And Spreading Malware Hits Big and Small Alike

Periodically we like to share a few of the stories and posts from across the web that caught our eye.  There are no editorial threads implied connecting these items together, other than being interesting.

#1: LulzSec vs. NewsCorp: After very publicly disbanding just a few weeks ago, it seems the LulzSec hackers have come out of retirement and have a new target – Rupert Murdoch.

The “lulz” began early this week with a hack of The Sun, one of News Corporation’s many newspapers and sister publication to the recently shuttered News of the World.  “Media moguls body discovered” yelled the headline of a phony story, mocking Mr. Murdoch and the recent troubles of his News Corporation.

The bogus article was quickly erased, but the hackers warned of more serious problems to come.  Specifically, the LulzSec Twitter feed claimed the group has up to 4 gigabytes of private emails from the Sun’s servers – which they may, or may not, begin releasing, depending on which Twitter claim you believe.

@AnonymousSabu, thought to be one of LulzSec’s founders, tweeted that “We’re releasing something we found in The Sun’s mail server, shortly. Ouch. Ready for the media storm?”  But when that release failed to occur, @AnonymousIRC, associated with a hybrid LulzSec/Anonymous offshoot, tweeted this: “We think, actually we may not release emails from The Sun, simply because it may compromise the court case.”  That was quickly followed by this tweet from @LulzSec: “We’re currently working with certain media outlets who have been granted exclusive access to some of the News of the World emails we have.”

So far, no media organization has admitted to any partnerships with LulzSec, AnonOps, AntiSec or any of the other heads of the larger Anonymous hydra.  But  in an interview with British newspaper The Independent this weeek, Sabu warns that The Sun hack was “simply phase 1″ of a larger operation that hackers intend to launch against other News Corporation’s properties – and Murdoch himself.  Not content to stop there, Sabu then suggested additional targets, warning: “New York Times, Forbes, LA Times, we’re going in.” Read the rest of this entry »

Hacking, Blagging, and Why the Murdoch Hacking Scandal is Nothing New

AP Photo/Kirsty Wigglesworth

There’s an unofficial rule among British journalists: dog doesn’t bite dog.  In other words, reporters working at one Fleet Street tabloid should not expose the wrong doings of reporters at other Fleet Street tabloids, as there are plenty of wrong doings to go around.

That rule is just one of the many casualties of the burgeoning phone hacking scandal involving media mogul Rupert Murdoch and his now shuttered News of the World tabloid.  Murdoch may become another.

As CEO and founder of News Corporation, Rupert Murdoch spent decades building the world’s second largest media conglomerate, measured by revenue, behind only the Walt Disney Company.  He is not a man known for his modesty, nor are the newsrooms of his nearly 200 newspapers, radio stations and global TV networks.

For decades, politicians in Australia, Britain, the United States and other nations have sought the endorsements of Murdoch’s newspapers, and scorned the wrath of his broadcasters.  As the New York Times‘ David Carr recently wrote:  “The News Corporation has historically used its four newspapers — it also owns The Sun, the Times of London, and the Sunday Times — to shape and quash public debate, routinely helping to elect prime ministers with timely endorsements while punishing enemies at every turn.”

It’s also been an open secret for years that some of his English papers – notably The Sun and News of the World – along with other British tabloids, have engaged in a variety of questionable activities collectively known among journalists as the “Dark Arts.”  Those arts allegedly include, but aren’t limited to, bribing civil servants and police, wiretapping the phones of public officials, using private investigators to obtain personal information, hacking mobile phones and something the Brits call “blagging” – the art of obtaining powerful information.   At times those actions have lead to prosecutions, more rarely convictions, but nothing in the past has hit News Corp – or journalism more generally – than this summer’s hacking scandal.

Read the rest of this entry »

The Dangers of Russian Hacking

The attack began on April 27, 2007.   Friction between Russia and Estonia had been on the rise ever since Tallinn announced its intention to remove a Soviet-era war memorial from its capital square.  With nationalist feelings at play on both sides, tensions were high.  As the massive bronze statue was carted away, Estonians wondered: how would Russia respond?

They soon got their answer.  A series of massive cyber attacks, launched from Russian ISPs, targeted Estonian government, media and private businesses on the web.  Bank websites were hacked, government Internet services became inoperable, and several times, under the weight of the distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks, the entire Estonian Internet was effectively shut down.  Urmas Paet, Estonia’s Foreign Minister, accused the Kremlin of direct involvement and warned “Russia is clearly testing NATO and the West”  (but Moscow denied involvement).   The barrage lasted for weeks, and even when it stopped, it took months for Estonia to fully recover. Read the rest of this entry »

The Benefits, and Pitfalls, of Cloud Computing

If you’re wondering what the latest, biggest “New New Thing” on the web may be, just look up at the sky for a clue.

It’s something called ‘cloud computing,’ and while there’s not much agreement what exactly it is, it’s clearly the topic of the moment.

