Friday, January 06, 2012


Is this the latest hacking trend? Dumping data on entire countries? Interesting that VietNamese securities companies have millions of customers...
Personal information of millions of Vietnamese offered for sale
January 5, 2012 by admin
VietNam reportedly has its first case of prosecuting individuals for selling personal information:
Three men in HCM City, including Duong Hong Le, Le Minh Trung and Hua Van Tuan, are accused of illegally collecting phone numbers and personal information of millions of people who are clients at securities and real estate trading companies–to sale, earning tens of thousands of USD.
Police recently found out that these men offered for sale personal information of millions of people on the Internet.
These people said that they used to work at many securities and real estate companies so they had information about many clients. After leaving these firms, they exchanged data and offered for sale the information on the net.
[....]
Police said that this is the first time they deal with such a case. As the three people sincerely declared information and their act did not cause serious consequence, they would be fined only.
Police are investigating many websites that perform similar act.
Source: VietNamNet.

(Update) This makes the story much more believable...
VN: 3 men identified as illegal sellers of private info
January 6, 2012 by admin
I just came across a more detailed news report on the VietNam breach I mentioned yesterday. Tuoi Tre reports:
In October 2010, [Duong Hong] Le set up the company’s official website at danhsachkhachhang.com, but the site has focused only on offering to sell lists of information on individuals, companies and organizations.
The website… contains the names of 30,000 prepaid mobile phone subscribers of MobiFone in HCMC, 1,200 chairmen of management boards of companies, 850 members of the Entrepreneurs’ Club 2030, 780 stock investors at the Vien Dong Company, 1,100 TVSI stock investors, 700 customers of the VGB gold trading floor, 2,230 owners of real estate in the Phu My Hung New Urban Area, 800 owners of properties from Him Lam , 1,200 customers of the Saigon Pearl Project, 1,300 Mercedes owners, 750 BMW owners, 1,300 members of the FV Hospital, 10,000 customers of Nguyen Kim Shopping Center, and 500 architects at various companies in HCMC.
According to investigators, Le has 51 lists of information for sale at a price of VND500,000-600,000 per list.
Le told investigators that he had earned about VND21 million (US$1,000) from the illegal business.
He said he had halted his business operations on January 1, 2011 after Tuoi Tre published an article about his illegal trading of private information, but six months later, he continued his activities, since he found that many other websites did the same and thought that such activities would not be banned.
Le said he had bought all of the lists from a man named Le Minh Trung, owner of the website www.timkhachhang.com, and Hua Van Tuan, who owns the website www.dtavip.com.
[...]
As of December 2011, [Le Minh] Trung had about 230 lists of customers in the fields of economics, finance, investment, and real estate. Each list contains detailed personal information such as names, telephone numbers, and workplaces of customers.
Read more on Tuoi Tre. This seems to be a fairly widespread problem in VietNam, and while the information may not be hugely sensitive, if they’re not careful, they’ll wind up with data being sold and re-sold, and re-sold… and before you know it, their databases will be as inaccurate and as annoying as ours.


This now looks like one hacker trying to become famous.
Update: Saudi hacker warns he is in possession of one million Israeli credit card numbers
January 5, 2012 by admin
Oded Yaron reports:
The Saudi hacker who managed to steal 15 thousand Israeli credit cards revealed another 11 thousand stolen numbers on Thursday, and threatened to release one million total stolen numbers.
According to a message left on the Saudi hacking group Group-XP’s message board, the hacker, who goes by the name of 0xOmar, was able to hack “much more than one can imagine.”
Read more on Haaretz.com.
Update: Ynet has more details on the latest developments.
In a statement on Pastebin, the hacker reveals more details, including some of the names of businesses whose servers were hacked:
Hi
It’s 0xOmar from group-xp, greatest Saudi Arabian hacker team.
We have leaked 400,000+ Israeli people details, including credit cards, but we have seen some stuff which needs attention:
- An Israeli stupid student says it was only 14,000 cards, while only A SIGNLE FILE we uploaded contains 27000 working credit cards, right now I’m sending this data from VPS server I have purchased with those cards. It was so bad media failure. Fake Jewish and Zionist lobby media started writing what a stupid student says. This made me a little unhappy. So I’ve started thinking of sending all Israeli credit cards I own which reaches 1M data. I’ll do it soon!
- Some other Jewish lobby fake media sites wrote that it was only One.co.il which is hacked, who says that? Another stupid Israeli student? No, it’s wrong. I’ve hacked more than 80 Israeli servers to gather those data. Each of them are so big and high profile, just some of them is One.co.il, bizmakebiz (Israeli business site), ezpay, Judaism, etc.
- Israeli online lobby was able to delete all my pages from Pastebin, Pastebay, Multiupload, Hotfile, etc. etc. This time you’ll not be able to do so. Pastebay says it’s uncensored text hosting, but it seems censoring have different meaning for Zionist lobby
Because of the above issues, I’ll send Israeli details some often, for now I have added another 11,000 credit cards which contains IsraCards and DinnerDash cards. This database contains 60,000 credit cards which also has MasterCard and Visa cards, but I’ll send them later among with a lot of others.
I’ve hacked much more than you can imagine, but I hate fake media and Zionist lobby in media and internet.
If needed maybe in next time I start sharing all data I have downloaded from Israeli military contractor companies and let the world have their all documents, I’m thinking to start doing it from an Israeli company which creates jammers and eavesdropping devices.
For now, you can download Israeli credit cards from below URLs which includes torrent, just search Credit Cards.rar.torrent in torrent sharing sites.
[...]
Saudi Arabia for ever! Saudi Arabia rules, long life King Abdullah!
assalamu alaikum wa rahmatullah
While most of the sites to which the data had been uploaded quickly deleted the files, copies of the latest upload are still available on the web.


