One-Hour DNA Tests Headed to ‘Select Customers’ this Summer

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Mar 132012
 

One-Hour DNA Tests Headed to ‘Select Customers’ this Summer

 

Security Management News

By Carlton Purvis

03/07/2012

 

 

 

 

Lockheed Martin and ZyGEM, a forensics company, unveiled a new rapid DNA testing technology  that they say can help identify suspects, aid in disaster recovery efforts, and eventually reduce rape-kit backlogs. Kits will be distributed to agencies this summer, the companies announced at a recent Annual Scientific Meeting of the American Academy of Forensic Sciences.

Last July, an appeals court ruled that police officers can collect DNA via cheek swab from suspects even if they haven’t been charged or convicted of a crime. But even though DNA collection is allowed, ZyGEM CEO Paul Kinnon said, a lot of times agencies don’t have the technology to do it. This new technology would allow them to do it in-house, without having to ship DNA to a regional lab and wait for a response.

“With the successful development of our fully-integrated cartridge device, this platform now has the potential to transform today’s DNA identification process from one that takes a great deal of training, sophisticated equipment , and time into a far simpler, more affordable process that can be performed in the lab or field in under 90 minutes,” said Joan Bienvenue, Lockheed Martin program manager and chief scientist.

The prototype was announced in 2010. Two years later, the companies have plans to release the DNA identification solution this summer to “select customers” in homeland security, law enforcement, and research fields.

It starts with a cheek swab. A police officer can swab a suspect and deposit the sample into a cartridge that is inserted into a processor that can provide a DNA profile in about 90 minutes. That profile can be matched against existing profiles or stored in a database. The system is designed so that it doesn’t take any special training to use.

“So a professional forensic person can use it. A semi-trained lab tech could use it. Also a police officer and military person can use it,” Kinnon said by phone on Wednesday. “This is a decentralized solution to a centralized problem. Anyone can do this wherever they are and get it in real time rather than having to wait two or three days” – the time it would take for a sample to travel to a lab and return.

Kinnon says hardware for the solution would cost around the same as current technology, but agencies could save money because all testing could be done in-house and there would be no wait for results. The technology could also be used in establishing paternity or identifying remains in a disaster relief situation. The technology isn’t  currently optimized to process rape kits, but it’s an application that is being explored for the future.

Judges in last year’s ruling said collecting DNA samples doesn’t violate constitutional protections and that DNA information was just a 21st century version of fingerprints. ZyGEM and Lockheed Martin just want to provide a faster way to run the “prints.”

 

Direct Link:  http://securitymanagement.com/news/one-hour-dna-tests-headed-select-customers-summer-009655

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FBI Turns Off Thousands of GPS Devices After Supreme Court Ruling

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Feb 292012
 

FBI Turns Off Thousands of GPS Devices After Supreme Court Ruling

 

 

Wall Street Journal

By Julia Angwin

February 25, 2012

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Supreme Court’s recent ruling overturning the warrantless use of GPS tracking devices has caused a “sea change” inside the U.S. Justice Department, according to FBI General Counsel Andrew Weissmann.

Mr. Weissmann, speaking at a University of San Francisco conference called “Big Brother in the 21st Century” on Friday, said that the court ruling prompted the FBI to turn off about 3,000 GPS tracking devices that were in use.

These devices were often stuck underneath cars to track the movements of the car owners. In U.S. v. Jones, the Supreme Court ruled that using a device to track a car owner without a search warrant violated the law.

After the ruling, the FBI had a problem collecting the devices that it had turned off, Mr. Weissmann said. In some cases, he said, the FBI sought court orders to obtain permission to turn the devices on briefly – only in order to locate and retrieve them.

Mr. Weissmann said that the FBI is now working to develop new guidelines for the use of GPS devices. He said the agency is also working on guidelines to cover the broader implications of the court decision beyond GPS devices.

For instance, he said, agency is now “wrestling” with the legality of whether agents can lift up the lid of a trash can without committing trespass. The majority opinion in U.S. v. Jones held that the agents had trespassed when placing the GPS device on a car without warrant.

He said the agency is also considering the implications of the concurring justices – whose arguments were largely based on the idea that a person has a reasonable expectation of privacy in the totality of their movements, even if those movements are in public.

“From a law enforcement perspective, even though its not technically holding, we have to anticipate how it’s going to go down the road,” Mr. Weissmann said.

 

Direct Link:  http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2012/02/25/fbi-turns-off-thousands-of-gps-devices-after-supreme-court-ruling/

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Web Gang Operating in the Open

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Jan 222012
 

 

Web Gang Operating in the Open

The New York Times
By RIVA RICHMOND
January 16, 2012

Five men believed to be responsible for spreading a notorious computer worm on Facebook and other social networks — and pocketing several million dollars from online schemes — are hiding in plain sight in St. Petersburg, Russia, according to investigators at Facebook and several independent computer security researchers.

 

 

A member of the Koobface gang posted to Foursquare, showing an office, complete with coordinates, in St. Petersburg.

