Is this a cyber-attack that equates to
a Pearl Harbor, or a mini-Pearl Harbor, or perhaps a childish prank?
Does a physical attack on cyber infrastructure equal a cyber-attack
on physical infrastructure?
Egypt's Naval forces claim they have
captured three scuba divers who were trying
to cut an undersea Internet cable in the Mediterranean. Col.
Ahmed Mohammed Ali said in a statement that the divers were caught
while “cutting the undersea cable” of Telecom Egypt. Internet
services have been disrupted since March 22 in Egypt. From the
article: "The statement was accompanied by a photo showing three
young men, apparently Egyptian, staring up at the camera in what
looks like an inflatable launch. It did not have further details on
who they were or why they would have wanted to cut a cable."
(Related) Now what do you think?
(Related) Still just a series of
coinkydinks?
UAE
Etisalat users face disruption after cable cut
This is the equivalent of giving people
who rent storage lockers a brand new shiney padlock!
Amazon
Woos the Paranoid With Crypto Cloud Service
Amazon’s cloud services just keep
getting bigger, but the fact remains that many people are still
worried that this cloud computing thing just isn’t as secure as the
systems you might set up in your own data center.
If Amazon wants its service to continue
growing at their current rate it has to change this perception. This
week the company stepped up this crusade, unveiling a new service for
creating and managing encryption keys in the cloud.
The service is called CloudHSM.
HSM stands for Hardware Security Modules — physical devices that
handle the creation and management of cryptographic keys. These
aren’t a new thing, but they’re new to Amazon Web Services, or
AWS, a set of online services that provide access to all sorts of
computing power, including virtual servers and data storage and more.
(Related) Now all they need to do is
actually use the padlock...
How
Private Data Became Public on Amazon's Cloud
Companies that use Amazon's popular
cloud computing service have accidentally [This is
clearly NOT an accident. Someone (probably an entry level IT guy)
turned this off and no one (management) checked! Bob]
disclosed confidential information including sales records and source
code, highlighting the risks of moving sensitive data to the Web,
according to new research.
… Rapid7 said the documents were
public because many of Amazon's customers overrode a
key security mechanism intended to keep such information
private, likely by accident as the result of poorly designed
third-party management software.
Apparently this is just one company
that hired some computers from some e-crooks. Imagine a case where a
country takes control of all the computers they can locate, and uses
them to attack another country.
March 27, 2013
BBC
News - Global internet slows after 'biggest attack in history'
"The
internet around the world has been slowed down in what security
experts are describing as the biggest cyber-attack of its kind in
history. A row between a spam-fighting group and hosting firm
has sparked retaliation attacks affecting the wider internet. It is
having an impact on popular services like Netflix - and experts
worry it could escalate to affect banking and email systems.
Five national cyber-police-forces are investigating the attacks.
Spamhaus, a group based in both London and Geneva, is a non-profit
organisation which aims to help email providers filter out spam and
other unwanted content. To do this, the group maintains a number of
blocklists - a database of servers known to be being used for
malicious purposes. Recently, Spamhaus blocked
servers maintained by Cyberbunker, a Dutch web host which states it
will host anything with the exception of child pornography
or terrorism-related material."
[From the article:
Spamhaus has alleged that Cyberbunker,
in cooperation with "criminal gangs" from Eastern Europe
and Russia, is behind the attack.
… Mr Linford said the attack's
power would be strong enough to take down government internet
infrastructure.
"If you aimed this at Downing
Street they would be down instantly," he said. "They would
be completely off the internet."
He added: "These
attacks are peaking at 300 Gbps (gigabits per second).
"Normally when there are attacks
against major banks, we're talking about 50 Gbps"
… Spamhaus said it was able to cope
as it has highly distributed infrastructure in a number of countries.
The group is supported by many of the
world's largest internet companies who rely on it to filter unwanted
material.
Mr Linford told the BBC that several
companies, such as Google, had made their resources available to help
"absorb all of this traffic".
The attacks typically happened in
intermittent bursts of high activity. [When the
criminal computers are “between jobs?” Bob]
Find a similar, less technical example
and see what has truly changed...
