“While it is true that Facebook has at least 60,000 servers, it is still possible to bring it down.”
These are the words of the anonymous voice that purports to represent Anonymous in a video posted to YouTube today.
“An online war has begun between Anonymous, the people, and the government of the United States,” the narrator begins. The reason: SOPA, PIPA and other perceived threats to Internet rights.
In order to bring down Facebook, the video asks for everyone who understands and supports Anonymous’ position to participate in this online protest. This is a protest that began over the last week, says the narrator, with attacks on the CBS.com, Warner Brothers, and FBI sites.
The narrator suggests that anyone who supports the cause download a program in order to participate in a Facebook attack.
Read more…
What if all your private documents are shared across the Internet? What if all your savings are robbed out of your net bank account? What if your mail account has been spammed, or even worse, if your company’s sensitive data has been hacked?
Statistics says India is among the top three countries targeted for phishing attacks. Globally, it is estimated that there are three crore victims of identity theft annually, with losses of nearly Rs.10,00,000 crore to companies.
Has anyone you know ever lost control of a net banking or email or social network account and inadvertently sent spam or worse? Your bank account, money, your photos, your private documents as a whole your identity — if you reuse the same password on multiple sites and one of those sites gets hacked, or your password is conned out of you directly through a phishing scam, it can be used to access some of your most closely held information.
India is one of the countries where the growth of identity fraud is said to be the fastest (at more than 100 per cent). Various banks, enterprises, and government organisations like the Income Tax Department have been targets of multiple phishing attacks over the past two years.
Recently, the government said in a note that 386 phishing incidents were reported to the Indian Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-In) between January and October in 2011.
Read more…
Secrets: the currency of spies around the world.
The rise of social media, hash-tags, forums, blogs and online news sites has revealed a new kind of secret — those hiding in plain sight. The CIA calls all this information “open source” material, and it’s changing the way America’s top spy agency does business.
NPR recently got a rare behind-the-scenes look at the CIA’s Open Source Center. It operates on the down-low, though it deals with public material. We aren’t allowed to tell you where the Open Source Center is. All we can say is that it’s housed in an unmarked and unremarkable office building just off a nondescript, busy street.
My producer and I were asked to leave our phones in our car. We were ushered inside to a small room with half a dozen analysts working at cubicles, their eyes fixed to computer screens. There was a bank of television monitors on the wall projecting news from around the world, which gave it kind of a newsroom feel.
The managing editor is Glen; he gave no last name. He pointed out a poster on the back wall made to look like a 1950s comic book, and in one corner it read, “There’s no escaping the information highway.”
Read more…
The United States Government’s cabinet-level national security agency, Department of Homeland Security has ensured the keeping of tabs on who is saying what and why. The Department’s National Operations Center (NOC)’s Media Monitoring Initiative is going out of its way to spend time, money and resources on watching over those that help bring news to the masses.
The NOC and its Office of Operations Coordination and Planning (OPS) collects personal information of news anchors, journalists, reporters or anyone who may use “traditional and/or social media in real time to keep their audiences situationally aware and informed.”Surveillance is extended to what foreign officials say and for what purpose. Apart from monitoring ‘foreign officials’, it has been revealed that the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is mainly tracking media stories that “reflect adversely” on the US government.
Through these media stories, profiles of journalists are gathered, why these journalists cover and write particular stories, and the effect of those stories are analysed. Also included in the roster of those subjected to the spying are government officials, domestic or not, who make public statements, private sector employees that do the same and “persons known to have been involved in major crimes of Homeland Security interest,” which opens the possibilities even wider.
Whereas the Department of Defence is charged with military actions abroad, the Department of Homeland Security works in the civilian sphere to protect the United States within, at, and outside its borders. Its stated goal is to prepare for, prevent, and respond to domestic emergencies, particularly terrorism.
Immigration, naturalisation
On March 1, 2003, DHS absorbed the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) and assumed its duties. In doing so, it divided the enforcement and services functions into two separate and new agencies: Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Citizenship and Immigration Services.
Read more…
Google is experimenting with a new signup form that eliminates the ability to create anonymous accounts. The new form is part of an effort to expand the Google+ social network by automatically adding every new Google account to Google+. Because Google+ requires a name and gender the new signup form effectively eliminates the anonymous Google account.
The new account creation page can be found by following the links on Google’s homepage. As the Google Operating System blog points out, the older Google account page, which does not require signing up for Google+ or Gmail, is currently still accessible through Google Reader, Calendar and other Google services.