 

The men live comfortable lives in St. Petersburg — and have frolicked on luxury vacations in places like Monte Carlo, Bali and, earlier this month, Turkey, according to photographs posted on social network sites — even though their identities have been known for years to Facebook, computer security investigators and law enforcement officials.

One member of the group, which is popularly known as the Koobface gang, has regularly broadcast the coordinates of its offices by checking in on Foursquare, a location-based social network, and posting the news to Twitter. Photographs on Foursquare also show other suspected members of the group working on Macs in a loftlike room that looks like offices used by tech start-ups in cities around the world.

Beginning in July 2008, the Koobface gang aimed at Web users with invitations to watch a funny or sexy video. Those curious enough to click the link got a message to update their computer’s Flash software, which begins the download of the Koobface malware. Victims’ computers are drafted into a “botnet,” or network of infected PCs, and are sent official-looking advertisements of fake antivirus software and their Web searches are also hijacked and the clicks delivered to unscrupulous marketers. The group made money from people who bought the bogus software and from unsuspecting advertisers.

The security software firm Kaspersky Labs has estimated the network includes 400,000 to 800,000 PCs worldwide at its height in 2010. Victims are often unaware their machines have been compromised.

The Koobface gang’s freedom underscores how hard it is to apprehend international computer criminals, even when identities are known. These groups tend to operate in countries where they can work unmolested by the local authorities, and where cooperation with United States and European law enforcement agencies is poor. Meanwhile, Western law enforcement is awash in computer crime and lacks the resources and skilled manpower to tackle it effectively, especially when evidence putting individuals’ fingers on keyboards must be collected abroad.

On Tuesday, Facebook plans to announce that it will begin sharing information about the group and how to fight them with security researchers and other Internet companies. It believes public namings can make it harder for such groups to operate and send a message to the criminal underground.

None of the men have been charged with a crime and no law enforcement agencies have confirmed they are under investigation.

The group investigators have identified has adopted the tongue-in-cheek name, Ali Baba & 4: Anton Korotchenko, who uses the online nickname “KrotReal”; Stanislav Avdeyko, known as “leDed”; Svyatoslav E. Polichuck, who goes by “PsViat” and “PsycoMan”; Roman P. Koturbach, who uses the online moniker “PoMuc”; and Alexander Koltyshev, or “Floppy.” )

Efforts to contact members of the group for comment have been unsuccessful.

Weeks after early versions of the Koobface worm began appearing on Facebook, investigators inside the company were able to trace the attacks to those responsible. “We’ve had a picture of one of the guys in a scuba mask on our wall since 2008,” said Ryan McGeehan, manager of investigations and incident response at Facebook.

Since then, Facebook and several independent security researchers have provided law enforcement agencies, including the Federal Bureau of Investigation, with information and evidence. Most notably, Jan Droemer, a 32-year-old independent researcher in Germany, has provided important information and leads, including a password-free view inside Koobface’s command-and-control system, known as the “Mothership.” Mr. Droemer spent nights and weekends for four months in late 2009 and early 2010 unmasking the gang members using only information available publicly on the Internet.

The F.B.I. declined to comment.

That computer crime pays is fueling a boom that is leaving few Internet users and businesses unscathed. The toll on consumers alone is estimated at $114 billion annually worldwide, according to a September 2011 study by the security software maker Symantec.

Russia, in particular, has a reputation as a hacker haven, although it has pursued several prominent cases against spammers recently. The Soviet education system’s emphasis on math and science combined with post-Communist economic collapse and weak private industry meant there were many highly trained engineers, but few legitimate outlets for their skills, said Vsevolod Gunitskiy, an assistant professor at the University of Toronto.

“Russia is sort of a perfect storm for cybercrime,” he said. The proliferation of organized crime and official corruption created “this very strong legacy of contempt for the laws and general culture of criminality.”

The Russian Embassy in Washington said it does not have any information regarding this group and that American law enforcement officials had never contacted the embassy on this issue.

The men investigators believe are behind Koobface look a lot like ordinary software enthusiasts, albeit with more tattoos and an outlaw persona. Mr. Avdeyko, who is two decades older than the other men and has been tied to an infamous spyware program dating to 2003 called CoolWebSearch, appears to hold a leadership role.

He and at least two of the other men have worked in the world of online pornography, said Mr. Droemer. Mr. Korotchenko and several of the other men apparently tried to run a legitimate mobile software and services business, colorfully named MobSoft Ltd. They did not reply to e-mails requesting interviews.

Mr. Droemer said the gang’s success was more attributable to workaday persistence and willingness to adapt than technical sophistication. They could have spread Koobface to many more PCs, he said. “They could have done a lot more technical things to make it more perfect, more marvelous. But there was just no need to do it. They were just investing as much to get the revenue they wanted to get.”

The group cleverly harnessed the infrastructures of powerful online services — from Facebook and Twitter to Google’s search engine and Blogger — to do the heavy lifting, and may have run its enterprise with just a few computers.

