http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/02/07/1957236&from=rss
Houston Courts Shut Down By Malware
Posted by timothy on Saturday February 07, @04:30PM from the full-employment-for-compsec-types dept. Security Technology
Conficker is still at it: dstates writes
"The municipal courts of Houston were shut down yesterday after a computer virus spread through the courts' computer systems. The shutdown canceled hearings and suspended arrests for minor offenses and is expected to extend through Monday. The disruption affected many city departments, the Houston Emergency Center was briefly disconnected and police temporarily stopped making some arrests for minor offenses. The infection appears to be contained to 475 of the city's more than 16,000 computers, but officials are still investigating. Gray Hat Research, a technology security company, has been brought in on an emergency contract to eradicate the infection. In 2006, the City spent $10M to install a new computer system and bring the Courts online, but the system has been beset by multiple problems. After threatening litigation, the city reached a $5 million settlement with the original vendor, Maximus, and may seek another vendor."
[From the article:
Court offices will remain open to allow people to pay tickets and fines... [The government always accepts payment. Bob]
… Janis Benton, the city’s deputy director of information technology, said officials suspected the infection was a form of Conficker...
… Conficker, also known as Downadup, infects computers via a flaw in the Microsoft Windows operating system. Microsoft issued an emergency patch back in October, and PCs that have the patch are protected from the worm. [In other words, if they had followed best practices this never would have happened. Bob]
… However, police this weekend will be using only citations for class C misdemeanors instead of arrests, since they cannot be processed. [“'cause when the computer is down, we don't know what to charge for a Big Mac...” Bob]
… Mayoral spokesman Patrick Trahan said people in jail would be able to make bail, but several bondsmen contacted by the Houston Chronicle were under the impression that no one could be released until Tuesday.
Related
http://news.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/02/08/1233228&from=rss
OpenDNS To Block and Monitor Conficker Worm
Posted by Soulskill on Sunday February 08, @08:22AM from the no-phone-home dept. Networking Security Worms News
Linker3000 writes
"According to The Register, OpenDNS plans to introduce an new service that will prevent PCs infected with the Conficker (aka Downadup) malware from contacting its control servers, and will also make it easy for admins to know if even a single machine under their control has been infected by Conficker: 'Starting Monday, any networks with PCs that try to connect to the Conficker addresses will be flagged on an admin's private statistics page. The service is available for free to both businesses and home users.' With the amount of trouble this worm has caused, perhaps this is a good time to take a look at OpenDNS if you haven't done so already."
One to follow? (It could go beyond nasty comments – see the next article.)
http://www.pogowasright.org/article.php?story=20090207143047420
Lawsuit targets anonymous online comments
Saturday, February 07 2009 @ 02:30 PM EST Contributed by: PrivacyNews
Hundreds of people who posted their opinions of a sexual assault trial in an online forum are now the targets of a lawsuit.
The authors of those comments on the Topix.com Web site thought they were anonymous, but this week, a judge ruled their names should be revealed.
Source - KHOU
Related?
http://www.pogowasright.org/article.php?story=20090208055753277
Prop 8 Donor Web Site Shows Disclosure Law Is 2-Edged Sword
Sunday, February 08 2009 @ 05:57 AM EST Contributed by: PrivacyNews
FOR the backers of Proposition 8, the state ballot measure to stop single-sex couples from marrying in California, victory has been soured by the ugly specter of intimidation.
Some donors to groups supporting the measure have received death threats and envelopes containing a powdery white substance, and their businesses have been boycotted.
The targets of this harassment blame a controversial and provocative Web site, eightmaps.com.
The site takes the names and ZIP codes of people who donated to the ballot measure — information that California collects and makes public under state campaign finance disclosure laws — and overlays the data on a Google map.
Source - NY Times
[From the article:
Eightmaps.com is the latest, most striking example of how information collected through disclosure laws intended to increase the transparency of the political process, magnified by the powerful lens of the Web, may be undermining the same democratic values that the regulations were to promote.
With tools like eightmaps — and there are bound to be more of them — strident political partisans can challenge their opponents directly, one voter at a time. The results, some activists fear, could discourage people from participating in the political process altogether.
Stephen Rynerson sent me this article. I had been receiving e-mails about this but had dismissed them as “urban myth” Looks like I should learn from Stephen and do better job of research!
