http://www.databreaches.net/?p=7835
PayChoice Suffers Another Data Breach
October 16, 2009 by admin Filed under Breach Incidents, Financial Sector, Hack, U.S.
Brian Krebs reports:
Payroll services provider PayChoice took its Web-based service offline for the second time in a month on Wednesday in response to yet another data breach caused by hackers.
Moorestown, N.J. based PayChoice, provides direct payroll processing services and licenses its online employee payroll management product to at least 240 other payroll processing firms, serving 125,000 organizations. On Thursday morning, the company sent a notice to its customers saying it had once again closed onlineemployer.com – the portal for PayChoice’s online payroll service — this time after some clients began noticing bogus employees being added to their payroll.
Read more on Security Fix.
Detailing some of the complexity. The computer stuff is easy, but conversion (getting the cash) seems to still trip these guys up.
http://www.databreaches.net/?p=7833
London cyber criminals face jail over Natwest fraud
October 15, 2009 by admin Filed under Breach Incidents, Financial Sector, ID Theft, Malware, Non-U.S.
Asavin Wattanajantra reports:
London-based cyber criminals face jail after siphoning off £600,000 from bank customers with a trojan virus.
According to a report in the West Sussex County Times, the criminals used a trojan to infected computers, which waited until a user logged onto an account and then slithered its way into online cash transfer procedures.
Shown a page with a faked Natwest logo and a message that it was an additional security measure, victims would be persuaded to type in passwords, PIN numbers and telephone numbers.
The virus would allow users to continue normally, but was secretly creating new payee details to siphon the cash into mule accounts, and then to Eastern Europe.
According to the report, 138 customers were affected with £600,000 transferred. Natwest managed to recoup £140,000 after the scam was uncovered.
Read more on IT Pro. Thanks to Brian Honan for this link.
(Related) Long article on virus trends.
http://www.sbpost.ie/technology/the-virus-evolution-44744.html
The virus evolution
04 October 2009
Big Brother is kinky? If it doesn't create a true image, why the fuss? Are we falling afoul of the “cartoon animal” section of the law again?
http://www.pogowasright.org/?p=4565
Manchester Airport rethinks strip-scanner for kids
October 15, 2009 by Dissent Filed under Non-U.S., Surveillance, Youth
John Ozimek reports:
Manchester Airport will be taking legal advice on proposals to send children through its new X-ray scanners.
This is a change from its position, reported in The Register yesterday, that they did not believe the images created by the new scanning technology (the slightly unfortunately named Rapiscan) would fall foul of child pornography laws, because they use X-rays and therefore “they do not make an image”.
Read more on The Register.
Thanks to Brian Honan for this link.
Cyber-war Evidence of the capabilities of government sponsored hackers.
http://yro.slashdot.org/story/09/10/15/1910229/China-Strangles-Tor-Ahead-of-National-Day?from=rss
China Strangles Tor Ahead of National Day
Posted by timothy on Thursday October 15, @03:41PM from the not-so-much-into-liberty-y'see dept.
TechReviewAl writes
"Technology Review reports that the Chinese government has for the first time targeted the Tor anonymity network. In the run-up to China's National Day celebrations, the government started targeting the sites used to distribute Tor addresses and the number of users inside China dropped from tens of thousands to near zero. The move is part of a broader trend that involves governments launching censorship crackdowns around key dates. The good news is that many Tor users quickly found a way around the attack, distributing 'bridge' addresses via IM and Twitter."
Tools & Techniques What can computer forensics tell us?
The pocket spy: Will your smartphone rat you out?
14 October 2009 by Linda Geddes
How much is a reputation worth? Stay tuned!
MS Says All Sidekick Data Recovered, But Damage Done
Posted by timothy on Thursday October 15, @02:58PM from the small-favors dept.
nandemoari writes
"T-Mobile is taking a huge financial hit in the fallout over the Sidekick data loss. But Microsoft, which bears at least part of the responsibility for the mistake, is paying the price with its reputation. As reported earlier this week, the phone network had to admit that some users' data had been permanently lost due to a problem with a server run by Microsoft-owned company Danger. The handset works by storing data such as contacts and appointments on a remote computer rather than on the phone itself. [Cloud computing Bob] BBC news reports today that Microsoft has in fact recovered all data, but a minority are still affected (out of 1 million subscribers). Amidst this, Microsoft appears not to have suffered any financial damage. However, it seems certain that its relationship with T-Mobile will have taken a major knock. The software giant is also the target of some very bad publicity as critics question how on earth it failed to put in place adequate back-ups of the data. That could seriously damage the potential success of the firm's other 'cloud computing' plans, such as web-only editions of Office."
Looks like Toyota is taking a lesson from Sony: When in trouble, dig yourself deeper!