Koobface will probably earn its place in history for pioneering and leading the criminal exploitation of social networks, rather than the size of its profits. Data found in the botnet’s command-and-control system suggests the group has earned at least $2 million a year for the 3 1/2 years of its existence, although the actual total is very likely higher, Mr. Droemer said.

Experts say the gang could have further enriched itself through identity fraud, since it has had access to millions of PCs and social-network profiles, but that there is no evidence it has done so.

Indeed, in a 2009 Christmas e-card to security researchers left inside victim computers, the gang vowed it would never steal credit card or banking information. It called viruses “something awful.” Its tactics have been less ruthless than those of many other hacker groups, experts said. For instance, it has never deployed malicious programs that install automatically, and rather has required its victims to make several unwise clicks.

While the Koobface gang operates freely, Facebook has focused on building elaborate defenses against the worm, which relentlessly struck the site again and again until disappearing in March. The gang abandoned the site after Facebook mounted a major counteroffensive, which included an effort to dismantle the command-and-control system of the botnet and a simultaneous push to scrub its network of the worm and clean up infections in users’ PCs.

“We fired all the different guns at the same time,” said Joe Sullivan, chief security officer at Facebook. “If we could literally shut down the command-and-control, all the infections, and just make them have to start over from scratch in all contexts, we figured they might decide to move on.” He hoped they would conclude Facebook was unprofitable, he said.

But Facebook’s effort and two earlier takedown efforts by security researchers — including one by the Bulgarian researcher Dancho Danchev, who revealed the name of one Koobface member on his blog last week — have failed put an end to Koobface, and smaller sites continue to suffer.

“People who engage in this type of stuff need to know that their name and real identity are going to come out eventually and they’re going to get arrested and they’re going to be targeted,” Mr. Sullivan said. “People are fighting back.”

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: January 19, 2012

An article on Tuesday about the Koobface gang, a Russian group believed to be responsible for spreading a notorious computer worm on social networks, misspelled the surname of one man identified by investigators as a member of the group. He is Alexander Koltyshev, not Koltysehv.

 

Direct Link:  http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/17/technology/koobface-gang-that-used-facebook-to-spread-worm-operates-in-the-open.html?nl=todaysheadlines&emc=tha26

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Mont. man gets 25 years prison for investment scam

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Dec 192011
 

Mont. man gets 25 years prison for investment scam
Associated Press
By SCOTT SONNER
December 13, 2011

RENO, Nev. (AP) — A Montana man convicted of running an investment scam on the Internet was sentenced Tuesday to 25 years in federal prison and ordered to pay $13.2 million in restitution to more than 1,400 investors.

U.S. District Judge Larry Hicks in Reno told Rick Young, 52, of Lewistown, that the fraud carried out by his Nevada-based Global One Group from 2006 to 2007 was “incredibly repulsive.”

Many of the victims, the judge said, were vulnerable, “middle-class working people taking money out of accounts, trading out of their 401(k) plans, their pension plans, even off of their credit cards.”

“Frankly, it was nothing more than a type of Ponzi scheme, but it was incredibly sophisticated,” he said.

Among other things, prosecutors said Young and his partner used the money for their own gain in 2006 and 2007 partly by falsely marketing the Global One as a licensed securities broker. A federal jury in March convicted Young of one count of conspiracy to commit mail and wire fraud, two counts of wire fraud, three counts of money laundering and one count of securities fraud.

Young appealed to the judge for “mercy and leniency” so that he might see his disabled 49-year-old wife again before one of them dies.

“This case is a big cluster. It’s all messed up,” said Young, who denied any criminal wrongdoing and said he was a victim of overzealous law enforcement and a former business partners who stole from him.

“I never thought in 1,000 years I’d be sitting here. It shows the glaring injustice of the justice system,” he said. “Maybe I was a bad businessman. Maybe I made some mistakes. But never did I step out to do something criminal.”

Hicks said that he had to give Young credit for one thing — his “smooth” sales techniques on his webcasts.

“It’s the court’s view the defendant obviously was impressed with his own skills in salesmanship that he could tell his story to the jury just as successfully,” he said. He said Young may have begun with some good intentions but “got carried away” in a “snowball” of greed.

“By the time it was at the bottom of the hill, he was so deeply mired in the fraud of these people that this court finds it, frankly, incredibly repulsive,” he said.

Young’s co-defendant, William Willard, 68, of Bozeman, Mont., was sentenced later Tuesday to 15 months in prison. Prosecutors recommended that penalty based on his cooperation in the investigation and in the prosecution of Young. Willard pleaded guilty in February to conspiracy to commit wire fraud.

Assistant U.S. Attorney Steven Myhre acknowledged it was a harsh penalty to seek for white-collar crime but Young deserved 30 years in prison.

“Young molded and perfected a sophisticated and wide-ranging fraud perpetrated over a three-year period where he controlled all the money, manipulated information, drained the savings of victims, captivated and brainwashed others through repeated lies and false promises spewed over and over again through the Internet, defamed and denigrated those who dared challenge him and enriched himself in the process without a care for those who suffered enormous loss,” Myhre wrote in a sentencing brief.

