The Great Data Exodus
21/06/2007 Written by Nick Lowe
The latest technologies and gadgets make it incredibly easy for your data to be stolen from right under your nose, unless you take steps to protect it.
Much of our personal and professional lives nowadays are heavily influenced by technology. Everything’s going digital, from the cassette player to the picture frame. And whether a technology is designed to help us communicate, to take pictures, or to listen to music or watch a movie, every gadget that we carry has the ability to store large amounts of data in digital form.
The ability to move massive amounts of information between traditional PCs and portable storage devices means that it’s now incredibly easy for confidential data to be taken from companies without knowledge or consent.Hacking Incident goes on Czech TV
18/06/2007 Written by Boris Mutina (minor)
Watching TV on Sunday morning , while still in bed, could be very relaxing. For example, if you are in Czech Republic you can watch a TV transmission on idyllic landscapes accompanied by soft, classical music: a sort of mind-yoga. But what could you think about if, instead of lawns, fields or mountains, you see on the screen the typical mushroom shape produced by a nuke explosion?Such view could be seen last Sunday morning, during live Panorama show on Czech TV, Channel CT2 (watch it here ).
Nuclear war? No, just a hacking attack: as it was said later in Czech TV-journals, those pictures were fake, and the transmission had been hacked.
The whole action was prepared by the art group Ztohoven, whose website went soon offline because of the massive number of visitors.
British appeal for hackers
15/06/2007 Written by Alberto Redi (halfmoon)
Next week-end the prestigious Alexandra Palace in London, will host hundreds of web developers who are gathering in the British Capital to join an Hackday organized by the BBC and Yahoo.
The event is actually an occasion to show web developers how to get more out of the data feeds and interfaces the two organisations make available, the BBC reports.
Seminars and laboratories will be held by developers from both the BBC and Yahoo.
3bay, mnsn or Googl? Attention to typo-squatting!
08/06/2007 Written by Roberto Preatoni (SyS64738)
One of the newest expressions of cyber crime is based on typo-squatting. “3bay.com”, “eba6y.it”, “googl.com”, “mnsn.com” , “tyahoo.com” are common mistakes we all commit while keying in a website’s domain, and usually a message of error follows.
But now people’s typing mistakes could become a weapons used by crackers to perpetrate all sorts of cyber crimes: in few words, attackers are registering domain names which are very close to those of very popular websites, in order to intercept part of their traffic.
It was assessed that over one thousand domain names has been recently registered on this purpose.
Weak data-security at the FBI network
30/05/2007 Written by Martin Arnsteiner
A new report concerning the state of security at the FBI network was created in April and released yesterday. US independent audit office (Government Accountability Office –GAO) accuses heavy lacks in the configuration of the internal police network FBI.
The FBI has closed computer networks, in which information about all aspects of the police work is exchanged. The GAO found out with its examination that the internal data security programs are incomplete and insufficient. The audit office stated that the network and the devices are not configured correctly to prevent unauthorized data access. In some places the FBI missed to restrict access checks and to graduate the access authorizations to safety level of the users. Because of this, user data could have been accessed although they were not allowed to do so.