The revamped Google account creation page adds some additional fields to the sign up form, including name and gender which are both necessary for creating a Google+ account. There’s also a new agreement — turned on by default — granting Google permission to “use my account information to personalize +1s on content and ads on non-Google websites.”
In addition to the Google+ integration, signing up for a Google account now means getting a profile page and a Gmail account; gone are the days when you could use an outside email address with your Google account. It is still possible to go in and delete the Google+, Google profile and Gmail portions of your new Google account after it’s been created, but given that few people ever change their default settings it’s safe to assume that most people won’t.
It should come as no surprise that Google is working hard to get more users signed up for Google+, after all, despite marginal momentum, Google+ is far behind Facebook when it comes to signing up new users.
View source…
Julie Chambers’ heartbreaking experience of losing her 2-year-old daughter was made worse in an unimaginable way.
The mother from northeastern England recently discovered a fraudulent Facebook page with pictures of herself and her daughter, Zoe, who died in 2008 after undergoing heart surgery, the Daily Mail reports. The site was taking donations for a transplant for Zoe, who was born with a heart valve that was too narrow.
“It would have been hard enough to handle if Zoe had been alive, but she isn’t with us,” Chambers, 37, said. “She’s dead and someone has used her picture to con people out of money.”
The Facebook page, traced back to Jamaica, asked visitors to “share” the link, which would result in a free heart transplant should 1,000 people participate. The page also accepted donations to a personal PayPal account. Though Chambers has contacted police, she doesn’t have a case since money hasn’t been directly stolen from her, the Daily Mail reports.
Unfortunately using the names and identities of children for fraudulent purposes isn’t uncommon, and some thieves go a step further.
Read more…
Koobface has been a thorn in the side of Web sites for years now. But starting today, Facebook is responding with salvos that could put the gang on the run.
According to The New York Times, the world’s largest social network will announce today that it’s planning to share boatloads of information it has gathered over the years about the Koobface Gang. The Times said today that Facebook believes “public namings” could go a long way toward stopping the gang from operating, and potentially help law enforcement officials start taking it down.
Koobface is responsible for a computer worm of the same name that, for over three years, has targeted social networks, including Facebook. The worm targets Windows and Mac OS X users by getting them to click on malicious links. The malware is notable for not attempting to steal financial information. The people behind Koobface make money by using the peer-to-peer botnet to download pay-per-install malware on computers and redirecting search queries to display ads.
Though Facebook is expected to offer up a relatively large data dump, security researcher Sophos has preempted that, revealing a host of details on the gang, including its real name, “Ali Baba & 4.” Both The New York Times and Sophos claim to have the names of the gang members, which the sources say, work out of St. Petersburg.
Facebook has had some information on the gang since 2008, Ryan McGeehan, Facebook manager of investigations and incident response, told the Times. And over the last several years, it has continued to gather intelligence and safeguard users from attacks.
Read more…
Civil liberties advocates are raising concerns that the Department of Homeland Security’s three-year-old practice of monitoring social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter could extend to tracking public reaction to news events and reports that “reflect adversely” on the U.S. government.
The activists, who obtained DHS documents through a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit, say one document in particular, a February 2010 analyst handbook, touts as a good example of “capturing public reaction” the monitoring of Facebook and other sites for public sentiment about the possible transfer of Guantanamo detainees to a Michigan prison.
A senior DHS official said the department does not monitor dissent or gather reports tracking citizens’ views. He said such reporting would not be useful in the types of emergencies to which officials need to respond. Officials also said that the analyst handbook is no longer in use and that the current version does not include the Guantanamo detainee reaction or similar examples.
With the explosion of digital media, DHS has joined other intelligence and law enforcement agencies in monitoring blogs and social media, which is seen as a valuable tool in anticipating trends and threats that affect homeland security, such as flu pandemics or a bomb plot.
But monitoring for “positive and negative reports” on U.S. agencies falls outside the department’s mission to “secure the nation,” said the Electronic Privacy Information Center, which obtained a copy of a contract and related material describing DHS’s social media monitoring through its FOIA suit.
Read more…
Hackers in China have found a way to infiltrate supposedly secure smart cards used by U.S. government employees, according to security company AlienVault.
The security firm said it has seen dozens of such attacks, which tap into a unique variant of a nasty bit of malware known as Sykipot.