"The
Supreme
Court of Canada has ruled that text
messages are private communication (Official Ruling) and
therefore police are required to get a warrant to gain access to the
text messages of private citizens. The CBC
reports: '[Supreme Court Justice Rosalie Silberman] Abella said
the only practical difference between text
messaging and traditional voice communications is the transmission
process. "This distinction should not take
text messages outside the protection to which private communications
are entitled," she wrote.'"
Perhaps we should read this...
March 27, 2013
EFF
Commentary on Expanded Powers of Computer Fraud And Abuse Act Reform
EFF: "Law professor and historian
Tim
Wu has called the Computer
Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA) the “worst law in technology.”
The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals has
described the government’s interpretation of it “expansive,”
“broad,” and “sweeping.” And Orin Kerr, former federal
prosecutor and law professor, has detailed
how the government could use it to put "any Internet user they
want [in jail]." So it's pretty surprising to see that now,
instead of reining in the CFAA’s dangerous reach, the House
Judiciary Committee is floating a proposal to dramatically expand it
and is reportedly planning to rush it to the floor of Congress during
its April “cyber” week... Techdirt’s Mike Masnick posted
a new draft and analysis of the CFAA expansion bill on Monday."
I expect a lot of my students will
telecommute.
March 27, 2013
Costs
and Benefits Advantages of Telecommuting For Companies
The
Telework Research Network: "We’re read over 500 studies
about telecommuting and here are what we’ve found to be the most
common advantages for the companies that establish work from home
programs. The following pros and cons of work from home programs
aren’t just our view, they’re the outcomes from a wide range of
studies. Visit our Research:
Pros & Cons page for additional information about how
individuals and communities can benefit from telecommuting as well."
Think of the infrastructure Walmart is
creating here. First in-store lockers and then customers for
store-to-door delivery. Revise that to mailboxes and postal carriers
and you can immediately see they are trying to take over the Postal
Service and probably all the express services... (Or perhaps split
it with Amazon to avoid the taint of monopoly)
"Amazon has been placing
lockers in brick-and-mortar retail stores, such as 7-Eleven, for
pickup of online purchases. Walmart
plans to pilot a similar program, presumably making it easier to
pick up online purchases at Wal-Mart. 'Wal-Mart hopes its network of
physical stores, which number about 4,000 in the United States, will
give it an edge as consumers increasingly use smart phones while they
shop. Wal-Mart has been testing
the shipping of online orders from a small number of its physical
stores for about two years. In 2013, the company plans to expand
this program from about 25 stores currently to a total of roughly 50
stores. ... Two-thirds of the U.S. population
live within five miles of a Wal-Mart store."
(Related)
Wal-Mart
may get customers to deliver packages to online buyers
… Wal-Mart has millions of
customers visiting its stores each week. Some of these shoppers
could tell the retailer where they live and sign up to drop off
packages for online customers who live on their route back home,
Anderson explained.
Wal-Mart would offer a discount on the
customers' shopping bill, effectively covering the cost of their gas
in return for the delivery of packages, he added.
Amusing. Perhaps I'll be able to point
out some of the things I did...
NSA
Declassifies — Sort Of — Its Super-Secret Internal Magazine
… Titled Cryptolog: The Journal of
Technical Health, its existence has been known for years, having been
mentioned in books about the agency by authors like James
Bamford. But its contents, like so much else about the agency
and its work, have remained a secret.
That changed today, when the NSA
declassified about a quarter century of back issues of the
publication running from 1974 to 1997. You can have a look at the
results
here.
We probably should start thinking about
this. They are showing the classic signs... “When in doubt, yell
louder!”
What
happens if North Korea collapses?
North Korea shut
down its last military hotline to South Korea on Wednesday,
warning that nuclear war was imminent. The threat was the latest in
a series of increasingly belligerent statements made by the Hermit
Kingdom since world leaders imposed sanctions as punishment for the
communist regime's recent missile and nuclear tests. Pyongyang has
threatened to nuke both South Korea and the U.S.
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