Topic: SECURITY - on September 17, 2008 at 10:38:00 AM CEST
Taliban using Skype phones to dodge MI6
Taliban fighters targeting British troops in Afghanistan are using the latest ‘internet phones’ to evade detection by MI6, security sources said last night.
Skype, a popular piece of consumer software that allows free calls to be made over the web, has been adopted by insurgents to communicate with cells strung out across the country.
Unlike traditional mobile calls, which can be monitored by RAF Nimrod spy planes, Skype calls – the commercial application of a technology called Voice Over Internet Protocol (VOIP) – are heavily encrypted.
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Topic: SECURITY - on September 11, 2008 at 12:12:00 PM CEST
Boeing virtual fence for Mexico border on hold: report
The U.S. Customs and Border Protection is putting off plans for a "virtual fence" being built by Boeing Co along the Mexico border and instead will focus on getting a physical fence in place, the Wall Street Journal said.
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Topic: SECURITY - on August 29, 2008 at 12:17:00 PM CEST
The things you can see with a UAV
The Draganflyer X6 UAV RC Helicopter is a surveillance nut's dream come true. The compact 'copter flies steady with its three rotors, enabling the on-board camera to record smooth video of whatever it's surveilling.
While the device is cool, it isn't new; two years ago the brainiacs at MIT came up with the Swarm Health Management Program, whereby craploads of these UAV's are networked into surveillance teams that can track moving objects and hand tasks off to each other, rather like a zone defense in basketball.
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Topic: SECURITY - on August 9, 2008 at 10:42:00 AM CEST
Beijing Olympics visitors to come under widespread surveillance
The government has installed about 300,000 cameras in Beijing and set up a network to spy on its citizens and foreigners.
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Topic: SECURITY - on May 23, 2008 at 4:26:32 PM CEST
Marines Land in Afghanistan — With Biometrics
A year ago this June, Taliban fighters streamed into the remote town of Chora in southern Afghanistan expecting an easy victory over impoverished villagers. Instead, they met heavy resistance from scores of uniformed Afghan men.
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Topic: SECURITY - on May 12, 2008 at 11:39:35 AM CEST
FBI Says Military Had Counterfeit Cisco Routers
There are new developments in the case of the counterfeit Cisco routers, which we have been discussing for some time. The NYTimes updates the story after an FBI PowerPoint presentation made its way onto the Web. It seems that experts at Cisco have examined some of the counterfeit routers in detail and proclaimed that they contain no back doors. Others don't believe we can be so sure.
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Topic: SECURITY - on May 11, 2008 at 2:17:00 PM CEST
US-Zöllner filzen Notebook-Speicher
Laptop, Handy, MP3-Player - Grenzbeamte an US-Flughäfen dürfen durchsuchen, was sie wollen und wann sie wollen. Gegen die Praxis hatte ausgerechnet ein Besitzer von Kinderpornografie geklagt, verloren und dem Datenschutz so einen Bärendienst erwiesen.
Die Frage, ob Grenzbeamte die mobilen Datenträger Reisender durchstöbern dürfen, ist in den USA endgültig zum Politikum geworden. Dabei geht es um eine Praxis, die sich aus europäischer Perspektive wie ein Big-Brother-Alptraum ausnimmt: Bei Sicherheitskontrollen an Flughäfen werden immer wieder Mobiltelefone, Laptops oder auch MP3-Player durchsucht, manchmal werden dabei sogar Daten kopiert.
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Topic: SECURITY - on May 1, 2008 at 2:22:00 PM CEST
An elephant never forgets? George W. Bush's lost e-mails
A federal magistrate judge on Thursday chastised the Bush administration for failing to fully answer questions related to a long-running dispute over missing White House emails. The White House is facing lawsuits from two public interest groups, Citizens for Responsibilty and Ethics in Washington and the National Security Archive at George Washington University, demanding that the White House restore the missing e-mails and put in place systems to prevent further e-mail losses. Administration officials were ordered to provide detailed information about the burdens involved in taking immediate actions to preserve copies of hard drive, tapes, and other media that may contain copies of the missing e-mails.
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Topic: SECURITY - on April 26, 2008 at 4:19:00 PM CEST
Scharfe Rüge für den BND - afghanische Regierung fordert Erklärung
Das Vertrauen ist dahin: Deutschlands Geheimdienst-Kontrolleure haben den BND wegen der Bespitzelung einer SPIEGEL-Reporterin scharf gerügt - von einer "schweren Krise" ist die Rede. Auch die afghanische Regierung ist verärgert. Der überwachte Minister fürchtet um sein Leben.
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Topic: SECURITY - on April 26, 2008 at 4:03:00 PM CEST
Hackers warn high street chains
High street chains will be the next victims of cyber terrorism, some of the world's elite hackers have warned.
They claim it is only a "matter of time" before the likes of Tesco and Marks & Spencer are targeted.
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Topic: SECURITY - on April 26, 2008 at 4:01:00 PM CEST
Department of Homeland Security website hacked!
The sophisticated mass infection that's injecting attack code into hundreds of thousands of reputable web pages is growing and even infiltrated the website of the Department of Homeland Security.
While so-called SQL injections are nothing new, this latest attack, which we we reported earlier, is notable for its ability to infect huge numbers of pages using only a single string of text. At time of writing, Google searches here, here and here showed almost 520,000 pages containing the infection string, though the exact number changes almost constantly. As the screenshot below shows, even the DHS, which is responsible for protecting US infrastructure against cyber attacks, wasn't immune. Other hacked sites include those belonging to the United Nations and the UK Civil Service.
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Topic: SECURITY - on April 26, 2008 at 3:58:00 PM CEST
500 Thousand MS Web Servers Hacked
According to F-Secure, over 500,000 webservers across the world, including some from the United Nations and UK government, have been victims of a SQL injection. The attack uses an SQL injection to reroute clients to a malicious javascript at nmidahena.com, aspder.com or nihaorr1.com, which use another set of exploits to install a Trojan on the client's computer. As per usual, Firefox users with NoScript should be safe from the client exploit, but server admins should be alert for the server-side injection. Brian Krebs has a decent writeup on his Washington Post Security Blog, Dynamoo has a list of some of the high-profile sites that has been hacked, and for fun you can watch some of the IIS admins run around in circles at one of the many IIS forums on the 'net.
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