Tech News
Before he was charged in July 2011 with aiding the hacker group Anonymous, Josh Covelli lived what he considered the life of an ordinary 26 year-old. He spent countless hours on the Internet. He had a girlfriend. He was a student and employee at Devry University in Dayton, Ohio. But after federal authorities accused him and 13 other people of helping launch a cyberattack against the online payment service PayPal, Covelli faced potentially 15 years in prison, and his life began to unravel. His girlfriend broke up with him. He struggled to find an employer willing to hire an accused computer hacker. His friends \"wanted nothing to do with me,\" he said, and he suffered from bouts of paranoia -- \"looking out windows, not sure who to trust\" -- before checking into a behavioral health center for three days. \"It was as if I got kicked off a cliff,\" Covelli, now 28, told The Huffington Post in an interview. Nearly two years after the charges made headlines, the case remains an anxiety-provoking daily reality for Covelli and his 13 co-defendants. Though they come from disparate worlds -- drawn from different points on the map and stages in their lives -- the defendants collectively share a sense of unsettling uncertainty, their plans and aspirations stuck in a limbo of indeterminate duration as they await a resolution of their case. Their wait may be nearing a conclusion. This week, the defendants -- known collectively as the \"PayPal 14\" -- attended a closed-door hearing in federal court in San Francisco in hopes of negotiating a settlement that could keep them out of prison. Lawyers for both sides declined to discuss the negotiations, but a joint court filing called the meeting \"productive.\" \"We\'re at a delicate point,\" one defense attorney said in an interview.
Mozilla has called on a commercial spyware company to stop masquerading as its Firefox browser to avoid detection on people\'s computers. The action comes after a report from human rights group Citizen Lab claimed that Gamma International, a controversial surveillance software company, was using Firefox as a mask to hide its FinSpy software, which is used by governments to snoop on citizens. British-based Gamma disguises its surveillance tool - which can be installed covertly, and then access key-strokes, activate webcams and record Skype calls as Firefox so that users don\'t delete it, Mozilla said. We\'ve sent Gamma a cease and desist letter today demanding that these illegal practices stop immediately, Mozilla said in a blog. We cannot abide a software company using our name to disguise online surveillance tools that can be and in several cases actually have been used by Gamma\'s customers to violate citizens human rights and online privacy. Mozilla stressed that the two software packages remained separate and that FinSpy did not affect Firefox itself or the way the browser operated. Gamma\'s software is entirely separate, and only uses our brand and trademarks to lie and mislead as one of its methods for avoiding detection and deletion, Mozilla said.
The Syrian Electronic Army, an informal network of hackers who wage cyberwar in support of the Syrian government and President Bashar al-Assad, have found yet another way to harass Western Web users. Hackers identifying as part of the Syrian Electronic Army have hijacked a series of Twitter feeds over the last few weeks. The targeted feeds tend to be associated with Western organizations, particularly ones that somehow cover Syria. Last month, hackers took over the Twitter feed and Web site for Human Rights Watch, disseminating the unsubtle message \"Syrian Electronic Army Was Here.\" Last week, they hacked into National Public Radio\'s site and its Twitter feeds, criticizing NPR\'s coverage of the Syrian civil war. On Saturday, hackers identifying as members of the Syrian Electronic Army defaced four Twitter accounts owned by CBS News, including the \"60 Minutes\" account, which had 320,000 followers until it was disabled by Twitter in apparent response to the hacks. The messages were among some of the pro-Assad hackers most elaborate, a long string of messages that accused the United States of supporting terrorism in Syria as part of a larger plot to impose a one-world government.
Looks like Bitcoin has got too big to ignore. Virtual currencies are to be regulated by the US Treasury after the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) moved to clarify their status under anti-money-laundering laws.
If you follow security news, or even just the tech press, you may have seen links to a very interesting paper about a researcher who mapped the entire IPv4 Internet space to see which hosts were alive, where they were in the world, and how much of the currently allocated IP space is in use. The more attention-grabbing headline, however, is the fact that to accomplish this, he created a 420,000-node botnet. He used low-security hosts where he could easily get in and deploy his script that would help map the Internet and create some amazing graphics.
Scientists say it is remarkably easy to identify a mobile phone user from just a few pieces of location information. Whenever a phone is switched on, its connection to the network means its position and movement can be plotted. This data is given anonymously to third parties, both to drive services for the user and to target advertisements. But a study in Scientific Reports warns that human mobility patterns are so predictable it is possible to identify a user from only four data points. The growing ubiquity of mobile phones and smartphone applications has ushered in an era in which tremendous amounts of user data have become available to the companies that operate and distribute them - sometimes released publicly as "anonymised" or aggregated data sets.