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Crime

Hacker Took Over BBC Server, Tried To Sell Access On Christmas Day 41

Posted by samzenpus from the you're-a-mean-one dept.
An anonymous reader writes in with this story about a hacker that took over a BBC server during the Christmas holiday. "A hacker secretly took over a computer server at the BBC, Britain's public broadcaster, and then launched a Christmas Day campaign to convince other cyber criminals to pay him for access to the system. While it is not known if the hacker found any buyers, the BBC's security team responded to the issue on Saturday and believes it has secured the site, according to a person familiar with the cleanup effort. A BBC spokesman declined to discuss the incident. 'We do not comment on security issues,' he said."

Submission + - Hacker took over BBC server, tried to 'sell' access on Christmas Day

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: A hacker secretly took over a computer server at the BBC, Britain's public broadcaster, and then launched a Christmas Day campaign to convince other cyber criminals to pay him for access to the system.

It was not clear how the BBC, the world's oldest and largest broadcaster, uses that site, ftp.bbc.co.uk.
News

Police Forensics Team Salvage Blind Authors' Inkless Novel Pages 100

Posted by samzenpus from the show-your-work dept.
Blind author Trish Vickers wrote 26 pages of her novel's first chapter when her son noticed she was writing without ink. Her manuscript was saved however after they took it to the Dorset Police department. A forensic team there worked on it in their spare time, and after 5 months they were able to recover the lost pages. Vickers said: “I think they used a combination of various lights at different angles to see if they could get the impression made by my pen. I am so happy, pleased and grateful. It was really nice of them and I want to thank them for helping me out.”
Censorship

Indian Man Charged With Blasphemy For Exposing "Miracle" 796

Posted by samzenpus from the smoke-and-mirrors dept.
bhagwad writes "When a statue in Mumbai began to miraculously drip tears, huge crowds began to gather, pray, and collect the water in vials. Sanal Edamaruku has exposed such bogus miracles before, and when he was called in, his investigations showed that it was nothing more than a nearby drainage. The entire investigation was caught on tape. The priests were outraged and demanded an apology. When he refused, a case of 'blasphemy' was registered at the police station and they now want to have him arrested." In related news, today Kuwait's parliament "passed amendments to the Gulf state's penal code stipulating the death penalty for those who curse God, Islam's Prophet Mohammed or his wives." However, they made no change to the penalty for playing a joke national anthem at a sporting event.
Crime

University of Pittsburgh Deluged With Internet Bomb Threats 238

Posted by timothy from the other-than-that-how-was-your-valentine's-mr-moran? dept.
An anonymous reader writes "The University of Pittsburgh has been plagued with 78 bomb threats (and counting) since February 14. It started low-tech, with handwritten notes, but has progressed to anonymous emails. Nearly every campus building has been a target. The program suspected is anonymous mailer Mixmaster. The university has been evacuating each building when threats come in (day or night), and police departments from around Allegheny County have offered assistance with clearing each building floor by floor with bomb sniffing dogs. There is a popular tracking blog set up by a student as well as a growing Reddit community. Is there any foreseeable defense (forensic or socially engineered) to a situation like this?"
Australia

The Story Behind Australia's CSIRO Wi-Fi Claims 161

Posted by timothy from the upside-down-land dept.
An anonymous reader writes "U.S. consumers will be making a multimillion dollar donation to an Australian government agency in the near future, whether they like it or not. After the resolution of a recent lawsuit, practically every wireless-enabled device sold in the U.S. will now involve a payment to an Australian research organization called the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization, or CSIRO, which hired U.S. patent lawyers who told a very lucrative tale in an East Texas courtroom, that they had '[invented] the concept of wireless LAN ... [and] when the IEEE adopted the 802.11a standard in 1999 — and the more widely-used 802.11g standard years later — the group was choosing CSIRO technology. Now CSIRO had come to court to get the payments it deserved.'"
EU

