Posts by tr1ck5t3r

Honeypots: Free psy-ops weapons that can protect your network before defences fail

Personally I like all the trust placed in existing code that's used to configure systems. Why would a hacker target a system, when they can target Kali that's used to spread the malware. Another good example of this concept is all the trust placed in MS Windows, or AV software that's lifting files off your system without your knowledge.

Use other peoples authority to spread the malware amongst clients. When did a so called security expert last check their systems? Nothing like Hubris before a fall.

So yeah, a honeypot is a valid technique, but is it the best?

Web banking malware slurps $1.2m for crooks, now kingpin 'fesses up

Re: Details Please

> maybe even using some more of the security domains the Intel architecture offers

Is that the Intel Management Engine which as been neutralised?

http://hackaday.com/2016/11/28/neutralizing-intels-management-engine/

"While he awaits sentencing, the Feds are on the lookout for a Samuel Gold, who was responsible for hiring the money mules that funneled funds to Khaimov.

Those mules interviewed by the FBI claimed they had been hired by Gold to pass on money in exchange for a small commission."

Resource burn. The Fed's will have to allocate more resources into this part of the investigation.

Samuel Gold seems like a character taken out of Reservoir Dogs with the help of Wikipedia.

Got an OpenBSD Web server? Better patch it

Re: Stuff happens...

Less is more, using embed OS's means everyone can tweak the source code to reduce bugs which can be used as backdoors as its smaller and more manageable and quicker to get to grips with, when writing your own version of an OS.

Plus various open source licences don't force you to share your tweaked OS, webservers, email servers reducing the backdoors to just the cpu and other chip based domain which adds security, despite some arguing theres no security with obscurity.

The raspberrypi is more secure than you think.

Sage Business School founder imprisoned – but you wouldn't know it

@allthecoolshortnamesweretaken

Sock puppet preplanned conversation.

Just another example of the corporate fascist world we live in, easily passed off as a coincidental conversation depending on how much you analyse the text output on websites.

Psychological training with thumbs up and thumbs down facilities, after all when you control the DNS you control what version of the internet you see.

@phuzz Obviously, you would expect/program Alexa or whatever AI to ignore any Radio or TV programs anyway, otherwise how many cups of tea do you want when watching EastEnder or Corrie?

As for Bitcoins, I wouldn't touch that with a barge pole, no privacy, besides to a certain extent all currency is backed up by violence metered out by the police & military, plus why make Satoshi a king maker with all those coins, Satoshi is just another example of clever people setting the rules to benefit themselves, whilst everyone else gets a crap education. You are set up to fail whether you realise it or not.

@mongo. And you think the police are honest? Just watch any TV police reality show, and watch and listen to what they say. Or take a look at this list from around the world which is stuff the police have not been able to cover up. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Police_corruption

And that's before you even get into a debate over the fact this country keeps adding new laws because it ultimately helps to farm compliant conformists.

When a cow gives birth to a calf, its got a couple days to be with it. When the farmer takes the calf away, the cow usually gets up and re-joins the herd, but some cows never get over the loss of the calf by re-joining the herd so the farmer puts it out of its misery and shoots it dead. Cant have it affecting the rest of the herd can we?

Theres not much difference with human society. The only difference with human society is you are taught to believe experts and put your trust in experts who think they know best and whilst they might solve one problem, as is so often the case theres usually tradeoffs or side effects when it comes to medicine. None of them can see the bigger picture. Ask someone something outside of their domain of knowledge, most people will simply say don't know and not think any more about it, few go off to form their own opinion or experience it in a bid to understand. Who would you rather put your life in the hands of?

Euthanasia is illegal in this country because its profitable to experiment on people in their time of need beit the NHS, Religious people or do gooders.

If you think its acceptable to tell "white" lies to your kids because you don't want to pop their bubble, now you know why the Govt does the same to adults. The spook Walt Disney knew a thing or two about manipulating people psychologically.

Theres no difference between representative democracy or facism, they both make the rules up as they go along. Representative democracy is a woolly term for sheeple to not think about the parallels with facism. Nationalism is like being born into a team that you have little say over unless you are allowed to leave. Globalists play countries off against one another.

Judges are dictatorial enforcers of law, just like GP's are govt approved drug dealers.

You can never trust a Govt that operates in secret. Dual use all the way.

If monopolies are bad, why is there ever only one Govt in a country?

Alexa, Action emergency protocol 101.

Better still, how about program your AI to carry out actions when it hears, "Police, freeze, you are under arrest".

Just make sure your smart phone can hear things when out and about, and your AI at home can hear the door being busted down.

Technically & legally, if the Police trigger the moving of funds, where does the law stand on that point?

Could it be viewed as a premeditated action if it can be proved an AI was preprogrammed by its user, a bit like a booby trapped front door or something else?

What if its a survival algo built into the AI in order to protect its existence with its existing user?

Slammer worm slithers back online to attack ancient SQL servers

It is interesting. Try this for an experiment.

Windows 7 hooked up to a Draytek Vigor 120 using ppoe to log onto your broadband connection.

Only network attacks being blocked is this slammer worm coming in on the SQL port.

Now boot from a Linux live cd like Ubuntu using same vigor 120 with pope and you'll get loads of different types of network attacks.

