travelodge UK is investigating an apparent hacking attack on its customer database.

The hotel chain issued a warning to users of its online service to be on the lookout for spam e-mails.

Full details of the security breach were not immediately available. A spokesperson said it seemed that a limited number of people were affected. (more…)

  • 24/06/2011
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Dropbox Drops the Security Ball

Storage and file-sharing vendor Dropbox made a huge cock-up during last weekend’s upgrade leaving all of its user accounts unlocked.

Encryption is not performed by the cloud provider’s client, meaning that all customer information was there for the taking on Sunday between 1.54pm and 5.46pm. Dropbox issued no official comment until yesterday, causing anger among users.

Founder and CTO Arash Ferdowsi confirmed a code update allowed a bug to enter the system to affect its authentication mechanism meaning users did not need passwords to log onto each other’s accounts.

“A very small number of users (much less than one per cent) logged in during that period, some of whom could have logged into an account without the correct password. As a precaution, we ended all logged in sessions.”

This is understood to equate to up to 250,000 users, among them some irate individuals who vented their spleen on the Dropbox forum at the weekend, threatening to move to a new provider and complaining about the vendor’s lack of communication.

Ferdowsi said the firm was investigating whether any accounts were accessed and tampered with and vowed to “immediately notify the account owner” if it unearthed any unusual activity.

“This should never have happened. We are scrutinising our controls and we will be implementing additional safeguards to prevent this from happening again… regardless of how many people were ultimately affected, any exposure at all is unacceptable to us.”

  • 24/06/2011
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Arizona Department of Public Safety Hit by Lulzsec

The hacker group LulzSec released what it said are sensitive documents from the Arizona Department of Public Safety on Thursday, to protest against the agency’s “racial-profiling anti-immigrant” policies.

LulzSec logo

The hacker group LulzSec has released what it said are sensitive documents from the Arizona Department of Public Safety. Image credit: LulzSec

“We are releasing hundreds of private intelligence bulletins, training manuals, personal email correspondence, names, phone numbers, addresses and passwords belonging to Arizona law enforcement,” the group said in a statement on its site. “We are targeting AZDPS specifically because we are against SB1070 and the racial-profiling anti-immigrant police state that is Arizona.”

SB1070 makes it a crime to be in Arizona without documentation proving US residency. The leaked documents — classified as “law-enforcement sensitive”, “not for public distribution” and “for official use only” — are “primarily related to border patrol and counter-terrorism operations and describe the use of informants to infiltrate various gangs, cartels, motorcycle clubs, Nazi groups and protest movements,” LulzSec said. A Department of Public Safety spokesman told The New York Times that the data appeared to be authentic.

  • 24/06/2011
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Lulzsec Leader Apparently Arrested in Essex

The Press Association reports that, “A 19-year-old suspected of being a mastermind behind notorious international computer hacking group LulzSec has been arrested in Essex, after a joint operation by the FBI and Scotland Yard.”

A spokesman for the Metropolitan Police states, “The arrest follows an investigation into network intrusions and distributed denial of service attacks against a number of international business and intelligence agencies by what is believed to be the same hacking group.

“Searches at a residential address in Wickford, Essex, following the arrest last night have led to the examination of a significant amount of material. These forensic examinations remain ongoing.”

  • 21/06/2011
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Germany Opens National Utilities CyberDefence Centre

Germany today launched its new cyberdefence facility in Bonn, dedicated to defending the country’s critical infrastructure, including its electricity and water supply. The facility is believed to be the first of its kind in Europe.

The Cyber-Abwehrzentrum in Bonn is located in a securely fenced office block of the Federal Office for Information Security. The centre is headed up by Michael Hange and members of the Federal Office for Civil Protection and Disaster Assistance (BKK) and the Federal Office for Protection of the Constitution (BFV). Other agencies such as the Bundespolizei (Federal Police), the Federal Intelligence Service and Bundeswehr (German Armed Forces) will join the centre in July.

Its new role – providing cybersecurity to key infrastructure on German soil – was already established a couple of months ago, when at a Security Conference in Munich German Chancellor Angela Merkel declared cyberwarfare “as dangerous as conventional war”.

According to German interior Minister Thomas de Maiziere, there is a cyberattack every two seconds on Germany. Those attacks have become more sophisticated and more targeted in recent years. De Maiziere said attacks on the German government network took place four or five times a day, and the attacks often originated from foreign sources.

Interior Ministry spokesperson Stefan Paris recently said that online espionage in Germany is also on the rise. “Germany is a very high-tech country with considerable experience and know-how, so others will naturally try to get hold of this knowledge – China is playing a large role in this.”

NATO already considers cyberattacks among the greatest security threats to the developed world. One recent example was the Stuxnet worm, which targeted industrial software and infected computers controlling uranium enrichment plants in Iran.

Estonia is another country that is ramping up its cyberdefence strategy. The country’s entire internet system in 2007 had to be switched off due to a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks, causing large amounts of public services to grind to a halt. Estonia has recently incorporated the Cyber Defense League, a volunteer force, into its military structure. The country is also the home of NATO’s Center of Excellence in Cyber Defense.

Austria is building a substantial cyberdefence structure consisting of 1,600 soldiers as well as several secret service departments.

The Netherlands’ Defence minister Hans Hillen recently said that the Dutch armed forces need to spend part of their budget for 2011 on cyberwarfare-related activities, although a national cybersecurity centre still needs to be established.

Last year, the UK government highlighted cybersecurity as one of the Tier 1 security risks facing the UK. The government said it planned to spend £650m on improved cybersecurity. The US, meanwhile, opened up its own Cyber Command as part of the military in 2009.

France is now considering combining the efforts of all of its government agencies that have thus far been tasked with identifying and combating cyberattacks into a specialised unit.

  • 16/06/2011
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