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Friday, February 27, 2009

NSA Should Oversee Cybersecurity, Intel Chief Says

Kim Zetter

Despite the fact that many Americans distrust the National Security Agency for its role in the Bush Administration’s warrantless wiretapping program, the agency should be entrusted with securing the nation’s telecommunications networks and other cyber infrastructures, President Obama’s director of national intelligence told Congress on Wednesday.

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Tuesday, February 3, 2009

Final Guilty Plea Wraps Up Federal “Warez” Crackdown

David Kravets

The final defendant in a five-year-old nationwide piracy crackdown pleaded guilty to criminal copyright infringement Wednesday, admitting to his role in a so-called “warez” club responsible for tens of thousands of unauthorized copies of videogames, software and digital music files.

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Friday, January 9, 2009

Weak Password Brings “Happiness” to Twitter Hacker

Kim Zetter

An 18-year-old hacker with a history of celebrity pranks has admitted to Monday’s hijacking of multiple high-profile Twitter accounts, including President-Elect Barack Obama’s, and the official feed for Fox News. The hacker, who goes by the handle GMZ, told Threat Level on Tuesday he gained entry to Twitter’s administrative control panel by pointing an automated password-guesser at a popular user’s account. The user turned out to be a member of Twitter’s support staff, who’d chosen the weak password “happiness.”

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Monday, November 10, 2008

Extortion Plot Threatens to Divulge Millions of Patients’ Prescriptions

David Kravets

A St. Louis company managing prescription benefits of 50 million people said Thursday it called the FBI to investigate an extortion plot threatening to expose personal information, including prescriptions, of millions of its clients.

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Friday, November 7, 2008

Obama and McCain Campaign Systems Were Hacked

Kim Zetter

Newsweek is reporting that computer networks of both the Obama and McCain campaigns were the targets of a sophisticated cyberattack in the run-up to the general election and, in the Obama case, “a serious amount of files” were downloaded from the system.

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Wednesday, October 15, 2008

Google Profiting From Typo-Squatting, Report Charges

David Kravetz

Google is profiting from millions of typo-squatting Web sites that earn advertising from Google’s AdSense advertising program, Harvard University professor Ben Edelman says.

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Tuesday, October 14, 2008

Cybercrime Supersite “DarkMarket” Was FBI Sting, Documents Confirm

Kevin Poulsen

DarkMarket.ws, an online watering hole for thousands of identify thieves, hackers and credit card swindlers, has been secretly run by an FBI cybercrime agent for the last two years, until its voluntary shutdown earlier this month, according to documents unearthed by a German radio network.

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Monday, October 6, 2008

Supremes Mull Whether Bad Databases Make for Illegal Searches

Ryan Singel

If a false entry in a database leads to a unconstitutional police search that reveals illegal drugs, does the government get to hold it against you?
That’s the question the Supreme Court will tackle on Tuesday.

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Monday, September 22, 2008

Comcast Discloses Throttling Practices–BitTorrent Targeted

David Kravets

Comcast came clean with the Federal Communications Commission late Friday, detailing how it throttled and targeted peer-to-peer traffic–maneuvers it has repeatedly denied.
The cable concern said it indeed hit “particular protocols that were generating disproportionate amounts of traffic.”

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Friday, August 22, 2008

Nonprofit Distributes File Sharing Propaganda to 50,000 U.S. Students

David Kravets

Propaganda is probably too light of a term to describe this piece of propaganda.
We’re referring to an educational comic strip (fat .pdf) on unlawful file sharing of music developed by judges and professors to teach students about the law and the courtroom experience.

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Friday, August 15, 2008

Boston Subway Board Member Delivers Scathing Criticism: “System Is a Mess”

Kim Zetter

A member of the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority’s board seized a report by three MIT students about flaws with the Boston subway’s fare collection system and delivered a scathing indictment of the subway system and its general manager, calling the system “a mess” and saying she had “lost all confidence” in the system’s general manager, Daniel A. Grabauskas.

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Wednesday, May 28, 2008

I’m Not a Superdelegate, but I Play One on the Internet

Sarah Lai Stirland

Like any of the 796 superdelegates in this highly charged presidential-election cycle, Tom Ryan says he’s taking his responsibility of choosing a Democratic nominee for president very seriously.
So seriously that the putative candidate for mayor of Scranton, Pa., has posted several YouTube videos describing what it’s like to be a superdelegate.

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Monday, March 31, 2008

Hackers Assault Epilepsy Patients via Computer

Kevin Poulsen

Internet griefers descended on an epilepsy support message board last weekend and used JavaScript code and flashing computer animation to trigger migraine headaches and seizures in some users. The nonprofit Epilepsy Foundation, which runs the forum, briefly closed the site Sunday to purge the offending messages and to boost security.

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Friday, March 7, 2008

Whistle-Blower: Feds Have a High-Speed Backdoor Into Wireless Carrier

Kevin Poulsen

A U.S. government office in Quantico, Virginia, has direct, high-speed access to a major wireless carrier’s systems, exposing customers’ voice calls, data packets and physical movements to uncontrolled surveillance, according to a computer security consultant who says he worked for the carrier in late 2003. “What I thought was alarming is how this carrier ended up essentially allowing a third party outside their organization to have unfettered access to their environment,” Babak Pasdar, now CEO of New York-based Bat Blue told Threat Level. “I wanted to put some access controls around it; they vehemently denied it. And when I wanted to put some logging around it, they denied that.”

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