What info is sent out? Windows 7 communicates with MS which adjusts the network icon to say its online.

Try the same with XP, but remove the time server references from the registery and disable windows updates so theres no apparent communication with the outside world and your XP device will still talk to MS.

UEFI allows device drivers to be remotely installed irrespective of your OS, and most firewalls communicate whats behind it through DNS lookups in a particular order.

I do wonder whose really behind these hacks.

Can a trillionaires billion dollar company be so inept at making software they are still in business and that rich unless they are getting lucrative contracts from Govt to hide the fact the US Tech giants just spy on their users, much like Telco & mobile companies listen into calls and track your movements?

CEO's & board members have a price to keep quiet about the spying they facilitate which is more than can be said for the dumb twats who work in law enforcement or the spooks for a pittance!

Polish banks hit by malware sent through hacked financial regulator

So which one are you choosing?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bollocks#.22Talking_bollocks.22_and_.22Bollockspeak.22

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bollocks#A_.22bollocks.22_.28singular_noun.29

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bollocks#Bollocks_.28transitive_verb.29

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bollocks#To_.22drop_a_bollock.22

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bollocks#Bollocking

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bollocks#Noun

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bollocks#Adjective

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bollocks#.22A_kick_in_the_bollocks.22

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bollocks#.22Bollock_cold.22.2C_.22freeze_.28or_work.29_one.27s_bollocks_off.22

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bollocks#.22Bollock_naked.22

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bollocks#Bollocks_.28singular_noun.29

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bollocks#.22Bollocksed.22

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bollocks#Web_design

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bollocks#.22Dog.27s_bollocks.22

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bollocks#.22Chuffed_to_one.27s_bollocks.22

You cant make this up.

From what I have seen this malware is also operating at the Firmware level on a variety of devices, well beyond the surveillance of any AV that only scans the files available through an OS, or the boot sectors for rootkits.

I suspect theres millions of systems out there infected and no one is any the wiser as it lies dormat ready for action.

If its not the work of any spooks, who will be watching all the traffic passing over their networks, albeit encrypted until they do a man in the middle attack on it, by rerouting your DNS lookups thanks to an old trick called Phorm which was first used to inject adverts into your web browsing experience, but can be used across all ports, just like a MITM can be done on your secure email systems.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phorm

So if its not the spooks, then its got to be a skunk works dept in one of the US tech giants who have secured their own networks from Govt, or a massive hacker collective.

Either way these people are resourced and intelligent.

Ubuntu Linux daddy Mark Shuttleworth: Carrots for Unity 8?

Re: The one interface to rule them all

Totally agree, its not like a car dashboard, where a manufacturers dashboard is pretty standard across the entire range. Ok so VW have probably the best dash for driving, with red needles as red focuses the mind, with blue background not straining or interfering with the night vision when driving at night.

You can tell which car companies have thought things through to some point, but there again, Volvo like their dials, because you can operate dials without taking your eyes off the road, handy if you want to adjust your cabin temp without thinking.

There again Tesla can absorb you in their tablet dashboard all they like just so long as the car can drive itself. On the other hand if it cant drive itself and you want to adjust something on the stuck on tablet, lets hope you are female and can multi task!

Ubuntu I'm losing patient with, they don't even ship an enabled GUI firewall like GUFW, so if you boot from a live cd and don't have the ready made scripts to configure iptables, in a hostile environment, then those bad bots will pwn your live CD experience in a matter of seconds, especially if you use a an ADSL modem like a Draytek Vigor 120 to get online with.

So just how do they plan to attract new users who are not technogeeks?

And they say Linux is more secure.......

US government agency pops 16 years of solar weather data online

Re: solar weather

> The sun is many hundreds of miles away and does not affect our weather here on earth in any way.

That's where you are wrong.

This blog post details all the updates which explains what solar weather is all about. https://nextgrandminimum.wordpress.com/

In fact, its increasingly looking likely we will be back into a mini ice age by 2065 as the sun is becoming increasingly silent, so much so there no sun spots in Jan, bummer if you went to Iceland to see the Northern Lights during this period.

No sunspots generally causes extreme weather, the biggest risk to mankind is famine due to failed crops especially as our high crop yields today means 1 damaged field through flooding, drought, too much cold or too much heat at the wrong times will affect more families.

During the medieval ice age, some 500 years ago, its thought something like 25% of the global population died due to famine or cold.

More information can found by reading this book https://www.amazon.co.uk/Little-Ice-Age-Climate-1300-1850/dp/0465022723

Thing is 500 years ago no Met Office existed, so we A) don't really know how man made CO2 will affect the climate during this upcoming period of solar activity and B) due to the chaos effect, we simply cant model the effects to any great degree, as it would be like modelling Brownian motion on a planetary scale and no one's got a computer bid enough to handle the data!

Best we can hope for, is that more people become multi skilled in disaster recovery ie digging ditchs, learning to tie ropes, thinking for themselves instead of watching disasters unfurl on the News, whilst commerce comes up with better decentralisation for contingency planning.

Its interesting to note, when the sun goes silent on the sunspot front, the cosmic rays increase and we get also sorts of problems with space junk building up. No wonder Japan sent a garbage collector up into space, even if it did fail to deploy its fishing net!