Apple Sued By Belgian Consumer Association For Not Applying EU Warranty Laws 290

Posted by Unknown Lamer from the regulation-is-only-ok-if-it-benefits-us dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Following the recent Italian case, Apple is now being sued by the Belgian consumer association 'Test-Achats' (french/dutch website) for not applying the EU consumer protection laws by only giving a one-year warranty on its products. At the same time, Apple is not only refusing to give the mandatory two-year warranty but is also selling the additional year of warranty with its Applecare products. If the consumer association wins its case, Apple could be forced to refund Applecare contracts to its Belgian customers while providing the additional year of warranty for free."
Data Storage

Coming Soon: Ubiquitous Long-Term Surveillance From Big Brother 191

Posted by Soulskill from the tinfoil-sales-skyrocket dept.
alphadogg writes "As the price of digital storage drops and the technology to tap electronic communication improves, authoritarian governments will soon be able to perform retroactive surveillance on anyone within their borders, according to a Brookings Institute report. These regimes will store every phone call, instant message, email, social media interaction, text message, movements of people and vehicles and public surveillance video and mine it at their leisure, according to 'Recording Everything: Digital Storage as an Enabler of Authoritarian Government,' written by John Villaseno, a senior fellow at Brookings and a professor of electrical engineering at UCLA."

Submission + - How to get non-developers to send meaningful bug r 2

Submitted by DemonGenius
DemonGenius writes: I'm in the midst of a major rollout of one of our primary internal applications at work and we have a beta version available for all the staff to use. The problem here is most of the staff don't know how to send reports meaningful enough to get us devs started on solving their problems without constant back and forth correspondence that wastes both developer time and theirs. Some common examples are: screenshots of the YSOD that don't include the page URL, scaled screenshots that are unreadable, the complaint that wants to be a bug report but is still just a complaint, etc. FYI, from the user's perspective they just send an email, but that email registers in our tracking system. Any thoughts on how to get the non-devs sending us descriptive and/or meaningful reports? Does anyone here have an efficient and user-friendly bug tracking system/policy/standard at their workplace and how does it work?

Comment Re:Define professionals? (Score 1) 556

by jclarke (#37747442) Attached to: Is Apple Pushing Away Professionals?

Bzzt. Try again.

http://www.crucial.com/store/mpartspecs.aspx?mtbpoid=60826169A5CA7304

That's, as of this posting, $339.99 for two 8GB DDR3 ECC DIMMS for the current-generation Mac Pro. To get to your precious 64G goal, you'd buy four of those two-dimm bundles which would total $1359.96 before taxes and shipping. And that's prices a well-known seller, without whatever coupons might be offered. I'm sure there's a newegg deal or something that'd make it even less. But that's "retail" right there. A far cry from your claimed "more than 5k by itself."

Comment Re:NASA and cards (Score 1) 44

by jclarke (#37671822) Attached to: German Researchers Crack Mifare RFID Encryption

the FIPS201 PIV (HSPD12) cards you refer to can be used for contactless authentication in a number of ways:
1. CHUID (easily duplicated, no authentication required to read from the card)
2. CAK (PKI validation of the card itself)
3. PKI (PKI validation of the cert issued to the person, stored on the card)
4. BIO (on card or off card matching of fingerprints)

3+4 = awesome stuff. if they can do it. i'd be surprised if they are using this for their doors. it's a ton of equipment, labor, time for end users, money, and burden for getting through a door.
1 = horrific, LESS secure than mifare or desfire or prox. i believe someone at Defcon was sniffing and playing these on a wall-of-sheep sort of display in '08 or '09

now. wanna know how most organizations are doing contactless access control with their HSPD-12 cards? they get them manufactured with a mifare or desfire inlay inside, instead of the contactless antenna for the PIV electronics. and they can even go further and have a PIV+Mifare+Prox card or PIV+Desfire+Prox card by putting a oldschool 125khz prox inlay inside as well (different frequencies, so no interference)

to the outsider or layperson it looks like your super-sexy PIV card is doing everything. In reality, it's the same old tech sandwiched in the middle of your PIV card.

not saying this is the case at NASA, i have no knowledge of their PIV deployment. But this is how it's done elsewhere.....

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