Hicks also rejected a defense request that Young be allowed to serve the sentences for various counts concurrently instead one after another, which have put his sentence somewhere between 17 and 20 years.

“I feel this case is so aggravated it calls for something more than a concurrent sentence,” the judge said.

“This is such a massive fraud with so many victims who suffered such real loss and whose lives are still affected,” said Hicks, who’s been on the federal bench 10 years but said he couldn’t recall a case where the criminal activity had adversely affected so many people so seriously.

Prosecutors said Young, Willard and others marketed Global One, which wasn’t a licensed broker, as a company that provided educational opportunities on trading techniques on the foreign exchange market. Investors were charged $500 annual memberships for access to Global One’s website, conference calls and Web-based seminars, and instructed to open accounts with foreign exchange brokers recommended by Global One.

In presentations, investors were told that Young made 8,000 successful trades in a year without suffering one loss, and that the company had a software program that could automatically execute trades.

Prosecutors said the claims were not true and there was no automatic trader, even though Young could be seen on webcasts telling investors it was “working its magic.”

“Go Auto! Go Auto!” Young would say while three people manually executed the trades.

Prosecutors said they could not confirm it was a record, but that the 25-year sentence was one of the most significant ever for white-collar crime in that district of Nevada. The added length was due in part to Young portraying himself as a “man of God” and appealing to investors religious faith, they said.

Myhre said in a statement after the sentencing that the case shows consumers should be suspicious of so-called investment experts who offer above-average rates of return, as well as those who “appeal to your personal status, such as your religious beliefs, need for financial security and sense of belonging.”

Direct Link:  http://news.yahoo.com/mont-man-gets-25-years-prison-investment-scam-233625915.html

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The Most Notorious Cybercrooks Of 2011 — And How They Got Caught

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Dec 112011
 

The Most Notorious Cybercrooks Of 2011 — And How They Got Caught

A torrent of attacks from groups like Anonymous, LulzSec, Goatse Security, and Antisec has made it a busy year for cybercrime investigators
By Ericka Chickowski, Contributing Editor
Dark Reading
Dec 07, 2011

While there are plenty of elusive hackers that will forever manage to outrun the law, the good guys scored some impressive arrests, indictments, and convictions in 2011.

Here are some of the highest profile cases to hit the headlines this year.

1. Anonymous and LulzSec Hacker: Ryan Cleary


Police raided the home of 19-year-old Brit Ryan Cleary and arrested him this summer for allegedly using distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks to take down the British Serious Organised Crime Agency (SOCA) website this year, plus websites for the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry the British Phonographic Industry last year. His arrest was heralded by authorities as part of a crackdown against LulzSec, but the loosely organized group associated with Anonymous disavowed him as its leader. Cleary for sure had some affiliation with Anonymous, though. Acrimony between him and other Anonymous members for hacking into the group’s AnonOps website and exposing its members IP addresses led to Anonymous exposing Cleary’s full name, address, phone number, and IP on its site. These details were used by authorities to eventually find, arrest, and indict him.
2. Ivy League Academic Content Turbo Downloader: Aaron Swartz

 


A programmer and fellow at Harvard University’s Safra Center for Ethics, 24-year-old Aaron Swartz faced indictment this year after he downloaded more than 4 million academic articles from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) network connection to Jstor, an online academic repository. Swartz used anonymous log-ins on the network in September 2010 and actively worked to mask his log-ins when MIT and Jstor tried to stop the massive drain of copyrighted material. After Jstor shut down access to its database from the entire MIT network, Swartz visited the campus and directly plugged in a laptop the infrastructure at an MIT networking room and left it hidden there as it downloaded more content. It was this visit in the flesh that got him nabbed; authorities had been tipped off by an IT admin about the laptop and after searching the laptop left it there along with a hidden webcam to catch Swartz when he came back for his computer. But not everyone thought his actions were criminal.
3. DNSchanger Creators: Vladimir Tsastsin, Timur Gerassimenko, Dmitri Jegorov, Valeri Aleksejev, Konstantin Poltev and Anton Ivanvov

 

Vladimir Tsastsin


In a cybercrime bust that some security pros called one of the biggest ever, the six masterminds behind the DNSchanger malware were arrested in November for operating one of the longest running and most costly botnets to afflict the Internet. Lead by Tsastsin, this gang of thieves is accused of developing the DNSchanger malware to help perpetrate a profitable clickjacking scheme that netted it $14 million in stolen advertising views. The malware pioneered the method of using social engineering techniques to deliver unobtrusive payloads used to hijack victims’ DNS settings in order to set up revenue streams based on their manipulated browsing. Law enforcement closed in on the takedown after a multiyear, public-private investigation it dubbed “Operation Ghost Click,” which was initiated nearly five years ago after researchers with Trend Micro brought the gang’s botnet to the attention of the Feds.