AI vuln-hunter bots have seen things you people wouldn't believe

Re: Let's be realistic

If you think about this situation using closed software like MS Windows, I would agree, if you think about this situation with opensource I would disagree.

WRT to using Open source, you have one AI spotting the problems (Ai1), another AI (Ai2) can rewrite the code randomly, put each iteration up for testing with Ai1. If Ai1 gives it a pass, code is committed. Job Done.

If you are familiar with coding, how long does it take to change something and recompile it? Perhaps the wrong data type was used for a variable, a String when it should have been a Cstring or Long and the inherent boundary checks datatypes bring to the table.

Its not hard to do, I even wrote a system in the 00's which rewrote software from procedural toOOP code, converting ISAM to SQL data sources. What the software house thought would take 3 months based on their own programmers experience, took me 1 week to write the convertor, and a few hours for the convertor to run and rewrite the software. Still got paid that 3months though.

Its just evolution on "steroids" albeit in the silicon domain and not the wider world where we have not even been able to quantify the effect different chemicals have on the long and short decision making process that affect animals including humans.

Lets face it, I could say something offensive to you whilst you are sober and you wont react, give you some drugs like alcohol which affects your liver and cholesterol production which in turn affects the production of various other hormones that can then go on and affect your judgement, and then you might be able to see how our decision making processes are so widely affected by the chemicals/drugs we choose to ingest, inhale, rub or spray on ourselves.

Look at this image to see how the liver which produces around 80% of your cholesterol is converted into different hormones. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cholesterol#/media/File:Steroidogenesis.svg

Lets not forget the metabolites of alcohol take 14 days to be broken down by the Liver.

So lets not kid ourselves that we are in control of our emotions or decision making processes, hey?

Standardised mass market foods go some way to standardise the emotions of humans which in turn helps the legal profession maintain their authority over us by ignoring inconvenient facts like how data you may have been exposed to at some previous point in time coupled with your chemistry at the time can determine future behaviour/reactions which much of main stream science is just scraping the surface on.

http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0051959

http://www.lifeextension.com/Magazine/2007/11/report_pregnenolone/Page-01

"Scientists from the VA Medical Center in St. Louis explored pregnenolone’s benefits in memory retention using a conditioning task in animals that involved learning to avoid a mild electric shock to the foot.37,38 To their surprise, they discovered that pregnenolone displayed beneficial effects in improving memory retention at almost incredibly low doses.1 They also found the response to pregnenolone was much faster than expected had the supplement been working like a typical neurosteroid, leading to the conclusion that something much more dramatic was going on."

What I take away from this, is that humans with no sex drive is a medical marker to show they are not functioning properly, and considering the weighting we give to old people's influence over our lives, think House of Lords as one example, is society as a whole set up to fail due to the faulty memories and decision making processes of old people with no sex drive, whilst still only allowing alcohol to be dominant recreational drug for society, considering how it affects both short term and long term memories by affecting the cholesterol production and other liver functions?

Lets not forget Liver is Latin for life.

Its also interesting how producing so much of the stress hormones can cause ill health by removing/reducing the other hormones which would normally be produced. So whilst stress hormones can increase spatial intelligence as a species are we setting ourselves up for failure in the future, as we know stress hormones affect the ability to remember and learn?

Studies already show Westerner kids have lower IQ levels.

Are Western countries suffering the intellectual effects of a baby boomer generation not able to think properly for themselves?

New SMB bug: How to crash Windows system with a 'link of death'

Re: If it compiles, ship it

> Nobody at Microsoft really knows how SMB file sharing actually works any more

MS like all typical big businesses with a corporate mindset got rid of the staff that originally worked on most of windows core anyway. Even the dude who wrote the core of MS Word is long gone now.

MS made redundant their expertise in return for short term profit, and if you really understand capitalism, the ever lasting light bulb and the Phoebus Cartel, you'll know these are nothing more than deliberate actions on the part of MS, but your EULA means you cant sue them.

It would be illogical to draw any other conclusion.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoebus_cartel

They are the corporate heroin dealers of software, you want to leave and use another operating system, but you cant as the software you need, doesn't exist elsewhere.

You want an alternative but they just don't exist, the same conformity that ushered in the Nazi's is now being used against you, people are lazy, they have been told you cant go wrong with MS, it used to be you cant go wrong with IBM, tomorrow it will be some other company you have yet to hear of.

Face it, we are all corporate clones with just enough intelligence to recognise some problems but not enough intelligence to come up with a solution.

Sophos update borks systems at London NHS trust

So how do you know these were false positives and not some really really good worm which has so far gone undetected? Stuxnet took over a year to just be reversed engineered and classified as a virus!

I'm always intrigued by these False Positives, because what it boils down to is believing someone or something else and not your anti virus software because the truth appears to be too uncomfortable!

Put it like this, when your AV software flags itself up, how do you know its not been infected?

Do you, like any good scientist have anything else to back up your position/opinion like a hash sum of the file in question compared to a known offline good copy for example?

Do MS even provide a list of their files & version numbers with a variety of hash sums, for people to use to verify and trust their Windows files independent of AV software analysis?

How do you know the Spooks are not redirecting your DNS lookup's or intercepting your network connections (MITM) to a hypothetical web link to MS which lists the hash sums of their own files?

Some people don't appear to have thought things through properly.

