There is more to this that the article reports. Keep an eye on it!
http://www.pogowasright.org/article.php?story=20080124055948438
Hackers steal OmniAmerican account data
Thursday, January 24 2008 @ 06:15 AM EST Contributed by: PrivacyNews News Section: Breaches
An international gang of cyber criminals hacked into OmniAmerican Bank's records, the bank's president disclosed Wednesday.
They stole scores of account numbers, created new PINs, fabricated debit cards, then withdrew cash from ATMs in Eastern Europe, including Russia and Ukraine, as well as in Britain, Canada and New York.
... The amount stolen is not yet known, he said, describing it only as "minimal." No depositors will lose money, he said.
Fewer than 100 accounts, some of them dormant, were compromised, all with a daily withdrawal limit of less than $1,000, he said.
Source - Star-Telegram
Because it's so easy anyone can do it?
http://www.pogowasright.org/article.php?story=200801231408036
Breaking News - Deputy DA Indicted for ID theft
Wednesday, January 23 2008 @ 02:08 PM EST Contributed by: PrivacyNews News Section: In the Courts
Fresno Deputy District Attorney David Jones has been indicted by the state attorney general's office, accused of stealing the identity of a former girlfriend to harass her.
Source - KSEE24
Someone will have to explain this one to me...
http://www.pogowasright.org/article.php?story=20080123141814989
UT: Committee delays vote on ID theft bill
Wednesday, January 23 2008 @ 02:18 PM EST Contributed by: PrivacyNews News Section: State/Local Govt.
A bill that would allow law enforcement to seek civil penalties in cases of identity theft has been delayed.
A vote on HB95 was delayed until Friday after the Utah Attorney General's Office raised concerns about how much it would cost to enforce. That left its sponsor, Rep. Karen Morgan, D-Cottonwood Heights, a little peeved.
Source - Deseret Morning News
Imagine that! Crooks without honor!
http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/01/23/2340251&from=rss
Phishing Group Caught Stealing From Other Phishers
Posted by samzenpus on Wednesday January 23, @08:58PM from the what's-good-for-the-goose dept. Security The Almighty Buck
An anonymous reader writes "Netcraft has written about a website offering free phishing kits with one ironic twist — they all contain backdoors to steal stolen credentials from the fraudsters that deploy them. Deliberately deceptive code inside the kits means that script kiddies are unlikely to realize that any captured credit card numbers also end up getting sent to the people who made the phishing kits. The same group was also responsible for another backdoored phishing kit used against Bank of America earlier this month."
http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article.cfm?articleid=1882
Digital Rights Management: Dead or Just Evolving?
Published: January 23, 2008 in Knowledge@Wharton
... While DRM may be all but dead in the music industry, experts at Wharton note that the technology isn't going to disappear completely. It's just evolving. "DRM will never go away.... It will just become more unobtrusive," says Wharton marketing professor Peter Fader. Furthermore, Wharton experts observe that consumer tolerance of DRM varies with the entertainment medium.
Tools & Techniques: Hackers take note! When politicians don't listen, hackers thrive!
http://techdirt.com/articles/20080121/13561225.shtml
Dutch Fiasco Demonstrates Futility Of Security Through Obscurity
from the no-secret-algorithms dept
Recent research on the security vulnerabilities of a new Dutch fare card system offers important lessons for computer security. The Dutch government spent $2 billion on the system, which has now been demonstrated to have fatal flaws. The researchers disassembled the smart cards used by the system and took high-resolution photographs of the circuitry. This allowed them to reverse-engineer the encryption algorithms being used by the system. As Felten points out, this wouldn't have been a problem if the Dutch had used an open crypto algorithm that has been widely tested and found to be secure. But because the system relied on algorithmic secrecy for security, this could be catastrophic. The algorithm uses a relatively short 48-bit key. This means that once the algorithm is known, it becomes possible to perform a brute-force attack, simply trying all 281 trillion possible keys in parallel until the correct one is found. That requires a non-trivial amount of computing power, but it's well within the capabilities of modern computer hardware. Indeed, this is precisely the approach taken by a Johns Hopkins research group three years ago when they cracked the encryption on the Exxon Mobil Speedpass, which used a 40-bit key. Brute forcing the 40-bit algorithm reportedly took the Hopkins team about 20 minutes, which suggests that -- even ignoring improvements in hardware -- it should be possible to brute force a 48-bit key in under a week. Since they're just deploying the system now and are presumably planning to use it for a decade or more, 48 bits is woefully inadequate. They ought to have used a standard, widely-tested cryptographic algorithm with a significantly longer key size, in order to make brute force attacks impractical.