4. Sony Hacker: Cody Kretsinger


This September, authorities detained and indicted Cody Kretsinger (a.k.a. “recursion”) for allegedly carrying out the summer attack against Sony Pictures on behalf of LulzSec. Authorities apparently hunted down Kretsinger through the U.K.-based HideMyAss proxy server service provider he used to help him “anonymously” carry out his SQL injection attack against Sony. The provider coughed up the logs to the authorities that allowed them to match time-stamps with IP addresses to pinpoint Kretsinger as the suspect in question.

5. Anonymous’ Inside Man at AT&T: Lance Moore
Former AT&T Mobility contractor Lance Moore allegedly handed over to Anonymous tens of thousands of phone numbers, confidential server names with IP addresses, usernames, and passwords to log into them, plus corporate emails, presentation documents, and intellectual property that was used by the LulzSec/Antisec movement in a public data dump this summer. According to his indictment soon thereafter, his misdeeds were discovered through the robust network auditing and log management run by his employer. AT&T was able to use its various logging and intelligence capabilities to connect the dots between an AT&T VPN connection used to upload documents to FileApe.com at the same time that unauthorized access was made to sensitive information. The IP address used was assigned to a group of less than 20 contractors and further investigation by security staff showed that Moore’s account was the only one used to access both FileApe and the servers with the stolen digital goods. What’s more, Web monitoring software showed that he used his account to search on Google for information on uploading files and file hosting.
6. Apple iPad Snoop: Andrew Auernheimer


Authorities indicted Andrew Auernheimer (a.k.a. “weev”), a vocal member of Goatse Security, for his involvement in exposing a flaw in AT&T’s Web security that the group used to acquire 114,000 email addresses belonging to iPad users, including notable celebrities, politicians, and businesspeople. The attack was carried out when Auernheimer and Goatse hackers realized they could trick the site into offering up the email address of iPad users if they sent an HTTP request that included the SIM card serial number for the corresponding device. Simply guessing serial numbers — a task made easy by the fact that they were generated sequentially during manufacturing — generated tons of sensitive addresses. Auernheimer and Goatse released details about the attacks to Gawker Media, and shortly thereafter the FBI arrested Auernheimer in connection with the breach.

7. Celebrity Hackerazzi: Christopher Chaney


Celebrity-obsessed hacker Christopher Chaney took cyberstalking to a new level when he used publicly available information from celebrity blog sites to help him guess passwords to hack Google and Yahoo emails owned by 50 different stars, including Scarlett Johansson, Mila Kunis, and Christina Aguilera. Using his access he set up email-forwarding to send himself of all email received by each celebrity. Chaney was responsible for the release of nude Scarlett Johansson photos that circulated the Internet. Though FBI investigators did not release the details of exactly how they managed to track Chaney down, they did report that they were piecing the details together during an 11-month investigation they dubbed “Operation Hackerazzi.”

8. Gucci Hacker: Sam Chihlung Yin
Fired after being accused of selling stolen Gucci shoes and bags on the Asian gray market, the former Gucci IT employee allegedly managed to set up a VPN token using a bogus employee name on his way out the door. A forensics investigation found that after he left the job, he called the company’s IT department posing as the fake employee to get his former co-workers to activate the fob, and from there he used that access to perpetrate digital mayhem, deleting servers, destroying storage set-ups ,and wiping employee mailboxes — essentially cutting off employee access to files and email across the U.S. for nearly an entire business day.

Direct Link: http://www.darkreading.com/security/attacks-breaches/232300124/the-most-notorious-cyber-crooks-of-2011-8211-and-how-they-got-caught.html?pgno=1

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Two dead on campus of Va Tech

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Dec 082011
 

Two dead on campus of Va Tech
KPHO News
Dec 08, 2011


Virginia Tech is on lockdown after two people were killed on campus. (Source: CNN/WDBJ) Virginia Tech is on lockdown after two people were killed on campus. (Source: CNN/WDBJ)


A screen grab of the Virginia Tech website. (Source: RNN) A screen grab of the Virginia Tech website. (Source: RNN)

BLACKSBURG, VA (RNN) – Two people have been killed on the campus of Virginia Tech, the scene of the worst mass shooting by a single gunman in U.S. history. One of the victims is a campus police officer.

An emergency response team has been called in to the bottom floor of the student center, where students have been sequestered during the campus-wide lockdown. The campus newspaper has reported the gunman is still at large.

The nearby Montgomery County Schools also have been placed on lockdown.

“Shortly after 12 p.m. today, a Virginia Tech officer stopped a vehicle on campus during a routine traffic stop in the Coliseum parking lot near McComas hall. During the traffic stop, the officer was shot and killed,” according to a statement by Mark Owczarski, director of news and information at Virginia Tech.

A person who matches the description of the gunman has been spotted sitting at a bus stop. The alleged shooter is described as a white male wearing gray sweatpants, a gray hat with a neon brim, maroon hoodie and backpack.

Shots were fired near an off-campus parking lot and then about an hour later at the performance arts center on campus. A person near the performing arts center is reported to have surrendered, but he is not the shooter.