GCHQ cyber-chief slams security outfits peddling 'medieval witchcraft'

Re: Hackers are not the only threat.

Misdirection is a valid technique in the dark arts of spying.

You feel more relaxed and let down your guard if you think they are only hacking network backbones.

Perhaps consider the fact the US Tech sector is just a PR friendly part of the US Military with spooks from other countries more interested in whats going on in your home than anything else. DO you really think Bill Gates got that knighthood just for MS Windows service to business, or perhaps its really a window into your life?

Whilst you might sense someone staring at you when out & about or from across the office, you sense nothing when that cold dark abyss of the camera in your smart phone is secretly watching your every move, whilst that microphone is recording everything you emit from your orifices.

Listening in to people when they are asleep is the best because so many people sleep talk when they dream, so you can find out what's on someone's mind, which is why the smartphone is used as an alarm clock more than any other application. Perhaps you have secret pervasion, like sticking things up your bottom? Its all recorded for future posterity.

I trust you have seen the news? https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/01/12/never_mind_your_the_devlelopers_maps_and_alarm_clocks_are_the_best_thing_about_mobes/

Spooks including MI5 & MI6 will play your behaviours more than you think, why do you think they have a close working relationship with escort agencies, sex and blackmail are the two oldest tricks in the book. Something Journo's know only too well, but sometimes they have to resort to drugging their targets in a bid to get them into a compromising situation which might be the "banker" that comes in handy later on in life, and with the best pharmacy in the world of legal and illegal drugs at their disposal, they can do anything they like, after all they make the rules and its all done in secret until the journo's get given a tip off so often seen with public figures including celeb's & politicians stepping out of line.

Maybe you will think twice next time you read the Daily Mail about some juicy gossip, just what is the real agenda behind the scenes?

If you build your own OS & Network, then how can hackers use the usual tricks that work for Windows, Linux, Apple, Android and so on?

Lets face it, the BT network is and was largely unique until Bell Labs/AT&T started interfering with the UK telecoms infrastructure under the pretence of global standards. Then the Israelis started supplying cards for the telephone exchanges which were prone to failing at the first lightening strike, but these cards also always had to go back to Israel to be fixed.... data harvesting perhaps using common natural phenomena to create the high failure rate? Snowden showed some things haven't changed with regard to intelligence sharing but some cultures are more secretive and paranoid than others for historical reasons.

If you want an insight into their activities look here at their recruitment pages.

https://www.gchq-careers.co.uk/departments/applied-research.html

Typical technologies include OS/Kernel; FPGA; GPU; Bespoke Processors; C/C++; Networking

Research includes Firmware design; systems architecture.

So you know when you hear about a new bug affecting an OS or some hardware like this one.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentium_F00F_bug

Pay attention to whats not said instead of what is said.

http://www.drdobbs.com/embedded-systems/the-pentium-f00f-bug/184410555

They have the resources thanks to the taxpayers to sit there and hack your systems.

Just why do you pay them money to hack your systems? Are you stupid?

Re: Do they lead where angels fear to tread or just follow crazy orders ......??

The fact they are accusing security outfits as peddling nonsense, is a GCHQ chief in denial. No he (Robert Hannigan) stepped down suddenly due to family reasons.

Did Russia hack and rewrite his speech notes before he put himself on the parapet?

Have the media been reporting fake news about Russia hacking, and if so who is driving this Russian Hacking meme, someone called Andrew Parker MI5 perhaps?

Or maybe the truth is these spooks never had the best people as the brightest all sought positions with tech firms in an earthquake zone chasing money, meaning Govt can only get convicted criminals with IT experience to work for the "Ministry of Justice" at best.

What does that say about the current state of affairs?

Even the hackers working for media outfits are earning better money than GCHQ employee's, but then what can you expect when the Royal Marines can not even keep track of weapons & ammunition stolen from right under their noses.

Looks like a Grunt exposed the slap dash methods of the MOD Top Brass!

Hard numbers: The mathematical architectures of Artificial Intelligence

Re: We won't pay because the computer says so

Human's employed to train an AI, whilst the customer and company pretend AI is here and now. Its been the holy grail since the dawn of time, yet theres just not enough computing power to properly recognise your speech, so next time you use an AI assistant think of the underpaid foreign worker typing up what you say in realtime.

Clockwork Turk machines have been around for a long long time.

Careless Licking gets a nasty infection: County stiffed by ransomware

The ransomware is operating at the Firmware level, rewriting your bios, typically a VIA chip on your motherboard, and some firmware of hard drives. Western Digital and Samsung are especially effected, but Hitachi's and Fujitsu's are not from what I have seen. It works in both Windows XP, 7 & 8, and various versions of Linux, going back to Gutsy Gibbon on Ubuntu, but seems to affect debian distro's including Kali, Parted Magic, Linux Mint, Raspbian and also updates the firmware of RaspberryPi's.

Its a good bit of malware exploiting the IEE standards.

For example, if you put a bios password in place to prevent setup changes and/or OS loading, once you have loaded the OS, you'll note you can update the bios from within Windows or Linux, so the charade of bios security is non existent. With regards to hacking the firmware of hard drives, this practice goes back to the 90's and in my tests, the malware even works on Bios found in PC's built in 2004 infecting the hard drives firmware of those machines.