The hackers appear intent on stealing data from the Department of Defense and other related agencies. The malware is capable of capturing the PIN numbers used by government smart cards, thereby allowing access to supposedly secure information.
“Like we have shown with previous Sykipot attacks, the attackers use a spear phishing campaign to get their targets to open a PDF attachment which then deposits the Sykipot malware onto their machine,” according to AlienVault. “Then, unlike previous strains, the malware uses a keylogger to steal PINs for the cards. When a card is inserted into the reader, the malware then acts as the authenticated user and can access sensitive information. The malware is controlled by the attackers from the command & control center.”
Government agencies use smart cards as an extra layer of security on top of passwords, according to the New York Times. Since passwords have been easy enough to hack, the smart cards were supposed to provide a final line of defense, at least until the new strain of Sykipot popped up.
Read more…
Hope you’re not shy, because there’s a good chance you’re being watched by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. According to a government document, the DHS has been monitoring social media as well as select blogs and message boards for more than a year.
The “privacy compliance review” obtained by Reuters comes from last November, but apparently this surveillance has been ongoing since at least June 2010. According to the document, it’s designed to “collect information used in providing situational awareness and establishing a common operating picture” with “data published via social media sites [used] solely to provide more accurate situational awareness, a more complete common operating pictures, and more timely information for decision makers.” In other words, the DHS is using the Internet to find out what’s happening, same as everyone else, but it certainly sounds more disturbing.
The review explains that all information monitored is “publicly available,” with whatever’s harvested kept “for no more than five years.” Among the sites monitored are Facebook and MySpace, as well as “more than a dozen” sites that monitor Twitter activity and aggregate tweets and conversations on the micro-blogging service. Photo and video sharing sites are also present, with YouTube, Flickr and — even more surprisingly — Hulu all being monitored. Perhaps that last one’s just an excuse to catch up on episodes of House.
Outside of social media, websites monitored include the New York Times Lede Blog, the Drudge Report and Huffington Post, as well as two Wired blogs: Threat Level and Danger Room. WikiLeaks, Cryptome, JihadWatch and Informed Comment also make appearances on the list. The report sounds more worrisome in abstract than the details actually suggest; the idea of “big brother watching” is unsettling, but we already knew the government was doing this sort of thing, so is it really a surprise to learn it’s also paying attention to other parts of the publicly-available Internet, too?
Read more…
The phenomenon has grown into cliché: A marriage long grown stale through rote gestures and the drudgery of childrearing. An old flame pops up on Facebook. Innocent flirting ensues. Next thing you know, you’ve got an STD test in one hand and divorce papers in the other. What happened?
• Facebook cited as a factor in one third of UK divorces last year
• No surprise to divorce lawyers in the U.S.
• Social media turns up as evidence in front of judge
Online Friendship Gone Awry
A new survey by UK-based site Divorce-Online reported that Facebook played a role in one in three divorces in 2011 in the island nation.
The 2009 Divorce-Online survey turned up 20 percent, so the number appears to only be growing. A figure widely circulated in news reports last year suggested that Facebook played a role in one in five divorces here in the States.
Given the ever-expanding role social media plays in the way we communicate, it’s no surprise it should be a common factor in divorce. “I hear it all the time,” says Brent Rose, a partner at Orsini and Rose Law Firm in Florida. “Most divorce lawyers know that Facebook is a contributor to their caseloads. It’s not at all uncommon for a client to tell you that the reason for the divorce is that a spouse has connected with an ‘old flame’ or a ‘first love from high school’ through Facebook.”
Read more…
Two U.S. congressman have charged Facebook with evading questions on whether it tracks users for targeted ads.
Meanwhile, Facebook has gone ahead and filed a patent that enables it to do just that, all the while insisting it has no intent to track users when they’re not logged into the social media network.
The congressmen, Joe Barton, a Texas Republican, and Edward Markey, a Massachusetts Democrat, asked the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) to look into accusations that Facebook still tracks users who’ve logged out, in spite of Facebook’s claims to have fixed the issue.
Here’s what Barton told ZDNet’s Emil Protalinski about Facebook talking from both sides of its gigantic social media face:
Facebook seems to be saying one thing and doing another. In the company’s response, it talks a lot about how they don’t currently “track” users online, but they just asked for a patent that would allow them to do just that. Why ask for something you don’t ever plan on using? I don’t believe that Facebook adequately addresses that question. If they get a patent that among other things explicitly mentions tracking the information about the activities of users of a social networking system while on another domain — how will it be used?
Read more…