More shots were reported in at least two other locations on campus. However, police said those  sounds were trash dumpsters banging together during pick-up.

The school is under lockdown, with law enforcement, the FBI and school officials swarming to the campus. Police dogs have been called in for the search. A SWAT team also has been called in to assist.

According to a Virginia Tech alert sent to students, one of the victims was located in the Cage Lot, an off-campus parking lot where students can park their cars and take a shuttle to campus.

Law enforcement have blocked the back gates to the campus, according to local law enforcement. The FBI and the school president are also on campus.

Police have requested any unassigned units to report to the south gate.

Classes have been suspended until further notice.

The shooting was the result of a routine traffic stop. According to NBC, the shooter fired at the officer who made the stop, and the officer returned fire.

The university says the shooter fled on foot, heading toward Duck Pond Drive. At that parking lot the second victim was found dead.

This is not the first shooting on the Virginia Tech campus. On April 26, 2007, Seung-Hui Cho killed 32 people – five faculty members and 27 students – and wounded 25 others before committing suicide.

Cho, who was a senior, shot two people at West Ambler Johnston Hall, a dormitory before crossing campus to Norris Hall, a classroom building.

Cho chained the main entrance doors shut to prevent anyone from exiting the building and hindering police from entering the building. Students jumped from windows to escape the shooter.

Cho killed himself as police stormed the building.

In August, the campus was placed on lockdown after reports of a gunman were made to campus police. No gunman was ever found.

Ironically, testimony had been scheduled today in an appeal hearing requested by the university for fines levied against it for its handling of the 2007 shooting.

Direct Link: http://www.kpho.com/story/16219871/two-dead-on-campus-of-va-tech?Call=Email&Format=Text

 Posted by at 13:17  Tagged with: , , , , , , , , , , ,

Anonymous Hacks Back at Cybercrime Investigators

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Nov 202011
 

Anonymous Hacks Back at Cybercrime Investigators
By Quinn Norton
November 19, 2011

The Antisec wing of Anonymous has come out with another document release in its ongoing assault on law enforcement.

Antisec anons, who specialize in hacks that show the net’s vulnerabilities, gained access to the Gmail/Google account of one “Fred Baclagan.” Baclagan appears to be San Diego-based Alfredo Baclagan, a retired supervisor of the multi-agency Computer and Technology Crime Hightech Response Team. “CATCH” specializes in cybercrime investigation in the San Diego, Imperial Valley, and Riverside counties of southern California. They released a purported 38,000 emails from two accounts of Baclagan’s as a 581 MB torrent.

The video announcement opens with the computer voice intoning 
”Greetings Pirates, and welcome to another exciting Fuck FBI Friday release.” Though not directly an attack on the FBI, this release may be the most consequential for computer crime investigators since the hack of HBGary, and particularly their CEO Aaron Barr, who had raised Anonymous’ ire by claiming to the Financial Times he’d uncovered the leadership of Anonymous.

While Anonymous had fun with Baclagan’s personal information, and even claimed to purchased camera equipment for him using his Google wallet, the most important consequences of this release may be the archives of the International Association of Computer Investigation Specialists mailing list archive. That mailing list includes conversation threads from forensic experts around the world discussing investigations, techniques, and how to counter different legal defense tactics.

For instance, the e-mails detail how various companies have responded to law enforcement requests, as in this excerpt from 2009:

* Subject: [iacis-l] Re: AT&T SMS Retention Time

I recently found out Verizon preserves text message content on their servers for 3-5 days which can be produced upon a search warrant. I then followed up with the other major providers in my area and found Sprint stores their text message content going back 12 days and Nextel content for 7 days. AT&T/Cingular do not preserve content at all. Us Cellular: 3-5 days Boost Mobile LLC: 7 days
Detective Rich Peacock
Baltimore County Police Department
Vice / Narcotics Section

Wireless providers generally only share this information with law enforcement, but much of their data retention practices were made public in September, thanks to open government requests from the ACLU.

An Anon claiming to be associated with the action said they’d had control of Baclagan’s account for a few weeks, and had been “looking through his data to see if any further exploitation was possible” before the release.

The same Anonymous participant went on to say this attack differed from last month’s law enforcement hack, which was in retribution for crackdowns on Occupy Wall Street protests. This hack was more focused on prosecution of computer crime in general.  Specifically, Anonymous was seeking payback for Anons charged for using the Low Orbit Ion Canon, a voluntary denial-of-service tool used last year to protest Visa, Paypal and Mastercard’s decisions to cut off donations to Wikileaks.

LOIC is a point-and-click piece of software that bombards a targeted website with useless traffic. However, the tool does nothing to disguise the source of the traffic, making it trivial for law enforcement to trace the source of the rogue traffic. So if a unsophisticated user used LOIC from their home connection, rather than from an open connection at a café, they could easily be arrested.

And that’s exactly what seems to have happened with the attacks on PayPal, where the FBI arrested a number of anon peons, based on information in PayPal’s server logs.

That’s the theme of this attack on Baclagan, the anon said on IRC.