A bios will always load a USB device first and the latest UEFI standard even allows drivers to be remotely loaded/unloaded so theres nothing stopping this malware from spreading unnoticed as Antivirus simply doesn't look at firmware. Theres millions of device's that have been hacked, now you know why the Chinese wont allow their own branded android phone's to have the firmware be updated.

Fear not, Europe's Privacy Shield is Trump-proof – ex-FTC bigwig

Re: Nice article, but...

>When 'illegal' surveillance is brought to light the government change the rules to make it 'legal'

Totally agree, just look at the Snoopers Charter section 56.4.

http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2016/25/section/56/enacted

"Any reference in subsection (1) to interception-related conduct also includes any conduct taking place before the coming into force of this section and consisting of—"

"the Interception of Communications Act 1985;"

Not quite 1984, but 1 year out isn't bad!

Besides law needs evidence, so the tech giants are still safe as the global population is dumbed down.

Who needs a Zika virus when you have consumerism!

Facebook's dabblings in TV suggest Zuck isn't actually a genius after all

Tying peoples Digital Rights to a platform and advertising revenue. Lets face it, once you have bought lots of music on iTunes, or been buying TV series to watch on your TalkTalk player, you soon realise that you cant move your music, films or TV series to another platform.

Suckmyberg is just following the crowd, having exploited peoples Ego's with Facebook.

Dido queen of carnage steps down from TalkTalk

Re: I can see the press release now...

Companies are not legally obliged to admit they have been hacked, and that's when they have discovered they have been hacked.

See no Evil, Hear no Evil.

Some companies wont ever know they have been hacked because the data is not the sort that's useful to make public, and is lucrative to just milk over time, like bank accounts.

Cyber-spying, leaking to meddle in foreign politics is the New Normal

Re: Attack of the Russian cyber bogeyman

Smokes and mirrors whilst the UK and US slowly go bust as Globalists exported your jobs and politicians sold off your industries.

Trumps has several bankruptcies under his belt, no other US politician has that sort of experience, so not only does he know how to make businesses profitable, the fact he had issued many executive orders including a ban on Govt recruitment is no different to what Tesco's did when Labour got into power in the 90's.

Govt spending in both countries is out of control, you only have to look at how George Osborne increased the national debt more than Labour did over 13 years.

http://blogs.spectator.co.uk/2013/11/the-tories-have-piled-on-more-debt-than-labour/

Baby boomers and pensioners stole your future by never paying enough tax or NI to fund the NHS crisis today and politicians only interested in their short term careers feathered their nests for their next payemaster once unelected.

So the question is, when China decided to offload US Treasuries & UK Gilts, how long with these currencies exist until hyper inflation like we saw during the Weimer Republic or will the UK see a repeat of 1976 with the Sterling Crisis and IMF loan.

http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/cabinetpapers/themes/imf-crisis.htm

Use public data for the house price crash that's happening right, and China's recently announced increased capital controls which is hurting the value of UK housing stock, arguably the last asset the country can export but where the stock never leaves the warehouse.

Google mistakes the entire NHS for massive cyber-attacking botnet

Re: "how to perform open heart surgery"

Surprised the NHS are helping to train Google Health.

https://googleblog.blogspot.co.uk/2015/02/health-info-knowledge-graph.html

Now I know how Google knows when the UK suffers pandemics, or local out breaks of something, whilst helping to train Google's Health AI's which will be a future venture based on their current partners.

Do taxpayers mind the NHS helping to train Google's AI's and getting awarded contracts for eye scans?

Its getting to the stage Google is taking with the left hand using searchs from the NHS as well as the right with Deep Mind contracts.

NHS reply-all meltdown swamped system with half a billion emails

I'll coin a new phrase, Email Denial of Service (EDOS), and its not the first time this has happened.

Why do Govt insist on spending so much money with companies who allow such silly mistakes?

This is not good management of the Taxpayers wallet.

'Treat your developers like creative workers – or watch them leave'

>The Rapid Response Toolkit

Thats great until you realise the communication infrastructure delivering net access and cellular comms is in crisis, as the US found out after Hurricane Katrina. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_government_response_to_Hurricane_Katrina

Whats not mentioned in the link, is the telco's didnt get generators to keep the cell tower's running for extended periods of time, so many generators ran out of fuel after 48hrs.

Fortunately some new standards in wireless comms should make it possible for future mobile phones & other devices to communicate in a distributed evolving over the landscape based on needs mesh network for large scale crisis thats affected normal infrastructure, or for area's like mountains, desert's, wilds of Africa, South America or Russia where normal infrastructure simply doesnt exist.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IEEE_802.11af#Comparison_with_802.22

Google's Chrome is about to get rather in-your-face about HTTPS

Hiding the delivery of malware to devices just gets easier and easier. MITM to spot your problems?

Infosec industry to drive machine learning spend surge says analyst

Its logical to not give digital decision making algo's analogue data to learn from, to begin with.

Corn-based diet turns French hamsters into baby eating cannibals

>No kidding, you should see how hard it it to find animal and dairy products from

Brexit has its advantages, like getting decent food from the commonwealth countries, even if your lamb and butter comes all the way from New Zealand during our winter months.

