Facebook Video Calls powered by Skype

With Facebook’s launch of video chat powered by Skype underway and enabling a new level of communication on its platform, we take a look at permission settings and privacy options.

Google: your private profile – now public

Google, in an effort to get more squarely into the center of the social networking scene, is implementing a system where private profiles you may have created in Gmail will become public after July 31, or you risk account deletion. While the information on the profile that is made public will be limited initially, the

The more things change, the more they stay the same

It’s something of a truism, that ‘old viruses never die’, and that certainly seems to be the case for some of the older, more widespread, email worms. In this interview (http://www.signonsandiego.com/uniontrib/20041129/news_lz1b29five.html) back in 2004, I talked about an email worm called “Win32/Zafi.b” which, at the time, had recently been spreading on a global scale. However,

Arizona DPS: hacked again – still – really?

On Wednesday we heard additional documents had been leaked from the Arizona Department of Public Safety (DPS). “Will this ever end?” has to be the most commonly-asked question in Arizona nowadays at the DPS. The original attacks last week were claimed by the group LulzSec, which was making the rounds exposing private information through hacking

Facebook Facial Recognition – A picture is worth a thousand words

Facebook recently launched a facial recognition feature that allows you and others to “tag” photos with your name. As has been the norm for Facebook, this “feature” is turned on by default and users must take their own initiative to limit, or turn it off. The implications are wide-ranging, so if you or anyone in

Windows Rootkit Requires Reinstall?

In a ComputerWorld article Gregg Kaiser cites a Microsoft engineer as saying that the trojan that Microsoft calls “Popureb” digs so deeply that the only way to eradicate it is to reinstall the operating system. If you read the Microsoft blog Feng didn’t actually say that this is the only way to eradicate the trojan.

SCADA still scary

“Infrastructure Attacks: The Next Generation?” now includes the speaker notes, which hopefully makes it more interesting and useful.

White House to double jail time for hackers?

The Obama administration seems intent on pushing for stiffer sentences for hackers caught endangering national security to 20 years prison time, doubling the current sentence. A stiff penalty, to be sure, the latest in a series of volleys from D.C. to curb the flurry of recent high-profile attacks and restore confidence in the U.S. Government’s

LinkedIn Privacy: An Easy How‑to Guide to Protecting Yourself

Introduction LinkedIn is a social network platform whose specialty is connecting professionals together to build relationships and create business opportunity. Recently the company became publicly traded and grabbed the attention of the world as its initial public stock offering more than doubled on the first day. Here we focus tools and options for user privacy

419: UK lets the Good Times Roll

…It’s a 419 (Advance Fee Fraud) message, of course. Stripped of the pseudo-governmental flim-flam, the core of the message is that they want you to forward them this…

#1 Bitcoin Exchange Data Breached

Mt. Gox, the most popular Bitcoin exchange, has had a database compromised and user information stolen, sparking rapid devaluation and temporary exchange freeze to halt the slide. According to a Mt. Gox breach notification e-mail sent to users on June 19th: “Our database has been compromised, including your email. We are working on a quick

Got Hacked? You have 48 hours to fess up

Or so the current legislation being proposed in a U.S. House of Representative subcommittee would like it. A hearing scheduled for today at the House Energy and Commerce Committee’s Commerce, Manufacturing, and Trade Subcommittee centered around draft legislation proposed by Rep. Mary Bono Mack (R-Calif.) hoping to accomplish a security baseline companies must adhere to,

I Can Neither Confirm nor Deny

As website appear to fall to hacks like the rain falls in Seattle, the question du jour doesn’t change from day to day. The same question is always asked… “Did Anonymous perform the attack?” What do all of these links below have in common? You don’t have to read them, I’ll tell you.. http://sdchamber-members.org/Business%20Online%202009-10/Business%20Action%20Online%20May%202010/Business%20Action%20Online%20May%20ESET.html http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/03/17/scientology_anonymous_round_three/

The Next Stuxnet

…the ‘next Stuxnet’ probably won’t be any such thing, whatever we may choose to call it…

Why the IMF breach?

In the absence of any detailed information from the IMF itself, it’s not surprising that most of the surmise around the attack is based on internal IMF memos quoted by Bloomberg, and much of it is rather tenuous.

LulzSec lulls the NHS: not such bad lads?

…on the Twitter account owned by LulzSec that they had turned their attention to the NHS. Curiously enough, they seem to have been restrained and even responsible: while there’s an image out there of a message they claim to have sent to an administrator at an unidentified NHS site, they blacked out the details.

A Nice Pair of Breaches

…here’s a blog in stark contrast to Urban Schrott’s blog about good password practice in Ireland … Troy Hunt ran an analysis of the subset of stolen Sony Pictures passwords put out as a torrent by those nice boys at LulzSec, some 37,608 of them…

Passwords, passphrases and past caring

First: a link to another article  for SC Magazine’s Cybercrime Corner on password issues: Good passwords are no joke. However good your password is, your privacy still depends on rational implementation by the service provider. Also, one of the articles that sparked off that particular post: ESET Ireland’s excellent blog post on a survey carried

Bitcoin: P2P underground cyber currency?

Bitcoins, a self-generated hash-based peer-to-peer currency with no centralized regulating body, are on a stratospheric trajectory, will it replace traditional legal tender as the currency of choice for cyber-nastiness? First, a little background. Bitcoins first surfaced in a white paper purportedly by Satoshi Nakamoto. While no one can trace his (her) exact identity, it seems

North Korea’s Overseas Cyber Warrior Training

It appears North Korea is expanding their cyber warrior savvy in a plan that includes sending the best and brightest of young programmers abroad to bone up on hacking, with the alleged goal of holding their own in cyber warfare. On the heels of the recent Pentagon announcement where cyber terrorism acts may be met