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Security

Submission + - Exploits Against New Adobe Flash Zero Day (krebsonsecurity.com)

Submitted by
krebsonsecurity
krebsonsecurity writes: "Attackers are exploiting a previously unknown security flaw in Adobe's ubiquitous Flash Player software to launch targeted attacks, Krebsonsecurity.com reports. The attacks come less than three weeks after Adobe issued a critical update to fix a different Flash flaw that crooks were similarly exploiting to install malicious software. The attack so far have embedded malicious Flash elements inside of Microsoft Word files. Adobe said it is investigating the attacks, and plans to issue an advisory today."
Facebook

Submission + - Winklevii Lose Legal War With Facebook (foxnews.com)

Submitted by Velcroman1
Velcroman1 writes: The billionaire's battle over the founding of Facebook is finally over. The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals said Monday that Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss — the former Harvard University classmates of Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg — can't undo their settlement over the social networking site. The appeals court ruled that the twins were savvy enough to understand what they were agreeing to when they signed the agreement in 2008, a deal that called for a $20 million cash payment and a partial ownership of Facebook.

The twins had alleged they were misled about Facebook's value when they agreed to settle their lawsuit that claimed Zuckerberg stole their idea to launch Facebook.

Submission + - File sharing case argued in appelate court (boston.com) 1

Submitted by luge
luge writes: Harvard students, along with Prof. Charlie "eon" Nesson, took the next step in Joel Tennenbaum's case against the RIAA this week, presenting their arguments on the unconstitutionality of huge copyright damages to a panel of the First Circuit Court of Appeals (one level below the Supreme Court.) Serious junkies can hear the audio recording of the discussion here. This is an appeal of last summer's ruling, which reduced Tennenbaum's damages — to $2,000 per song. The appellate court's ruling could come in a few months.

Comment Re:They Authorised The Charge (Score 1) 173

by krebsonsecurity (#33052398) Attached to: Rogue Anti-Virus Victims Rarely Fight Back
Everything you said is true and makes sense. However, what we are dealing with here are by-design fly-by-night companies that are in existence long enough to snag a few thousand victims, and then they vanish into thin air. There is no recourse in those cases for the victim/customer to obtain redress from the "company" that sold the bogus product: It simply doesn't exist anymore. And it's not like this is an accident: This is all part of the plan. If the so-called businesses spreading rogue anti-virus had to stay in business for more than a few weeks, they'd go broke from all the chargeback fees. The question is, who pays those chargeback fees when the company that incurred them is no more?
Security

Submission + - Rogue Anti-virus Victims Rarely Fight Back (krebsonsecurity.com)

Submitted by krebsonsecurity
krebsonsecurity writes: One big reason why rogue anti-virus continues to make major bucks for scam artists? Relatively few victims ever ask their credit card company or bank to reverse the charges for the phony security software — even when the victims don't even receive the worthless software they were promised. I recently found several caches of data for affiliates of a rogue anti-virus distribution program, and the data showed that in one set of attacks only 367 out of more than 2,000 scammed disputed the charge. A second rogue anti-virus campaign scammed more than 1,600 people, and yet fewer than 10 percent fought the charges.
Security

Submission + - German Fraud Forum Carders.cc Exposed (krebsonsecurity.com)

Submitted by krebsonsecurity
krebsonsecurity writes: Carders.cc, a German online forum dedicated to helping criminals trade and sell financial data stolen through hacking, has itself been hacked, writes Krebsonsecurity.com. From the story: "The once-guarded contents of its servers are now being traded on public file-sharing networks, leading to the exposure of potentially identifying information on the forum’s users as well as countless passwords and credit card accounts swiped from unsuspecting victims." The data posted onto Rapidshare includes the e-mail and IP address of each user, in addition to what appears to be all of the public and private communications among forum users.

Submission + - Does an Associates Matter Anymore?

Submitted by n2kzo1
n2kzo1 writes: Dear Slashdotters; Does an “associates” degree matter anymore? Specifically does it matter in my situation; I work in the tech industry, but I didn’t get my college degree back in my 20’s. Last year (and almost a year before that) I started going to an adult-oriented online college. (My employer has been reimbursing my class costs, as I finish each class.) However, the online college put me onto a bachelors track and told me I didn’t need an associates. (By the way I’ve been in the tech industry for about 15 years, and have several tech-certs.) I’ve taken about 6 months off from the online college to pursue another (more demanding) technical certification. Soon I will be returning to online college classes. I’ve only completed about 30% of my bachelors. I was thinking of asking the online college to switch me to an associates track, and I’m guessing I would only need a few more classes to finish that, and then I could go back to my bachelors track later. But, in my situation, does the “associates” degree even matter? Or should I just continue getting my bachelors and forget about the associates? Eventually I would like to someday complete a masters degree. I’m in the US, and the bachelors would be a Bachelors of Science in Business Administration. p.s. – There may be several hours in-between my responses (here), because this site is blocked at my job.
Robotics

Submission + - Tony Robbins, Sergey Brin Become Robots (singularityhub.com)

Submitted by kkleiner
kkleiner writes: If you are like me, you have been somewhat skeptical of the whole telepresence robot idea. Yet after seeing Sergey Brin and Tony Robbins attend a recent Xprize event via Willow Garage's Texai telepresence robot, consider me convinced that the telepresence robot revolution is indeed for real. In the future, individuals will probably be able to rent out time on telepresence robots at events all over the world.

Submission + - Obama sends nuclear experts to tackle BP oil spill (telegraph.co.uk) 1

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: The US has sent a team of nuclear physicists to help BP plug the "catastrophic" flow of oil into the Gulf of Mexico from its leaking Deepwater Horizon well, as the Obama administration becomes frustrated with the oil giant's inability to control the situation. The five-man team – which includes a man who helped develop the first hydrogen bomb in the 1950s – is the brainchild of Steven Chu, President Obama's Energy Secretary.
Idle

Submission + - US Postman Hoarded Over 20,000 Letters (bbc.co.uk)

Submitted by calmofthestorm
calmofthestorm writes: Some 20,000 pieces of mail — many more than a decade old — have been recovered from a postman's garage in the US city of Philadelphia. The FBI said it took more than three postal vans to remove the mail. Investigators are still trying to find the postman so they can question him.

Submission + - Google to offer encrypted searches next week (cnet.com)

Submitted by John Jorsett
John Jorsett writes: CNet reports that, embarrassed by the revelation that its Street View program had improperly collected usage data from WiFi hot spots, Google attempted to repair its image by announcing Friday that it would begin offering an encrypted version of its search service next week.
Security

Submission + - Phish Targets Seize on Teachable Moments (krebsonsecurity.com)

Submitted by krebsonsecurity
krebsonsecurity writes: An increasing number of phished brands are not only disabling the fraudulent sites, but also seizing on the opportunity to teach would-be victims how to spot future scams, writes Krebsonsecurity.com. From the story: "From Sept. 2008 to April 2010, Hong tracked 1.16 million hits from roughly 15,000 unique redirected URLs. To filter out probable victims from other “noise” traffic — such as random Web crawlers and people testing the landing pages — researchers at Carnegie Mellon University scrubbed the data of hits that didn’t identify the original phishing site, as well as those that appeared to be for testing only (Internet addresses that hit multiple phishing URLs per day, for example). After filtering the results, Hong said his team found roughly 200,000 hits on 1,285 URLs — or about 156 hits per URL — that were very likely clicks from people who would have given away financial data and/or passwords at phishing."

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