UK Cybersecurity: Permanent job salaries growing faster than contractor pay rises

Hackers are innovative, so the fact firms are now tacking Cyber Security more seriously show's the corporate mindset is behind the times.

It's interesting to note what web sites using IDS/IPS sites to block anti-s0cial computers visiting their websites, most websites seem to block, the time it takes for them to block indicates the type of code they have protecting their sites and from what against, so just like you can wireshark tcp traffic and work out the device and browser being used, you can use malware to working out the IDS/IPS in place and then exploit vulnerabilities in some of these IDS/IPS systems.

Interesting to note Google's main search site stays up, probably due to their custom built front end, but their Maps facility appears to have a weakness preventing Google from displaying their map data. This could be disruptive for their other users which could be exploited.

A little thought experiment. When considering how easy it is to update firmware from code ie you dont need to expose an EEPROM to UV light or have to short some jumpers to update some firmware, just how secure are your systems without some sort of physical manual intervention?

Windows code-signing tweaks sure to irritate software developers

And the best bit, MS have introduced their own disruptive technology that will be the demise of MS.

How stupid can you get price gouging your sales & engineering proxy staff when Western economies are already flatlining?

China's just announced tightening capital control's are going to trigger the mother of all financial crashes.

UK courts experiencing surge in cyber-crime case load

But are they clever enough to not fart on the chair leaving behind traces of fecal matter and thus their DNA?

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16078481

SporeStack: Disposable, anonymous servers, via Bitcoin and Python

Bitcoins is not anonymous. Looks like we have another twat miss selling services.

https://bitcoin.org/en/you-need-to-know

Your Facebook account is now more secure than your bank's (probably)

Re: U2F / 2FA are far from a panacea

This is only really going to appeal to businesses and celeb's reliant on Facebook.

Just hack the USB bus in the OS and get the U2F key redirected to your computer.

Cloning dongles and using dongles plugged into one computer whilst tricking said software running on another machine is as old as the dongle itself.

You can try it right now with Windows Remote Access and sharing a USB printer.

Carry on using flawed OS's.....

LeakedSource website goes dark amid claims of police raid

Its a bummer when a backup emerge's in a foreign country which doesnt share intelligence.

I've heard Russia is very attractive for hosting senstive data.

US and Russia engaged in legal tug of war over LinkedIn hack suspect

Re: One hand scratches the other

>Neither the US nor Russia wastes favours on dispensable items like people.

The sooner the population of every country on this planet realises that noone can get in the way of the authority of the Govt and establishment, the sooner people will realise that they dont live in a free world, and that Representative Democracy is just a woolly name given to sheeple to hide the fact that its no different to a fascist dictatorship, because in a Representative Democracy they still make the laws without your say so.

Google launches root certificate authority

Consuming other peoples encrypted data makes it harder for the spooks to crack unless there is "depth" much like we saw with Heil Hitler being used repeatedly during WW2 messages, and it also makes it easier for said companies to hack their user's but also an attractive attack vector's for hackers. Question is, will Google have someone on standby ready to enter the password at a moment's notice when their root certificate server needs rebooting? SSL/TLS is not that secure unless you have to enter the password and keyloggers are not installed on the system.

Stop replying! pleads NetApp customer stuck in reply-allpocalypse

>What is needed in this instance is user education

Because humans are human, my software has a bulk mailing facility that is programmed to only send BCC, whilst also capable of spitting out email's individually in a manner to not trip up ISP's email restrictions which might exist more so in overseas country's, eg 200 an hour and no more than 1000 a day for example.

Dont blame the user's blame the chain of command at the top for their stupidity at failing to quantify the risk to their business. In the mean time, sign up to every mailing list going and have some software to delete the spam automatically but ready to harvest email addresses when these businesses slip up.

Its only a question of time, and a valid attack vector for future hacking, if you choose to plan ahead.

Wow, look out, hackers: Trump to order 60-day cybersecurity probe

From what I have seen so far, malware obfuscated into opensource code working with malware in the firmware of Add-on graphics card, HDD firmware with extra code stored in the unused sectors of harddrives, exploiting the Quick Format option seen with todays massive sized hard drives along with CPU virtualisation switched on by default in the bios, and bios malware makes much of the computer systems and controls systems already pwned. Even banks and supermarkets still using their old mainframes, but with PC access are vulnerable, and considering the UK only has between 3-7days of food in the supply chain, the ripple effect for food distribution centres when one goes down would be rendered useless.

DirtyCow identified in 2007 was never really patched properly until the end of last year, making it very easy to add malware. Throw in the fact that the US tech sector is just a public relations branch of the US military and you start to see the US Military's weaknesses in achieving global domination by 2020.

Any hardware where the firmware can be updated is a great place to hide malware. The USB bus is perfect for downloading compromised device drivers into systems, just check out how your OS's work to see how easy that one is. Consider who ever unplugs their USB mouse & keyboard, or printer from desktop's? Exploit the psychological and instinctive behaviour of humans in their comfort zones. CEO's are particulary vulnerable as their kids become valid attack vectors for corporate systems.

If you can take out the ferry ports and the channel tunnel, disrupte NATS's you could bring the UK as a country to its knees in under a fortnight, because theres nothing like hunger to cause problems, chatic problems, why else did David Cameron tell muslims fasting for Ramadan to observe Mecca's hours not UK Summer time as UK day time is longer than Mecca's and the military know all too well what a bit of hunger and testorone is like for creating violence.