Toyota Claims Woman "Opted In" To Faux Email Stalking
Posted by timothy on Thursday October 15, @04:37PM from the give-marketing-new-prescriptions dept.
An anonymous reader writes
"ABC News is reporting that a California woman is suing Toyota for $10 million for sending her email that appeared to be from a criminal stalker. The woman claims the emails terrified her to the point that she suffered sleeplessness, poor work performance, etc. Toyota says the ruse was part of a marketing campaign for the Toyota Matrix. A Toyota spokesman says they are not liable for the woman's distress, because 'The person who made this claim specifically opted in, granting her permission to receive campaign emails and other communications from Toyota.'" [Do emails with no indication they are ads from Toyota count? Bob]
A raw (not annotated) database of law. Lexis and Westlaw would just point to the actual text of the law rather than keep their own copies. Business opportunity: create a shell that allows subject experts to comment/annotate/interpret their areas of expertise.
http://www.bespacific.com/mt/archives/022580.html
October 15, 2009
Law.Gov: America's Operating System, Open Source
Law.Gov: America's Operating System, Open Source - by Carl Malamud
"Public.Resource.Org is very pleased to announce that we're going to be working with a distinguished group of colleagues from across the country to create a solid business plan, technical specs, and enabling legislation for the federal government to create Law.Gov. We envision Law.Gov as a distributed, open source, authenticated registry and repository of all primary legal materials in the United States. More details on the effort are available on our Law.Gov page."
Perhaps the Old School can learn something from the Internet generation?
http://www.bespacific.com/mt/archives/022578.html
October 15, 2009
WSJ Claims Title to Number 1 U.S. Newspaper in Circulation
AP: The Wall Street Journal surpasses USA Today as top-selling US daily
See also, Huffington Post Passes WashingtonPost.com in Unique Visitors, in September, and in the same E&P article, the "list of top 30 current events and global news destinations for the month of September ranked by unique users..."
This has potential!
http://homeworkday.wolframalpha.com/
Wolfram|Alpha Homework Day announced
Wolfram|Alpha Homework Day, a live interactive web event starting at noon CDT on Wednesday, October 21, 2009.
We are proud to announce today some of the highlights we have planned for Homework Day, including:
* Several interactive segments where Stephen Wolfram and the Wolfram|Alpha Team help you tackle tough homework problems
* Step-by-step tutorials for educators by educators demonstrating how to integrate Wolfram|Alpha into the classroom
* Vibrant panel discussions about Wolfram|Alpha and the future of education
More details about Homework Day and how you can participate are available on the Wolfram|Alpha Homework Day home page: http://homeworkday.com
One to evaluate later. If one “Pipe” isn't providing enough bandwidth, how can you us many pipes as if they were one? The responses are quite interesting. (Also provides communications redundancy!)
http://ask.slashdot.org/story/09/10/15/2220228/Affordably-Aggregating-ISP-Connections?from=rss
Affordably Aggregating ISP Connections?
Posted by timothy on Thursday October 15, @07:01PM from the glob-glob-glob dept.
An anonymous reader writes
"Has anyone setup a system to aggregate multiple ISP connections to form a high bandwidth site-to-site link? Load Sharing SCTP looked interesting, but it doesn't look like it has been widely adopted. Multi-Link PPP appears to be more widely supported for clients, but I can't find any good guides for setting up both sides of the connection for a site-to-site link. The hardware solutions I've found are expensive for a small business. Does anyone have experience using hardware solutions from Mushroom Networks (Virtual Leased Line, p2 of this document), Ecessa (site-to-Site Channel Bonding), or others?"
Perhaps I'll require my website students to do this...
http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/create-a-picture-slideshow-movie-with-photofilmstrip/
Turn Your Pictures Into A Movie With PhotoFilmStrip
Oct. 16th, 2009 By Karl L. Gechlik
… You can start by either dragging and dropping your pictures onto the top left portion of the screen which you can see in the screenshot below:
… After starting the process you will see your options for creating your video. Among them are the quality of the video profile. There is VCD all the way up to HD video. Obviously the better the quality the longer it will take to render and the larger the final output file will be.
You can set the length of the video and if you are going that route you can set up an audio file to play along with the video.
In Colorado, we use small children rather than digital cameras. Maybe he didn't have a younger brother...
Australian Student Balloon Rises 100,000 Feet, With a Digital Camera
Posted by timothy on Thursday October 15, @11:11PM from the shame-about-the-iso-setting dept.
hype7 writes
"An Australian student at Deakin University had a fascinating idea for a final project — to send a balloon up 100,000ft (~30,000 metres) into the stratosphere with a digital camera attached. The university was supportive, and the project took shape. Although there were some serious hitches along the way, the project was successful, and he managed to retrieve the balloon — with the pictures. What's really amazing is that the total cost was so low; the most expensive part was buying the helium gas for approximately AUD$250 (~USD$200)."
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