Monday, January 21, 2013

If you drop a frog in boiling water, he will leap out. Put him in room temperature water and slowly raise it to a boil and you have... boiled frog.”
Eugene Kaspersky And Mikko Hypponen Talk Red October And The Future Of Cyber Warfare At DLD
What is the consequence of cyber warfare slowly becoming increasingly common? That was the basic question that guided the DLD keynotes of Eugene Kaspersky, the co-founder of security company Kaspersky Lab, and F-Secure‘s chief research officer Mikko Hypponen.
… Asked about the highly targeted and personalized Red October attack, both Hypponen and Kaspersky currently seem to assume that it was a state-sponsored attack, especially given that it took a good amount of traditional espionage to target the embassies, European Union agencies and space and nuclear research centers around the world the malware attacked over the last few years. Still where it came from remains unclear, especially because it attacked sites in a multitude of countries. This, too, leads Kaspersky to believe that it wasn’t developed by Russia. Red October, after all, attacked a number of sites in Russia. In his view, it could be from Israel, a hacktivist group, or, he speculated, maybe the secret services of different countries were customers of a group of sophisticated hackers.
As for cyber warfare in general, one thing Hypponen especially stressed is the difference between cyber espionage and cyber warfare. Spying, said Hypponen, is not warfare. “Warfare is something different,” he said. “It’s when you start using malware, viruses and backdoors to target our critical infrastructure.”


Perhaps there is no safe way for an individual to “blow the whistle?”
"In what appears to be a more-and-more common occurrence, Ahmed Al-Khabez has been expelled from Dawson College in Montreal after he discovered a flaw in the software that the college (and apparently all other colleges across Quebec) uses to track student information. His original intention was to write a mobile app to allow students to access their college account more easily, but during the development of his app he discovered 'sloppy coding' that would allow anyone to access all of the information that the system contains about any student. He was initially ordered to sign a non-disclosure agreement stating that he would never talk about the flaw that he discovered, and he was expelled from the college shortly afterward."


Even ranting liberal comics are noticing? What is this world coming to?
Kevin Cirilli reports:
Liberal comic Bill Maher said Friday that Americans aren’t losing their Second Amendment rights — just “all the other ones,” and then compared the country to a strip club without strippers.
“It’s not your Second Amendment rights that are under attack — it’s all the other ones,” Maher said on HBO’s “Real Time” on Friday, citing online privacy laws, search warrants and airport screenings.
Read more on Poitico.


Best model ever or not, there looks to be a demand.
Kim Dotcom's new "Mega" cloud service appears to be a hit. According to Dotcom over 1 million have signed up for their free 50 gigabytes of storage. Although that is about 1% of the Dropbox user base, it's not a bad start. From the article: "Mega quickly jumped up to around 100,000 users within an hour or so of the site's official launch. A few hours after that, Mega had ballooned up to approximately a quarter of a million users. Demand was great enough to knock Mega offline for a number of users attempting to either connect up or sign up for new accounts, and Mega's availability remains spotty as of this articles' writing."

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