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Written by Massimo Cotrozzi
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Wednesday, 09 August 2006 |
 Hardware vendors are benefitted from spywares and viruses, according to the "State of the net 2006" from ConsumerReports.org. In fact in the last report regarding common issues among surfers, an interesting trend arises. It looks like surfers suffer more damages than predicted, but not from where one could think. In fact it looks like surfers infected by a spyware prefer to change the computer or upgrade the hardware, rather than fix the issue. For the case of spyware, nearly 1 million users prefered this solution rather than disinfection, leading to an expense of 2.6 billion USD...
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Tuesday, 08 August 2006 |
 Zone-h at Defcon 14: Day 3
Today brings a close to another year at Defcon, which was filled with many people from across the globe and the like minded hacker community in todays electronic frontier. While a short day, Sunday was filled with a few presentations [ we will get to those in a minute ] as well as the closing activities for Defcon 14.
Dark Tangent was there to greet the conference goers and the house was packed. He was happy to report on the success of the new venue and said that the attendance extended above the 7000 mark [ they even ran out of official badges... see the pics below for Zone-h's press badge]. He announced that the Defcon provided, publicly available wireless Internet was the most hostile network in the world over this weekend! To give an example, they continually ran the "Wall of Sheep". The Wall of stupidity is more like it, as the Wall of Sheep displays the usernames and passwords [ with only the first 3 characters shown to the public ] of persons logging into the Defcon free wireless network. Among various things... like webmail, POP3, IMAP, FTP and HTTP. the live projection board displaying also the username and domain, of which many were .edu .gov and several [bigcompany].com addresses. Fortunatly Zone-h had access to the "secure" press line, a hard wired connection that was independent of the public, and sniffed [ lol ] one...
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Written by Massimo Cotrozzi
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Tuesday, 08 August 2006 |
 The devil is not always as bad as depicted. In some cases the devil could also be your friend, in fact. The reference is about the dropping of a lawsuit filing from the Music Majors against a cheerleader teacher in Palm Desert. It happened that she was accused of downloading copyrighted music from the internet and refused to pay the fine. Her lawyer (a clever one indeed, if not for else, for asking a security guy) argues against the filing that it is not possible to prove that, ....
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Written by Roberto Preatoni
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Monday, 07 August 2006 |
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 Electronic Voting Technology is still a controversial topic: on the one hand there is the need to improve voting operations through an effective method for votes computation, on the other there are some perplexity due to the effective security of this technology. Diebold's electronic voting technology has been tested for long before being introduced officially, but now, researchers at the Open Voting Foundation have come up with what they call as "the most seriois flaw" in electronic voting technology yet documented.
The Register reported last week that according to the Open Voting, "it's possible to get Diebold's AccuVote TS touchscreen voting machine by toggling a single switch, to boot from an unverified external flash drive instead of the device's built-in firmware , which is stored on a EPROM chip..." Write Comment (0 Comments) |
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Monday, 07 August 2006 |
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 Zone-h continues it's day to day coverage of the biggest hacking convention, held here in Las Vegas. Day 2 began with a presentation by Jared DeMott about the Evolving Art of Fuzzing, focusing on how fuzzing works and the different types of fuzzing programs and techniques. If you are not familiar with fuzzing, it is a technique for finding flaws in compiled software code. Fuzzing can be used against file parameters as well as client and server applications. While no earth shattering revelations were covered, the presentation gave an all around view of fuzzing applications and the different types of uses fuzzing has. More information and a fuzzing tool, GPF or General Purpose Fuzzer, by DeMott can be found at http://www.appliedsec.com ... Write Comment (1 Comments) |
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Saturday, 05 August 2006 |
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 Zone-h is in Las Vegas attending Defcon 14 , the annual meeting of hackers and security researchers and we are providing daily coverage for our readers. Getting off nearly 2 hours late, today started off with a good presentation by Agent Thomas Grasso on the US government fight on organized cybercrime. Mr Grasso described the organizational structure of various groops, from old school warez traders, and how their structures were the basis on which todays cybercrimals are organized and function in a la-costra-nostra [ mafia ] fashion in structure.
From credit cards and spam to specialized devices as ATM skimmers, organized crime has a strong foothold and structure much like any other multi billion dollar business. Mr Grasso outlined profit estimates averaging $67billion US a year from illicit cybercrime. You can read more at the NCTFA web site...
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