“Forecast: Increasing Cloudiness” predicts the Internet technology blog Channel Insider.  “The cloud…is the long-held dream of computing,” writes Michael Armbrust with the University of California Berkeley.  “Cloud computing is hot and will only get hotter over the next few years,” says Steve Wexler at Network Computing.

It’s not hard to find praise, and predictions, about cloud computing.  Much harder, however, is finding a clear and concise definition.

“As a metaphor for the Internet, ‘the cloud’ is a familiar cliché,” write Eric Knorr and Galen Grumen at InfoWorld.com.  “But when combined with ‘computing,’ the meaning gets bigger and fuzzier.”  Much like those big white things in the sky, ‘cloud computing’ may be an idea that looks fairly solid from a distance but gets less tangible the closer you get. Read the rest of this entry »

Digital Frontiers editor Doug Bernard is off this week, but while he’s away, we’d like to highlight several stories elsewhere on voanews.com.

Photo: AP

On Wednesday, President Barack Obama went where no U.S. president has gone before, by holding his first-ever “Town Hall” meeting using the social media network Twitter.  The cyberspace event focused on the U.S. economy and jobs.   A chief executive not known for brevity, Mr. Obama fielded questions from across the United States in a more than an hour-long session from the East Room of the White House.  Mr. Obama’s responses were summarized in Twitter posts by the White House, abiding by the standard 140-keyboard-character format, but he was not constrained in his spoken responses.

The event was streamed live on the White House web site and on Twitter, carried by major cable news networks and on the web sites of numerous media organizations.  VOA’s Dan Robinson covers the event here.

Meanwhile, there is news of a former Chinese president’s health.  Or is there?

Chinese censors are apparently blocking online discussion of former president Jiang Zemin, whose absence from a key Communist Party event in Beijing has sparked speculation that he is seriously ill.The 84-year-old Jiang was conspicuously missing from July 1 state celebrations marking the 90th anniversary of the founding of China’s Communist Party.   Mr. Jiang is thought to be undergoing treatment at Beijing’s 301 Military Hospital.  China’s Twitter-like Weibo platform on Wednesday blocked terms such as “Jiang Zemin,” “myocardial infarction” and “general secretary,” sparking a wave of online speculation about the former president’s well-being.

Some big American technology companies, such as Cisco, have drawn fire for agreeing to work with the Chinese authorities on projects that can lead to censorship and spying on the Chinese people.  VOA’s Ira Mellman spoke about the issue with Jillian York at the San Francisco based Electronic Frontier Foundation.  Find both stories on this page of voanews.com.

Planning a trip to Japan?

Photo: safecast.org

If you’re venturing anywhere near the Fukushima power plant, you can check radiation there from where you sit if you visit the website Safecast.

The home page has a constantly-updating map of Japan with little pins charting the latest radiation data.  Safecast aggregates data from official public sources and allows volunteers to upload their own Geiger counter readings.  Safecast’s instant uploads mean its data is always timely. It’s also established standards for consistency for its volunteers. For instance, they’re asked to note where they took their measurements. Since fallout settles on the ground, a reading from a roof can be different from a reading at ground level.  Deena Prichep reports with text and audio from Portland, Oregon.

Some of the stories from the digital world we’re following this week on voanews.com.   DF editor Doug Bernard returns on Monday.

Who, And Where, Are The Greatest Threats To Internet Security?

In this Sept. 24, 2010, file photo the National Cybersecurity & Communications Integration Center (NCCIC) prepares for the Cyber Storm III exercise at its operations center in Arlington, Va. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite)

The web has been humming with talk this week – talk, concern, worry and general shpilkes – about Internet security.  There’s good reason: not only are there renewed questions about just which hacker group is responsible for what cyber-attack, but the rate and severity of computer hacks appear to be escalating rapidly.  In the last week alone the governments of Brazil, Antigua, Australia and Zimbabwe have all been hit hard, with secure and private information literally pouring out onto the web.  “Anonymous” on Tuesday declared ‘war’ on the city of Orlando, going as far as dressing Mickey Mouse up in the “Guy Fawkes” mask of AnonOps.   One day later the newly formed hacker group “AntiSec” targeted the major media firms Universal Music and Viacom, while also returning to an earlier hack – the Arizona Department of Public Safety – only this time with a new document dump of sensitive information.  It seems no-one is immune: even singer Amy Winehouse’s website was defaced Friday by a group calling itself “SwagSec”, which vows to “…take back the Internet from the white devil.”

The hacking playground has become crowded territory, and despite efforts of the FBI (also a recent hacker victim) and British authorities, there are no signs the web is becoming any less insecure.

Below are several stories we found online this week: none of them specifically concerning the Lulz-Anti-Anonymous-Swag-Sec tangle, but all that still raise serious questions of web privacy and security. Read the rest of this entry »