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Displaying items by tag: Security

Sunday, 19 February 2012 21:31

Could Anonymous Actually Be Doing Some Good?

anonThe online activist collective known as Anonymous has undergone a lot of changes in the years that is has been around. We have followed them and covered some of their highlights (and some of their blunder). They provide an interesting commentary on society and the internet. In a time when it has been commented that the media controls the information and governments are abusing their power, they almost act like a policing body. This is not to say that the activities of their members are always honest and forthright, in fact there are times when members of the collective do things that are appalling. However, we are seeing them bring some corporate and governmental practices into the open.

Published in Editorials

animal_farm-pigsAfter both SOPA and PIPA were publicly shelved the US government did what it always does. It finds a way to do what it wants, but by hiding it in other bills or (as is becoming more common) using trade agreements to by-pass laws altogether. This is exactly what we are seeing with ACTA and TPP. These two trade agreements are probably some of the most dangerous bits of work that we have read about in a very long time.

Published in Editorials
Sunday, 12 February 2012 09:31

Anonymous has a busy weekend

broken-lockAnonymous had a rather big weekend starting off with taking down the CIA’s public website cia.gov. This was done through an interesting trick that appeared to be a combination of a DDoS and some DNS tinkering. On the day of the outage the CIA’s website resolved to 192.81.129.107 which when looked up showed as an address belonging to an IP pool in the UK. Once the attack was completed the site resolved to 192.81.129.130 which is undeniably part of the same range, but now shows as a US IP range.  Looking at the evidence this could possibly be a new form of attack from the collective. Unfortunately we just do not have enough information on the subject to be sure and the CIA is not releasing any new information.

Published in News
Friday, 10 February 2012 17:25

Anonymous takes down the CIA's Website UPDATE

anonIt looks like Anonymous has succeeded in taking down the website of the CIA. After announcing a tweet at #YourAnonNews stating that the CIA site was about to go down at around 4:14pm the collective appears to have made good on its threat and announced that the site was officially down at 4:45PM.

It looks like this might be a DNS redirect as the IP that CIA.gov resolves to appear to be from the UK and will not resolve on any reverse lookups... More to follow.

Published in News

News_manstealingdataOk this one goes in the books for being really foolish of Google. Remember how we told you that cutting corners in the coding of Google Wallet allowed a crafty hacker to read the binary data and get your PIN? Well today there is even worse news about the mobile payment application. The new flaw is almost a basic flaw in the OS as well as an application flaw. What’s worse is that this is so simple it does not even count as a hack… and you do not have to have a rooted phone to pull this off.

Published in News

News_manstealingdataThere is an old saying; buy cheap and sell dear that came about in the Carnegie days and has been in use by corporations for so long that it is just the way they do things. What this means now is that corporations will always look for the quick and easy way to do things. This is not a big shocker; after all most companies will want to minimize costs and maximize their profits. Where this hurts the consumer is that many times minimizing costs ends up being translated to security or product quality. A perfect example would be Apple’s move to Foxconn. Yes they reduced their operating costs, but the product quality realistically has gone down. Another place where we see cuts are in security and network protections of user data. A good example of this can be found in Google Wallet.

Published in Editorials

anonThere are just some things that you should not do. One of those is never start a land war in Asia… um sorry wrong article; well one of the others you should never think that dealing with Anonymous is all fun and games, or that the collective can be bought or treated with the same type of disregard as a common criminal. We have been following the spat between Anonymous and Symantec for some time and the feud actually goes back farther than many people think.

Published in News
Thursday, 02 February 2012 09:34

New WiFi Vulnerability Found in Some HTC Phones

3d-11As the mobile market begins to become more and more an everyday lifestyle (how often have you seen someone browsing the web on their phone during your morning commute) we are finding that simple things are being left open to potential attack. These are not new items and are often holes or exploits that have been dealt with in the PC (including Mac) world long ago. Still the mobile market where it is today is a lot like the PC market in its infancy; nothing is really secure and both Apps and OSes have a long way to go before they are truly protected.

Published in News

broken-lockWe have said this before and we will say it again; what can be locked, can be unlocked. We also would like to add that nothing is “secure” unless it is powered off, unplugged and perhaps at the bottom of the ocean. I will never forget the feeling of watching someone remotely open and close the tray on my XboX and that was wired and behind TWO firewalls. Let’s face it all you can really do is minimize the threat and have a good plan to react when something happens.

Published in News
Wednesday, 28 December 2011 07:06

Stratfor Breach shows a much larger issue

broken-lockWhen we first started following the collective that is called Anonymous we noted that there would come a time when any breach or hack would be thrown at their feet. This has now started to happen as the media (who has never really understood the situation) attempts to appear informed on the social hacking that is taking place in the world today. On December 25th the group AntiSec (a group formerly part of Anonymous) hacked into the Strategic Forecasting Website and the servers behind it.

Published in Editorials
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