Monday, September 10, 2012

Hacking is easy, apparently subtlety is not.
Phony Al-Jazeera text messages sent by pro-Syrian gov't hackers
Al-Jazeera has become the second news agency in a little more than a month to be targeted by pro-Syrian government hackers.
The Qatar-based satellite TV station revealed in a tweet this morning that its short messaging service had been compromised and used to send false news reports, including a report that Qatar's prime minister had been assassinated:
A group calling itself the Syrian Electronic Army reportedly claimed responsibility for the hack, the second attack on the satellite network in less than a week. The broadcaster reported Wednesday that several of its Web sites had been hacked and defaced with pro-Syrian government slogans.
The group also claimed responsibility for a sophisticated attack on Harvard University's home page last year that briefly defaced the page with a message accusing the U.S. of supporting the uprising against Syria's president.
Pro-Syrian government hackers have stepped up their attacks on news agencies in recent weeks. In early August, Reuters suffered two security breaches in two days when hackers managed to gain control of one of its Twitter accounts and defaced with pro-Syrian government tweets. Earlier that week, hackers broke in to the Reuters.com Web site and added a phony post purporting to be an interview with the head of the Free Syrian Army.


Only 53%? I'm impressed!
AU: Schools clueless about IT security, reveals study
September 10, 2012 by admin
Byron Connolly reports:
Almost one in two Australian secondary and tertiary schools do not have an IT security awareness program in place and alarmingly, 53 per cent didn’t know what information was taken during a data breach, according to a study commissioned by Symantec.cloud.
The study asked around 500 teachers and administration staff at 168 private and public secondary and tertiary schools across Australia about their IT security landscape and what precautions they had in place to protect students.
Read more on CIO.
And what would we find here in the U.S. if the same study were run?


Okay, I'll need someone to interpret. I see this as “Yes but No”
By Dissent, September 9, 2012
FourthAmendment.com quotes from a new opinion from U.S. District Court in Maryland holding that there is Fourth Amendment reasonable expectation of privacy in medical records held by a doctor. The case is United States v. Mitchell.
[From the article:
There is no Fourth Amendment reasonable expectation of privacy in medical records held by a doctor. The third-party doctrine and consent also must apply. United States v. Mitchell, 2012 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 126651 (D. Md. September 5, 2012):


September 09, 2012
Paper - The Perils of Learning and Sharing Everything' from a Criminal Information Sharing Perspective
Sliter, John R., 'Techno-Risk - the Perils of Learning and Sharing Everything' from a Criminal Information Sharing Perspective (September 9, 2012). 30th Symposium on Economic Crime in Cambridge, England on September 5th, 2012. Available at SSRN.
  • "The author has extensive law enforcement experience and the paper is intended to provoke thought on the use of technology as it pertains to information sharing between the police and the private sector. As the world edges closer and closer to the convergence of man and machine, the human capacity to retrieve information is increasing by leaps and bounds. We are on the verge of knowing everything and anything there is to know...and this means that police will have the capacity to learn everything about everyone with the only restriction being privacy legislation. But it also means that those involved in immoral, unlawful or illegal activity will have that same capacity and with no such restriction... The global community requires a secure and credible system to retrieve and assess all of the information ‘generally available to the public.' A system that will strive to keep ‘Big Brother’ in check and ‘Bad Brother’ out, all the while providing a means of alerting citizens to genuine risks or to dangerous people. Such as system would help diffuse the systemic inaccurate and harmful profiling that is often based on rumours and innuendo. There is an identified public-private partnership opportunity. A chance to work with privacy advocate groups and background checking private companies to define, design and deliver on something that will be of immense benefit to citizens around the globe."


Mostly medical, so far...
September 09, 2012
Pubget - search engine for life science PDFs
"Pubget develops cloud-based content access tools for scientists, researchers and libraries. The company’s core product, pubget.com, is a free site for legally finding and directly retrieving research papers. [It is] the comprehensive source for science PDFs, including everything you'd find in Medline. We add 10,000 new papers each day... Pubget was purchased by Copyright Clearance Center, Inc. (CCC), a not-for-profit organization and leading source of licensing solutions."

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