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Microsoft Dumps Partner For Fake Support Call Scam
An anonymous reader writes “Microsoft has broken its relationship with one of its Gold Partners, after it discovered that the partner was involved in a scam involving bogus tech support calls. India-based Comantra is said to have cold-called computer u… Continue reading
Protecting a Laptop From Sophisticated Attacks
mike_cardwell sends in a detailed writeup of how he went about protecting a Ubuntu laptop from attacks of varying levels of sophistication, covering disk encryption, defense against cold boot attacks, and even simple smash-and-grabs. (He also acknowled… Continue reading
Apache Warns Web Server Admins of DoS Attack Tool
CWmike writes “Developers of the Apache open-source project warned users of the Web server software on Wednesday that a denial-of-service (DoS) tool is circulating that exploits a bug in the program. ‘Apache Killer’ showed up last Friday in a post to t… Continue reading
New Research Cracks AES Keys 3-5x Faster
Landing his first accepted submission, qpgmr writes “AES, generally thought to be the gold standard for encryption, is showing weaknesses. From Computerworld: ‘Researchers from Microsoft and the [Belgian] Katholieke Universiteit Leuven have discovered … Continue reading
An easy-to-make sequence that fooled random number checkers [Mathematics]
Take a look at Champernowne’s Constant. It’s a ridiculously easy sequence to make, and yet it fooled programs designed to root out underlying order in seemingly random numbers.
David Gawen Champernowne was born in 1912. When he was an undergraduate in … Continue reading
Safe Browsing Tool | WOT (Web of Trust)
“The WOT add-on shows you which websites you can trust based on millions of users’ experiences.
Our safe surfing browser tool is easy-to-use, fast and completely free.” Continue reading
Posted in security, syndicated
Tagged bookmark, extension, Fraud, Scams, skepticism, syndicated
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Digi-Comp II by EMSL (video)
Wow, check out the video tour of Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories’ functional recreation of the classic educational binary computer Digi-Comp II.
Several weeks ago, we talked about bringing our giant Digi-Comp II to Maker Faire. But now we’re ba… Continue reading
Daily Sony Hacking Occurs On Schedule
jjp9999 writes “LulzSec was compromised and a member of the group, Robert Cavanaugh, was arrested by the FBI on June 6. Meanwhile, LulzSec hacked Sony again, this time leaking the Sony Developer Network source code through file sharing websites.”
RSA SecurID breach linked to hacker attack on Lockheed Martin; other US military contractors may be affected
[F-35 Lightning II, also known as the Joint Strike Fighter (JSF), planes built by Lockheed Martin arrive at Edwards Air Force Base in California in this May 2010 photo. REUTERS/Tom Reynolds/Lockheed Martin]
This week, Lockheed Martin—the largest … Continue reading
Sony BMG Greece hacked, company’s security woes continue
It’s the security nightmare that just won’t end, and right now there’s got to be plenty of Sony executives beginning to wish someone would pinch them already. After taking quite a PR and financial beating over the PSN breach, now the Greek site of S… Continue reading
Posted in security, syndicated
Tagged attack, customer data, CustomerData, greece, hack, hacked, hacks, sony, Sony BMG, sony bmg greece, SonyBmg, SonyBmgGreece, syndicated
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Sony hacked again, used to host phishing site
With Anonymous Denial of Service attacks and then the twin hacks of PlayStation Network and Sony Online Entertainment, Sony's online infrastructure has been taking a battering over the last few weeks—and it's not over y… Continue reading
Science proves that staring at a screen all day is bad for you [Dangerous Habits]
Proving the words of countless mothers across countless nations, new research shows that spending all day staring at computers and TVs actually is bad for kids, giving them heart problems later in life.
Scientists say that kids who spend many hours i… Continue reading
Posted in computers, health, syndicated, technology
Tagged biology, Dangerous habits, science, syndicated, Top
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France to require unhashed password storage
France’s new data retention law requires online service providers to retain databases of their users’ addresses, real names and passwords, and to supply these to police on demand. Leaving aside the risk of retaining all this personal information (ident… Continue reading
SSL certificate authorities put us all at risk by handing out certs for “mail” “webmail” and other unqualified domains
In the wake of the revelation that a major SSL certificate provider suffered a serious breach, Chris Palmer from the Electronic Frontier Foundation has analysis of the common practice of issuing certificates for unqualified domain names, such as “mail”… Continue reading
Posted in security, syndicated, technology
Tagged Action, Business, eff, ssl, syndicated
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World’s largest spam botnet goes down (for now?)
Brian Krebs reports on the takedown of the command-and-control servers for Rustock, the largest and most successful spam botnet. The botnet’s output has fallen from thousands of spams per second to one or two spams per second:
It may yet be too soo… Continue reading
Posted in security, syndicated, technology
Tagged Action, botnet, Business, infosec, spam, syndicated
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Amazon Security Flaw May Make Your Old Password Easy to Crack [Security]
It seems that if you haven’t changed your Amazon.com password in awhile and it’s more than eight characters, anything after the first eight characters doesn’t matter so much. For example, if your pass… Continue reading
Secunia Personal Software Inspector (PSI)
The Secunia PSI is a FREE security tool designed to detect vulnerable and out-dated programs and plug-ins which expose your PC to attacks. Continue reading
Amazon EC2 Enables Cheap Brute-Force Attacks
snydeq writes "German white-hat hacker Thomas Roth claims he can crack WPA-PSK-protected networks in six minutes using Amazon EC2 compute power — an attack that would cost him $1.68. The key? Amazon's new cluster GPU instances. 'GPUs are… Continue reading
Living Earth Simulator aims to predict everything that’s happening on our planet [Mad Science]
The Living Earth Simulator is quite possibly the most ambitious computer project ever undertaken. This all-encompassing simulation will collect all the data in the entire world, to predict everything from the next major disease outbreak to the next fin… Continue reading
Posted in computers, syndicated
Tagged Computer Science, Data, data analysis, Information science, Living Earth Simulator, mad science, science, syndicated
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Car immobilizers cracked due to crappy proprietary crypto
Karsten Nohl of Security Research Labs, a white-hat hacker, believes that a recent spike in car theft is due to a break in the car immobilizer security systems; thieves are able to re-mobilize the immobilized vehicles. My question is: how long until so… Continue reading
Posted in security, syndicated, technology
Tagged automotive, Business, copyfight, syndicated
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