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/7872299.stm
Parking ticket leads to a virus
Hackers have discovered a new way of duping users onto fraudulent websites: fake parking tickets.
Cars in the US had traffic violation tickets placed on the windscreen, which then directed users to a website.
The website claimed to have photos of the alleged parking violation, but then tricks users into downloading a virus.
Tools & Techniques for hackers. Remember, passwords alone are never enough.
http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/02/07/1628234&from=rss
Passwords From PHPBB Attack Analyzed
Posted by Soulskill on Saturday February 07, @12:19PM from the convenience-trumps-security dept. Security News
Robert David Graham writes
"The hacker who broke into phpbb.com posted the passwords online. I was sent the password list, so I ran it through my analysis tools and posted the results. Nothing terribly surprising here; 123456 and password are the most popular passwords as you would expect. I tried to be a bit more creative in my analysis, though, to get into the psychology of why people choose the passwords they do. '14% of passwords were patterns on the keyboard, like "1234" or "qwerty" or "asdf." There are a lot of different patterns people choose, like "1qaz2wsx" or "1q2w3e." I spent a while googling "159357" trying to figure out how to categorize it, then realized it was a pattern on the numeric keypad. I suppose whereas "1234" is popular among right-hand people, "159357" will be popular among lefties.'"
[From the article:
many passwords are dictionary words.
16% of passwords matched a person's first name.
14% of passwords were patterns on the keyboard
4% are variations of the word "password"
5% of passwords are pop-culture references
4% of passwords appear to reference things nearby
3% of passwords are "emo" words
3% are 'don't care' words
1.3% are passwords people saw in movies/TV
1% are sports related,
All machines used before had good salesmen but no certification. They still won't release their source code, so if “fair and open” isn't part of their sales pitch. What is?
http://news.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/02/07/134248&from=rss
The First Federally Certified Voting System
Posted by Soulskill on Saturday February 07, @09:17AM from the at-least-it's-not-diebold dept. Government
InternetVoting writes
"The Election Assistance Commission has announced the first ever federally certified voting system. While the Election Management System (EMS) 4.0 by MicroVote General Corporation has successfully completed 17 months of testing, many questions still remain about the United States' voting system Testing and Certification program. Many systems are still being tested to obsolete standards, the current standards are set to become obsolete soon and cost estimates for future certifications are skyrocketing. The future of improved innovating voting systems does not look bright."
Related (for contrast)
http://news.cnet.com/8301-1001_3-10159166-92.html?part=rss&subj=news&tag=2547-1_3-0-5
OLPC to laptop makers: Use our design
Posted by Jonathan Skillings February 7, 2009 4:01 PM PST
Speaking at the TED 2009 conference, OLPC founder Nicholas Negroponte said that the future of the initiative--which set out to put simple, durable, low-cost laptops in the hands of schoolchildren in developing nations--is to become, in essence, more commonplace, to "build something that everyone copies," according to Ethan Zuckerman, blogging from TED.
Interesting!
http://news.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/02/08/0116224&from=rss
Tool Shows the Arguments Behind Wikipedia Entries
Posted by timothy on Sunday February 08, @01:01AM from the citation-will-one-day-be-needed dept. The Media The Internet
Al writes
"A team of researchers at the Palo Alto Research Center have created a tool that shows how much argument has gone into crafting an entry. Ed Chi, a senior research scientist for augmented social cognition at PARC, obtained access to Wikipedia edit data and used it to build a tool that shows whether users have fought over the accuracy of a page by rapidly re-editing each other's changes. Experiments suggest that the method provides a better measure of 'controversy' than simply having Wikipedia editors add a warning to a suspect page. Their software, called Wikidashboard, serves up a Wikipedia entry, but adds an info-graphic revealing who has been editing it and how often it has been reedited. Of course, this doesn't reveal whether a Wikipedia entry is truly accurate, but it might at least highlight an underlying bias or vested interest."
[From the article:
Daniel Tunkelang, chief scientist at Endeca, an information analysis firm based in Cambridge, MA, says that the tool is a step toward exploring the social context of Wikipedia entries, but he adds, "There's some room for compressing this into something more consumable."
Video of Bill Gates on malaria and teaching at the TED Conference. (And the release of mosquitoes at his talk)
http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/bill_gates_unplugged.html
Talks Bill Gates: How I'm trying to change the world now
No comments:
Post a Comment