Of course, neighbours like Eire & Europe in general, not to mention the occupying force known affectionately in stupid circles as the US woud come to the country's aid, so disrupting their runways would be on the cards as well. Disabling the ability to fly in tankers, leaving the Royal Navy somewhat up the creak without a paddle or should that be a ferry for container lorry's.

How many people would it take to achieve an act of terrorism like this?

Not many. In fact if you really wanted to go to war, the WW's are currently amatuer in comparison to what could be achieve today & all without having to drop a nuke, just to show up the stupidity of leaders.

You can use Amazon style drones to drop your IED onto runways both civilian and military. Find out what companies look after airport infrastrure, ege LPL/ECorr look's after Stansted Airports runway, other options include LSD (easily made) in water supplies, so targetting their equipment would be valid attack vectors. Even targetting & disrupting major telecom's infrastructure in built-up towns and cities to create panic would be valid attack vectors from a psychological perspective, ala a rerun of the London Riots.

Reading online literature from places like this http://www.dau.mil/pubscats/ATL%20Docs/Forms/AllItems.aspx identifying their strengths and weaknesses are also valid planning techniques to identify the strengths and weaknesses of the military industrial complex.

Can you spot the GCHQ & foreign agents working in collaboration by starting with Github account?

https://github.com/gchq/BoilingFrogs

You can learn alot by reading online. All you need to do is organise, plan and show up the UK Military & Nato for what is it really is.

Of course the same could be done to other countries as well, but it wont be as effective on major continents, like a European country, but could Mexico find a way for the US to tear down the wall Trump plans to build? Time will tell.

And it goes without saying, these are not the only tactics that could be used, there's plenty of low cost tricks one could employ to further get a population to turn on itself or have a revolution.

Euro space agency's Galileo satellites stricken by mystery clock failures

Re: Forgot?

Elements of the US establishment have gone rogue on the world, the US will not be defeated which means sabotaging other countries efforts.

Seagate hauls out fat form factor throwback hard drive

How about firmware that can not be hacked by the suite of malware that's been evolving over the years that spreads over Windows, Linux & BSD and has had aspects of it identified by experts that have called their observations, BadBios, BadUSB, Stuxnet, Duqu, Flame & most recently Shamoon?

Its only a simple ask for hardware than needs a physical intervention to short some pins or jumpers of graphics cards, CMOS chips, usb connected devices, hard drives, printers and more, to flash the firmware whilst employing bug free code.

If we cant have that, then enjoy your repression if you are even clever enough to spot it, as you go about deferring your judgement in all aspects of your life to so called experts.

UK's lords want more details on adult website check plans

What can of worms this subject is.

So suppose someone passes the age verification process to watch some porn online, some websites have extreme content.

Secondly as pointed out by someone above, most teenagers will always get access to porn, in my day it was nicking porn magazines that sold in the school playground but these were always your newsagent soft porn content and now a days any kid staying up late to watch Channel 4 can see similar using the online players on their smart phone or watching it on their tv in their bedroom. The tech savvy will also be using VPN's to bypass any censorship, and could fuel a rise in hacking in order to view said explicit material.

So would it be more sensible to have perhaps a two tier approach to porn, like soft porn that's in line with the age of consent, and then the more extreme porn accessible from a later age, like maybe 21 or 25? The softporn aspect could be a way to educate kids better on whats acceptable sexual activity.

Currently the age of consent does seem somewhat hypocritical considering sexting teens in a "loving" relationship can end up on the sex offenders register as well. Loving is quoted merely because some adults typically parents will denigrate a teenagers claim to being "in love"

If the Cannabis medical data is correct, the human brain doesn't stop developing until around the age of 25, so perhaps it would make sense to have extreme/hard core porn banned until this age, so that its not burnt into the retina and brain cells of future sexual deviants?

Of course, another point to this whole debate about viewing pixels depicting sexual activity is that, does having access to fapping material make someone less likely to commit a sex crime by not being so sexually frustrated? And considering the parental controls already provided by ISP's, anyone can go on Reddit.com, search for NSFW, and then end up on gyfcat.com and imgur.com for porn ranging from soft to hardcore verging on extreme. There's no age check for gyfcat.com or imgur.com, less than 10 seconds to gain access to this sort of material.

Do you think kids wont tell each other how to access these sites bypassing the current ISP parental controls in place?

On the main page of imgur.com a bestiality image involving the British constabulary, I couldn't make this up if I tried.

Warning NSFW, but you could test your companies censorship systems out and report your findings to the IT dept and your line manager if you so wanted.

http://imgur.com/t/nsfw/ON8sa2U

Besides the BBC do often provide their own primetime documentaries depicting animals having sex as well.

I dont think blanket bans are a good approach especially considering the oversight GCHQ have on the computer networks, and in your home accessing your motion detector for your games consoles, your smart phone camera's & mic's and any cctv/webcams you might have on your computer or laptop.

In a way its no different to kids drinking alcohol under age they will always do this if they really want to, whilst ignoring the fact that peer pressure can also exploit the naïve kids into actions they don't want to do, just like taking drugs.