“It was a blow against white hat sellouts, and also specifically the CA DOJ, which is also prosecuting our anonymous comrades in San Jose for the paypal loic attacks,” said the anon on IRC.

Baclagan did not respond to a voicemail message left by Wired Friday evening.

Quinn Norton is a writer and photographer who peripatetically covers net culture, copyright, computer security, intellectual property, body modification, medicine, and biotech.

Direct Link:  http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2011/11/anonymous-hacks-forensics/

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The threat of Electro Magnetic Pulse

 Articles of Interest, National security, Terrorism, Cyber Terrorism & Related Crimes, Technology & Digital Security  No Responses »
Nov 202011
 

The threat of Electro Magnetic Pulse
WBFO News
By Rich Kellman
Fri July 1, 2011

Elma, NY – A businessman man in Elma is leading the fight against a major threat to the nation’s electrical grid. WBFO news contributor Rich Kelmman and senior correspondent for WGRZ-TV tells us about Electro Magnetic Pulse or EMP.

Have you ever considered what would happen if one day all electricity just stopped. Local businessman Henry Schwartz thinks about it a lot.

“You’d get up and none of the lights would work. Your radio wouldn’t work, the car wouldn’t start, your water system would stop. Go to the food store and there wouldn’t be any. Everything that we know in the modern world would grind to a halt,” said Schwartz.

In 2008, an independent congressional commission warned that an electromagnetic pulse generated by a nuclear blast high above the earth could critically damage or destroy our electric grid.

Henry Schwartz’s business runs on electricity. He owns Steuben Foods in Elma and employs some 500 people. They manufacture and package food and medical supplies. About three years ago, he became deeply concerned about EMP and formed a not-for-profit organization called EMPact America.

“(EMP is) more of a threat than nuclear devices exploded in 10 of our cities at the same time,” he said.

The sun can also generate emp through solar storms. UB physics professor Dr. Will Kinney shows us video of the sun spewing a geyser of superheated gas in early June. “Blammo,” said Kinney. “And that was just last Tuesday. That material travels outward in space and can affect things like communications and the infrastructure on the earth.”

At risk are more than 200,000 miles of transmission lines across North America. In 1989, a blast of hot solar gas knocked out power for six million people in and around Quebec for about 9 hours.

“It’s entirely possible that we could see large outages again from these kinds of solar storms,” said Kinney. “But those regional outages didn’t result in cascading failures.”

But back in 1859, a huge supersolar storm, far bigger than the one that caused the Quebec blackout, shorted out telegraph wires in the United States and Europe and caused fires. The northern lights were seen as far south as Rome, and the world was not wired then as it is today.

What are the odds of that happening again? Will Kinney said,”Nobody really knows for sure.”

Anthony Caruana is Town Supervisor of Tonawanda. “The likelihood may be rare,” said Caruana. “But we need to be prepared just in case.”

Caruana is a retired Army brigadier general. “I don’t think anybody ever believed that 9/11 could happen with airplanes going into massive buildings using our own planes and our own fuel to hit it.”

“A lack of imagination,” said Caruana.

In 2008 after eight years of study, the Congressional EMP Commission issued its final report, which focused on EMP as a weapon. We reach senior staff member Dr. Peter Pry in Washington and asked whether the commission considers nuclear EMP a clear and present danger.

“Yes, that’s correct. the commission did judge that it was a clear and present danger now,” said Pry.

Pry envisions an attack by an enemy that explodes a nuclear bomb in space, 300 miles above the United States. The resulting EMP destroys our entire electrical system. Everything shuts down. “North Korea has the bomb now.” he said, “and North Korea will sell anything to anybody.”

As for Iran, Pry said, “The Federation of American Scientists put out an estimate that Iran could have enough fuel for several nuclear bombs within five months.”

There is debate among some experts about the actual likelihood of the nightmare scenario foreseen in the Commission report. “I certainly think they have the desire and motivation to do what they say,” said UB physics professor Dr. Dejan Stojkovic.

“Right now, I don’t think they have the capabilities to do what they say, but that may change in the near future,” said Stojkovic.

“We are in a very critical position here in our town,” said Caruana. “We have a water treatment plant, we have a wastewater plant, we have emergency services, hazardous materials and critical infrastructure.”

Tonawanda has a backup generator at its wastewater treatment plant. good for a few weeks, till the fuel runs out. “So if we’re doing things protecting our own equipment things here,” says Caruana, If it’s not done at the next level, we may not even be able to continue to function.”

In response to the threat, Congress is considering a bill called the Shield Act to strengthen the nation’s electric grid. “I think everybody should get to their congressman and tell them this is a high urgency,” said Schwartz.

Caruana calls Schwartz a good neighbor and a patriot. “He’s dedicated, it looks like, this part of his life, to making sure we’re protected.”

Henry Schwartz is the sole funder of EMPact America. With its mission of informing the public about EMP, we ask why he is doing that.

