Displaying items by tag: FBI

There has been another hack of government systems from the sound of things on Your Anon News one of the Anonymous Twitter feeds. According to the post and the pastebin link the dump is a listing of “Passports, Visa’s, etc.” and is the second from the new group SpexSec. The first attack was in retaliation for ignoring security warnings and targeted a single FBI agent, Scott Augenbaum who is the Head of the FBI’s Cybercrime task force according to some information that is available at the time of this writing.

As someone that has followed the online “hacking” community since its infancy (war dialing anyone) I can say with a fair amount of confidence that the guys what kicked it all off (Like Steve Wozniak) would be proud of where some of the movement has gone. In the early 80’s War Dialing was something of a fun sport, you dialed a range of numbers until a computer answered and then you tried to talk to it. A lot of the activity was aimed at “corrupt businesses and government agencies” right alongside the people looking to just do it because it was something new and exciting.

When we first started to hear rumblings about Microsoft’s next version of Windows we were told that it would be positioned as the center piece of a connected home. Now at the time we took this to mean an internal environment with connectivity to gaming consoles, media centers (or hubs) and of course Windows Home Server. What we did not expect was for Microsoft to shovel the cloud and their cloud based services down the consumer’s throats.

So the FBI has started a new club and one that involves the US Marshals, the DEA and apparently even the NSA. This clubs whole purpose is to find ways to monitor and decrypt data that transferred through electronic communications. Sounds fairly innocuous right? After all these law enforcement agencies should have the tools they need to investigate crimes and to prevent threats to national security. The problem comes from the fact that the club (called either the National Domestic Communications Assistance Center or Domestic Communications Assistance Center) might have been around since 2008 without anyone telling anybody.

Remember how we told you about Jim Conte and his plan to make anonymous posting a thing of the past (and in some cases illegal)? When we covered that we talked about the technological and financial barriers to doing this as well as some of the implications of the law. Well we have an actual example of how removing anonymity from the web can be abused (and how it directly relates to the section about political commentary).

After watching the Department of Homeland Security try to force new amendments allowing them very expanded powers to police and control the Internet it seems the FBI wants to get in on some of this too. You see The FBI and law enforcement are having a hard time doing their job (according to them) and their current methods for gathering information with a warrant are just not enough. They would like Mandatory backdoors into online communication services like Skype, MSN, Gmail etc.

There is a lot of talk in the news about a very old piece of malware. This malicious code was called DNSChanger and was part of a criminal enterprise that intended to route people’s traffic through their own servers instead of the intended servers. This opened the victims up to countless other potential infections. The Malware was discovered back in 2004 and had a small amount of fame for its time. The impact of this particular infection was rated into the millions of Windows based PCs. Although the malware was identified and six people were arrested for it, the authorities did not know what to do about the infected systems (which is VERY odd).

There was something of a victory for MegaUpload and in many ways supporters of a free and open internet. The judge presiding over the case has stated that the case may never actual go to trial because the FBI and those backing their actions made a tiny, little, blunder that has turned out to not be so tiny. In their effort to send a message the FBI and other agencies in the US government have taken a very firm stance on the situation a stance which could eventually come back to haunt them.

There is an old saying; “ I cannot give you what I do not have and I cannot tell you what I do not know”. It is with this philosophy in mind that a new Internet Service Provider is seeking to hit the market. The man behind this new company also happens to be one of the only ISP owners to ever fight and win against an FBI request for subscriber information; Nicholas Merrill.

A new Anonymous splinter group has hit the scene with a name that is sure to bring back bad memories for the authorities. The name as many of you might have heard is LulzSec Reborn. If the name is any indication it means that either some of the old members of LulzSec are back or people that were sympathetic to the LulzSec cause have reincarnated the name for their own purposes. The question is; regardless of who is behind this new group, what are the purposes.