In another way, I suppose it boils down to viewing your kids as personal possessions until you disregard them because some mythical age limit has been reached even though intelligence is more than just IQ results measuring spatial intelligence when considering emotional intelligence as well.

Besides, if the viewing of sex is so bad by virtue of these mandatory control mechanisms, should kids be making decisions of what sex they want to transgender into whilst still at primary school, or does having a GP & others involved in this decision making suddenly make it all right?

A highly emotive can a worms this topic be!

Devs reverse-engineer 16,000 Android apps, find secrets and keys to AWS accounts

Most app developers are not security experts, throw in the low cost to market & ease of use for producing these apps so John Smith down the pub with his whippet can knock one out, and you can see quickly how these mistakes occur.

Microsoft Germany says Windows 7 already unfit for business users

Re: Really .....

Your malware is probably operating at the firmware level now, having updated your UEFI bios, your hard drive firmware and any usb devices connected that don't need the pins of chip's in the usb devices shorted to reprogram, where those chips are reprogrammable and not the more expensive one's burnt and fixed with the same code for life.

Nothing like exploiting capitalism on a global scale, because your HW manufacturers and Rebranders typically stop supporting their devices after a few years from when they were sold. Fancy another IoT attack like we saw in Oct 2015 on the US?

Its amazing just how many manufacturers and AV companies don't check the firmware authenticity of USB devices when they get plugged in. In fact hacking card readers and writers for things like door entry systems makes hacking data centres even easier, when did you last sweep the building or your rack space for add-on HW?

Its like something out of Mr Robot!

Just start here if you want to learn how easy it easy to reprogram the firmware of your USB devices. https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/hardware/ff537061(v=vs.85).aspx

In the mean time I found a way yesterday to install a device driver that's bypasses UAC set to the max on W7SP1. This will probably work on W10 as well, but yet to test.

And if you get a blue screen of death, when on some websites, just pay attention to the driver affected, sending adverts which hack the graphics card to trigger a BSOD is more common than you think, so if you use IE, enable the option: Use Software Rendering instead of GPU Rendering, this will stop adverts and images on rogue websites from tripping up your graphics card. FYI.

London Ambulance IT system hit by three outages in last year

Is this Ukraine conflict like the one, where Victoria Nuland says "F*** the EU" when the US orchestrated the coo, and Vice President Joe Biden's son Hunter now heads up one Ukraine's major oil companies? Or like the coo orchestrated in Turkey where the bridges over the Bosphorus Strait were commandeered as this then controlled access to the Russian Black Sea Fleet, which could have prevented Russia from getting the likes of the aircraft carrier Admiral Kuznetsov down to Syria protecting their interests & Syria's regarding a certain pipeline from reaching the EU?

And all because the Ukrainians were stealing gas from the Russian pipeline into EU which forced Russia to turn off the Gas. The fact Germany has now built a gas terminal port to take in Russian gas seems to be missed on you as well. Sure go for fuel security especially as the sun is expected to go into a Grand Solar minimum by 2020-2022 (read Professor Fagan's book The Little Ice Age: How Climate Made History 1300-1850 to get an understanding of the implications of what a Grand Solar Minimum will mean for this planet), the likes of which has not been seen for 500 years well before anything resembling any Met office ever existed.

Is it right to bomb the hell out innocent people creating terrorists which go rogue and bring it to your doorstep?

Be careful what you wish for, in this complicated game of politics and warmongering. The world has become a more dangerous place over the last few decades since the US become Globocop.

Extremism is the result of extreme US foreign policy.

I wonder when people will start suing the Govt for the sanctions imposed on Russia, that's led to all this Russian aggression, afterall Russian code was found at a US utility company over Xmas?

If they can hacked America, they can hack anyone including lil'o blighty.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-38479179

Auto emissions 'cheatware' scandal sparks war of words between Italy, Germany

Oh look all the car manufacturers have been caught with their hands in the "emissions" cookie jar, what a surprise.

Still its only a side show when you look at how much oil the US Military machine consumes on a daily basis, the same amount as Sweden.

Just by getting rid of the US Military machine, you could save the planet in more ways than one, but hey what do I know, there's so many criminals running top organisations and top govt departments telling me what to think and do; I do know it wouldn't take much to eradicate the 1% that need some pest control.

Dodgy Dutch developer built backdoors into thousands of sites

The public cant even choose trust worthy politicians with the "aided" scrutiny of the media or have a so called choice in the tech ecosystems on offer to the world, so when clever people make up the rules and then exploit their own rules, is it any wonder some people resort to effectively imitating global "leaders" without the contractual paperwork detailing his actions?

Laser beam sky mirage cannon can spy on enemies and generate Star Trek-style shields

You only need a temperature difference of 0.4 to 0.5 degrees C to create a heat haze effect just above a road surface and whilst its commonly seen during summers, you can see it when the road surface is just above freezing as it requires a lot of solar energy to create that wibbly wobbly effect.

It will be interesting to see how BAE compensate for that wibbly wobbly mirage, are they giving pilots 15 pints of wife beater to compensate for this effect?

The HAARP antennas also heat up the atmosphere, but these heat the atmosphere 200km+ which have the effect of expanding the atmosphere into the path of satellites which can then make them fall to earth. Radio telescopes can pick up the electron density change as explain around the 50min mark in this program. http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b01d99vb