Elvis is alive and living in Silicon Valley?
If Elvis were a digital entrepreneur today
By Nancy Prager Story last modified Thu Jan 24 04:00:02 PST 2008
Much like latter-day New World explorers, Europeans have staked their flag on the Internet to claim control of the digital frontier.
The European Union has begun to harmonize the copyright laws of its member countries related to creative content online. While the United States will still own the hardware underpinning the Internet, the Europeans, if successful, will determine how we use it.
The EU's stated objective is to craft a copyright law that supports innovative business models and facilitates the broadcast and delivery of diverse online creative content across borders.
... The European Union realizes that compliance with 27 different copyright laws and licensing regimes is a significant barrier to entry for companies and a detriment to its citizens.
... According to the official notice, the changes are designed to accomplish the following:
1. Remove the barriers to entry that multijurisdictional licensing create.
2. Encourage copyright owners to make content available online with the confidence that piracy will not cannibalize the economic value of the underlying works.
3. Create procedures to make clearing content easier and less expensive, including the ability of third parties to use works for whom the owner of the rights cannot be located (so-called orphan works).
4. Limit the negative impact of digital rights management through interoperability standards and labeling requirements.
5. Formalize a standard of conduct between access/service providers, rights holders, and consumers to encourage legal use and access of creative content and to discourage unauthorized file sharing.
... The solutions the European Union creates will serve as a guide to other countries, and perhaps the de facto legal framework for the Internet as the digital frontier continues to develop.
Rethinking the publishing business. If you subscribe (electronically) to every magazine and newspaper you ever found useful or amusing the main problem is: How do you filter all that information?
http://techdirt.com/articles/20080121/13050622.shtml
Your Website Shouldn't Be Just An Electronic Version Of Your Print Publication
from the not-an-afterthought dept
We spend a lot of time here at Techdirt beating up on large media companies for their poor media strategies. For a long time, established media companies saw their websites as little more than an afterthought. Stuff tended to be developed for the print version first, and then got dumped to the website as an afterthought. This meant the content was often stale, and it certainly wasn't designed to engage the online conversation. Even worse, in many cases the content was hidden behind a paywall, further cutting it off from the online conversation. Recently, though, we've seen a few major media properties start to take the web seriously, not just as an adjunct to their print editions but as an important medium in its own right. I noted a few months ago that the New York Times seems to be taking the web seriously. and now the Times notes that the Atlantic has jumped on the bandwagon. (Full disclosure: A couple of the magazine's recent hires are friends of mine) The Atlantic has done several smart things. First, they've dropped their paywall, not just for their new content but also for selected articles from 150 years of the print edition. Given that back issues were previously collecting dust on the shelves, that can only help drive traffic to the site. More importantly, they've recruited a stable of lively, high-profile bloggers who not only attract traffic to their own blogs, but by discussing content appearing elsewhere on the site, help to raise the profile of the site as a whole. They've also been proactive about experimenting with new technologies, including full-text RSS feeds and Flash-based video. The story indicates their traffic has quadrupled, and that's before their paywall goes down this week. The urgency of magazines' modernization project is intensified by news that Wal-Mart is removing more than a thousand magazines from their store shelves, including major titles like the New Yorker, Forbes, Fortune, and BusinessWeek. Paper is a slow, expensive, and cumbersome way to transmit news, and as online news sources mature, more and more users will find they no longer have any use for dead tree publications. So making their websites successful is no longer optional for mainstream print publications: if they don't modernize quickly, they're going to quickly find themselves drowning in red ink very soon.
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