Ubiquitous surveillance. Or maybe drones over Mile High stadium? Coverage of weddings and bar mitzvahs? Should I start a “Drone Fund?”
Livestreaming Journalists Want to Occupy the Skies With Cheap Drones
It may not sound like much: A video blogger bought a toy helicopter.
But the blogger is 25-year-old Tim Pool — an internationally known journalist who attracts tens of thousands of viewers to his live-stream broadcasts from Occupy Wall Street protests in New York, DC, LA and other cities. (His feeds and archival footage are also aired on mainstream networks such as NBC.) He and his partners hope that the toy chopper — the $300 Parrot AR Drone — will be one step toward a citizen-driven alternative to mainstream news.
… Having thoroughly figured out how to cover giant events from ground level, they are now exploring ultra-cheap alternatives to the hundreds of thousands of dollar news choppers used for aerial reporting of big events like protest marches and police clashes. In the process, the video bloggers are discovering both how far low-cost consumer technology has come and how much farther it needs to go.
Like the HD video cameras now included in the live-streamers’ cellphones, aerial surveillance drones have progressed from ultra-expensive professional gear to impulse-buy items. What was once in the Pentagon budget is now at Toys ‘R Us – in a simple form, at least.

(Related) maybe I should just get into the drone business?
Obama’s New Defense Plan: Drones, Spec Ops and Cyber War


Local Lots of interesting questions here. Clearly encrypting your data suggests you had an expectation of privacy but since there was a warrant can that force you to incriminate yourself? The Feds are looking at this as “We searched and found a safe, the stolen money is there!”
Feds Want Judge to Force Suspect to Give Up Laptop Password
January 5, 2012 by Dissent
David Kravets reports that a ruling is expected soon on a case previously mentioned on this blog:
Federal prosecutors want a judge to order a Colorado woman to provide the password to decrypt her laptop which the government seized with a search warrant.
With back-up from digital rights groups, the woman is fighting the feds, arguing that being forced to provide her password violates the 5th Amendment’s protection against self-incrimination.
Colorado U.S. District Judge Robert Blackburn is expected to rule any day on whether to force defendant Ramona Fricosu to decrypt her Toshiba Satellite M305, which authorities seized from her in 2010 with a court warrant while investigating financial fraud.
Read more on Threat Level.


Attention all you lawyers who missed out on the Y2K disaster (because it never happened) This one has real potential!
Ready Your Watch: The Leap Second Is Coming
The International Earth Rotation and Reference Systems Service (IERS) in Paris — the grand arbiters of time on our big blue marble — has declared that a leap second will be introduced on 30 June, 2012.


When Draino is outlawed only outlaws will have Draino! Fortunately, they have not heard of Dihydrous Monoxide (See: dhmo.org or http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dihydrogen_monoxide_hoax )
IL: ‘Drano’ law an invasion of privacy
January 6, 2012 by Dissent
Have we reached the point as a society where our grandmothers have to show ID and sign a log book to buy a bottle of Drano?
Apparently, lawmakers in Springfield, including Marengo Democrat Jack Franks, thought the answer was yes.
They passed a new law that requires anyone who buys caustic and noxious substances, which include everyday items such as drain cleaners and pool chemicals, have their name, address and amount of purchase entered into a log at the store.
The law came in response to a couple of incidents where people in Chicago were disfigured for life after they were burned with acid. The enormity of such attacks is unquestionable – but the state’s method of fighting this problem is questionable.
Read more on Northwest Herald.


Fortunately, my students never read my blog...


Sometimes I wonder if I'm the only one who recognizes stupidity when it appears... I guess they could have texted drivers during rush hour...
National Phone Survey on Distracted Driving Attitudes and Behaviors


Geeky stuff
For the first time since it sprang onto the web in 2004, Nginx (pronounced “engine-ex”), the lightweight open source web server that could, has overtaken Microsoft IIS to become the second most used server on the web.


This could be very handy...
BenchPrep Is Codecademy For Any Subject, High School To Med School
Books are not the best way to learn. To retain knowledge you have to interact with it, and that’s where BenchPrep comes in. The startup licenses textbooks from big publishers like McGraw Hill and converts them into interactive web and mobile learning courses. Today, BenchPrep announces its expansion beyond college admission test prep. It will now offer courses to assist with high school, university, law, medicine, professional certifications, army, and more. It’s also releasing a new evaluation tool that determines a student’s weaknesses in a given subject. BenchPrep is the future of the ‘education anywhere’ movement. [Worth investigating? Bob]
… In about 7 days, BenchPrep can convert any textbook, say one on Calculus that sells for $50, into an interactive course it can sell for $100. That’s still much cheaper than taking a class in person. The publisher gets paid royalties on each course sale, and Rangnekar says BenchPrep plans to be cash-flow positive by June. New partnerships with more publishers will add 50 more courses to its library in the coming months.

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