Monday, September 19, 2011


This could be serious both in potential information loss but also in reputation.
Missile maker sees network hacked
The Reuters news agency said Japanese newspaper Yomiuri reported that information from Mitsubishi's computer system was stolen in the attack. A representative of the company confirmed the attack, Reuters reported, but said the company was still looking into whether any data had been taken.
The Yomiuri report said about 80 infected computers were found at Mitsubishi headquarters in Tokyo and various facilities in other areas of Japan, according to Reuters.


Increasing SPAM results in increased numbers of compromised systems. The question is: What will they be used for?
The unknown explosion of malicious email attachments
Commtouch, the original equipment manufacturer (OEM) for many security vendors dealing with anti-Spam and anti-Malware protections, discovered a massive jump in malicious email attachments last month. Beyond concerns regarding extra volume, the problem is no one seems to know why there was a sudden spike.
Since August, someone unknown - perhaps a group - has been targeting millions of systems worldwide with email containing malicious attachments. However, this isn’t the typical type of Spam, this is direct malware distribution on a mass scale resulting in abnormally high levels of malicious messages.
The pattern has been seen before: Fake messages with malicious attachments alleged to contain details on UPS and FedEx deliveries, credit card charge errors, and so on. Since the fall of the Rustock botnet, Spam levels across the globe have fallen, but, despite that, the volume of malicious email attachments has skyrocketed.
In August, Commtouch’s monitoring points noticed an average of a few hundred million to two billion malicious messages per day. On August 8, that number exploded to 25 billion Malware-laced emails.
“A review of several end-user forums reveals that the email campaigns have been successful – with many users having opened the malware attachments. The infection rate is generally linear – the more malware is emailed, the greater the final number of infections.


“Them pesky illegal immigrants are a problem. Let's make everyone who is not illegal prove it!”
E-Verify: De Facto national ID and the end of privacy
September 19, 2011 by Dissent
John Whitehead has this editorial in Desoto Times Tribune:
As technology grows more sophisticated and the American government and its corporate allies further refine their methods of keeping tabs on citizens, those of us who treasure privacy increasingly find ourselves engaged in a struggle to maintain our freedoms in the midst of the modern surveillance state.
The latest attack on our right to anonymity and privacy comes stealthily packaged in the form of so-called job protection legislation. Introduced by House Judiciary Committee Chairman Lamar Smith (R-Texas) in June 2011, H.R. 2885 (formerly H.R. 2164), the “Legal Workforce Act,” is being marketed as a way to fight illegal immigration and “open up millions of jobs for unemployed Americans and legal immigrants.” [Sure. Bob] However, this proposed federal law is really little more than a Trojan horse, a backdoor attempt by the powers-that-be to inflict a de facto National ID card on the American people.
Read more on Desoto Times Tribune.

(Related) Another way to identify individuals in the herd?
Massive Biometric Project Gives Millions of Indians an ID
Kiran has never touched or even seen a real computer, let alone an iris scanner. She thinks she’s 32, but she’s not sure exactly when she was born. Kiran has no birth certificate, or ID of any kind for that matter—no driver’s license, no voting card, nothing at all to document her existence.
… Now, for the first time, her government is taking note of her. Kiran and her children are having their personal information recorded in an official database—not just any official database, but one of the biggest the world has ever seen. They are the latest among millions of enrollees in India’s Unique Identification project, also known as Aadhaar, which means “the foundation” in several Indian languages. Its goal is to issue identification numbers linked to the fingerprints and iris scans of every single person in India.


This will be important for Windows 8, which assumes touchscreens are everywhere...
"Open up a cardboard tube, roll out a transparent film just millimeters thick, apply it on a flat object and *tada* you've got an interactive touch surface. Cambridge-based Visual Planet just launched its new massive-sized multitouch thin film drivers so you can create touchscreens from 30 to 167 inches in size! Their touchfoil is a transparent nanowire embedded polymer capable of sensing the touch of a finger, or even pressure from wind and translating that to a computer interface. It works on glass, wood, and other non-conductive surfaces."


Interesting, but not enough to drag us out of the recession...
Study: Facebook ‘App Economy’ Adds Over 200K Jobs, Contributes More Than $15B To The U.S. Economy
Although the U.S. employment and jobs economic outlook is bleak, a new study released today reports that Facebook is creating a thriving economy around its social network. According to new research from University of Maryland, the Facebook App Economy has added at least 182,000 new jobs and contributed more than $12.19 billion in wages and benefits to the U.S. economy this year. Using more aggressive estimates, the Facebook App Economy created a total of 235,644 jobs, adding a value of $15.71 billion to the U.S. economy in 2011.
… As we’ve written in the past, 2.5 million websites have integrated with Facebook, and Facebook users install 20 million apps every day. Every month, more than 250 million people engage with Facebook on external websites. Especially with the viral growth of gaming apps, as well as the use of the ‘Like’ button used by brands, more and more developers are building off the Facebook platform to tap into the network’s 700 million-plus userbase.

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