Apparently the loosely organized hacking collective/meme known as Anonymous has announced that they will take out the Internet’s root DNS servers with a massive DDoS tomorrow.
How likely is it that they’ll succeed? Not very, for a whole host of reasons.
Leave a Comment » | 
Networking, Syndicated | 
Permalink
Posted by matt
Well, I wish I’d known about this technique the last time I forgot my gym lock combination.
Leave a Comment » | Syndicated, Tools | Permalink
Posted by matt
The recent capture of an American drone by Iranian forces has been a hot news item. Interestingly, Iranian engineers are coming forward with information on how it was captured. Rather than trying to crack the encryption on the command-and-control link to the pilot, they used spoofed GPS data to force its autopilot to land in Iran, all the while thinking it was in Kandahar. Nice hack.
Leave a Comment » | Exploits, Syndicated | Permalink
Posted by matt
From a post on the Interesting People mailing list:
Craig S Wright says: “I was contracted to test the systems on a Boeing 747. They had added a new video system that ran over IP. They segregated this from the control systems using layer 2 – VLANs. We managed to break the VLANs and access other systems and with source routing could access the Engine management systems.”
https://plus.google.com/u/0/110897184785831382163/posts/5qsNxFEaiML
Leave a Comment » | Exploits, Syndicated | Permalink
Posted by matt
An interesting, DARPA-funded project over at Columbia: FOG allows for false documents to be created which then “beacon” a message back to the originator when they are opened. Clearly, the intent is twofold – to seed places like Wikileaks with false information, and to ferret out people who are trading in stolen documents.
Leave a Comment » | Syndicated, Tools | Permalink
Posted by matt
Sure, if you want to steal someone’s ATM PIN, you can shoulder-surf it, or use a pinhole camera, or even compromise the ATM itself. But why bother when a thermal camera is so much easier?
Leave a Comment » | Exploits, Syndicated | Permalink
Posted by matt
A new piece of Android software, which installs itself as “Google++”, is a true bundle of joy. Not only does it steal data from the phone, it is also capable of answering phone calls from a predetermined number (after setting the handset to silent and turning on the speakerphone) to allow the attacker to eavesdrop on the surrounding environment.
Much as I chafe at the restrictive nature of the Apple App Store, it really is a model that makes sense for an appliance like a phone. It’s nice to have the added flexibility of a platform like Android, but it also imports all of the security problems of a general computing device along with the capabilities.
Leave a Comment » | Smartphones, Syndicated | Permalink
Posted by matt
The EFF has filed a friend of the court brief in a Colorado federal courtroom, asserting that compelling a defendant to reveal the password to her computer’s encrypted hard drive is a violation of the Fifth Amendment. This will be an interesting legal precedent; I don’t think that the British tactic of holding someone in contempt until their password is revealed has been used here in the USA.
Leave a Comment » | Legal, Syndicated | Permalink
Posted by matt
From this article at the Wall Street Journal:
The Pentagon has concluded that computer sabotage coming from another country can constitute an act of war, a finding that for the first time opens the door for the U.S. to respond using traditional military force… Pentagon officials believe the most-sophisticated computer attacks require the resources of a government. For instance, the weapons used in a major technological assault, such as taking down a power grid, would likely have been developed with state support, Pentagon officials say.
As Lauren Weinstein pointed out on the IP list, you couldn’t possibly come up with a better challenge to incite black hats. “You think only a foreign government can take out a power grid? Well, watch _this_!”
Leave a Comment » | Legal, Syndicated | Permalink
Posted by matt
IT World is running a fun article on features that we’ve lost from our computers over the years. While the common perception is that technology is always getting better, it does occasionally happen that a really useful concept or feature vanishes, never to reappear.
(My favorite, which isn’t in the article, was the old SCO Unix capability to turn all of the text in a terminal window red if you were logged in as root. It was so simple, but such a great visual clue.)
Leave a Comment » | Syndicated | Permalink
Posted by matt