Before deciding to participate in your favorite online games, you might be interested to know what the government is potentially cooking up that would potentially allow them to monitor your online gaming activities.Read more
U.S. Navy Contracts to Build Tools for Extracting Info from Video Game Systems
June 7th, 2012 | Posted by in privacy | Social networks | Terrorism - (0 Comments)With the recent focus on Stuxnet due to the CBS 60 Minutes Special: Stuxnet: Computer worm opens new era of warfare and the 60 Minutes Overtime special Stuxnet copycats: Let the hacking begin, aired earlier this month, I was reminded of the extent our nation’s critical infrastructure is at risk from cyber attack.Read more
Juniper BGP Bug Briefly Takes Down the Internet
November 10th, 2011 | Posted by in Give me more Internets! | Terrorism - (0 Comments)On the morning on November 7, while folks in my part of the country (Oklahoma) were still trying to come to grips with being rocked by two damage-causing earthquakes in less than 24 hours (that’s unheard of for OK), a previously unknown software bug in the BGP function of Juniper routers caused a major hiccup in the Internet. Details on what exactly the problem was are very thin, but Juniper acknowledged that “a small percentage of customers” was affected. Unfortunately, that small percentage happened to be companies that run routers in the core of the Internet (like Level 3). The outage was widespread, but short.Read more
Reuters is reporting[reuters.com] that Canadian soldiers have been ordered not to post personal information to social networking sites like MySpace[myspace.com] and Facebook[facebook.com]. The apparent motive is safety – “Al Qaeda operatives are monitoring Facebook and other social networking sites.”
Many have heard of the potential effects that sharing the wrong information online can have on our careers and social lives, but few would view death as one of those potential effects. “This may seem over dramatic … (but) the information can be used to target members for further exploitation. It also opens the door for your families and friends to become potential targets as well.”
Are these soldiers and their families really in danger or is this an exaggeration or a command with a hidden motive?
This seems like a smart idea…
February 20th, 2008 | Posted by in Give me more Internets! | Security | Terrorism - (0 Comments)The new Boeing 787 Dreamliner has been widely reported as a feat of technological engineering. The plane has three separate networks on-board: an administrative network, a flight control/navigation network, and a passenger network. Everything about this plane seems cool from the Ethernet jacks in the armrest of every seat, to the completely computerized flight controls system, to the ability for the plane to automatically adjust humidity settings based on the number of passengers on-board. There’s just one problem. Reports indicate[foxnews.com] that the three networks (administrative, flight, and passenger) are not completely separated. There is at least the ability for one-way communications from one of the networks to another. But unless this is a connectionless, no guarantee of delivery, UDP-like fire-the-message-and-hope-it-arrives communications protocol, there are obviously two-way connections, even if control information was designed (in software) to be transmitted in only one direction.
So these networks are not air-gapped, the only foolproof way to prevent one network from talking to another. To make matters worse, it seems that the administrative network is accessible via Wi-Fi (for maintenance personnel), particularly while the aircraft is sitting at the gate. So a sufficiently skilled 16-year-old Johnny Q. Hacker could sit comfortably in an airport terminal with his laptop and attempt to hack into a 787′s administrative network.
I hope they are using WPA2 with AES encryption and rolling keys…
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