“What’s in it for me?” he said. “Well,I have a family just like you probably do, and I’d like them to live. I also have another family, and that’s the employees that I work with everyday. I have a community, and I have the United States of America, and I want to hold onto them with all my heart and soul.

“My life wouldn’t be worth living if we had an EMP event and we’re not prepared. So it’s everything,” said Schwartz.

Direct Link: http://news.wbfo.org/post/threat-electro-magnetic-pulse

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Justice Dept. proposes lying, hiding existence of records under new FOIA rule

 Articles of Interest, Law Enforcement, Social Media, Technology & Digital Security  No Responses »
Nov 162011
 

Justice Dept. proposes lying, hiding existence of records under new FOIA rule
The DAILY CALLER
10/25/2011
By C.J. Ciaramella

A classified folder rests President Barack Obama’s desk during a morning meeting in the Oval Office, June 8, 2009. (Official White House Photo by Pete Souza)

This official White House photograph is being made available for publication by news organizations and/or for personal use printing by the subject(s) of the photograph. The photograph may not be manipulated in any way or used in materials, advertisements, products, or promotions that in any way suggest approval or endorsement of the President, the First Family, or the White House.

A proposed revision to Freedom of Information Act rules would allow federal agencies to lie to citizens and reporters seeking certain records, telling them the records don’t exist.

The Justice Department has proposed the change as part of a large revision of FOIA rules for federal agencies. Specifically, the rule would direct government agencies who are denying a request under an established FOIA exemption to “respond to the request as if the excluded records did not exist,” rather than citing the relevant exemption.

The proposed rule has alarmed government transparency advocates across the political spectrum, who’ve called it “Orwellian” and say it will “twist” public access to government.

The draft FOIA revisions were first published in March, but the Justice Department re-opened comment submissions in September after several open-government groups raised objections. A Justice Department spokesperson said the agency is committed to public input and transparency, which is why it re-opened public comments on the rule — an unusual step in the process.

In a public comment regarding the rule change, the ACLU, along with Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) and OpenTheGovernment.org, said the move “will dramatically undermine government integrity by allowing a law designed to provide public access to government information to be twisted to permit federal law enforcement agencies to actively lie to the American people.”

Anne Weismann, the chief counsel of CREW, said the Justice Department has a legitimate purpose behind the rules: to protect sensitive information about ongoing investigations. However, she said lying about the records “is an overbroad and improper response.”

“The problem is, if you’re a FOIA requester and the agency says they don’t have the records, you have no reason to doubt that,” Weismann said. “But if they cite an exemption, you have the option to sue.”

Those groups have suggested an alternate federal response that would not require any revisions to the rules. “We interpret all or part of your request as a request for records which, if they exist, would not be subject to the disclosure requirements of FOIA pursuant to section 552(c), and we therefore will not process that portion of your request.”

Conservative government watchdog Judicial Watch has also lambasted the proposed rules change. (RELATED: Obama admin. pulls references to Islam from terror training materials, official says)

The news is “not surprising, coming from the Obama administration,” said Christopher J. Farrell, director of investigations and research at Judicial Watch.

“The Obama administration is already doing it right now by actively misleading the public concerning White House visitor logs,” Farrell said. “Every day, the Obama administration misrepresents and conceals the true, complete record of who is going in and out of the White House — all the while proclaiming themselves champions of transparency. It’s truly Orwellian. The proposed rule change should be rejected.”

However, the Justice Department says it has long had this standing authority. A 1987 memo from then-Attorney General Edwin Meese III advises the Justice Department that it has the legal authority to deny existence of records, using the same language as the new rule.

“Where an exclusion is employed, the agency is legally empowered to ‘treat’ the excluded records as not subject to the FOIA at all,” Meese wrote. “Accordingly, a requester can properly be advised in such a situation that “there exist no records responsive to your FOIA request.” Such phrasing — as opposed to any more detailed statement that, for example, any records specified in a particular request ‘could not be located’ — most rationally and fairly implements an exclusion’s effect.”

If the new rule were to go into effect, there is a good chance it might be challenged in court. Courts have traditionally given the Justice Department fairly broad powers regarding records disclosure, but recent precedent may give the DOJ trouble.

In a case involving the FBI and records disclosure, U.S. District Judge Cormac Carney wrote that the “Government cannot, under any circumstance, affirmatively mislead the Court.”

Under current FOIA practice, the government may withhold information and issue a denial saying it can neither confirm nor deny the existence of records. Such a denial is known as a “Glomar response” — named after the legal battle between the Los Angeles Times and the CIA in the 1970s over records concerning the CIA’s attempts to salvage a sunken Soviet submarine.

Upon taking office, President Obama released a memorandum declaring his administration was “committed to operating with an unprecedented level of openness. Specifically, he pledged to bolster the strength of the FOIA act, calling it “the most prominent expression of a profound national commitment to ensuring an open government.”

Read more: http://dailycaller.com/2011/10/24/justice-dept-proposes-lying-hiding-existence-of-records-under-new-foia-rule/#ixzz1dtVFZwB7

 Posted by at 19:25  Tagged with: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
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