law & disorder – Page 3 – Tech Today w/ Ken May

Obama administration defends $222,000 file-sharing verdict

Credit: U.S. Embassy, Jakarta The Obama Administration has stepped into a long-running file-sharing lawsuit in Minnesota, urging the United States Supreme Court not to get involved in a six-figure verdict against a young mother from Northern Minnesota. The feds don’t buy the woman’s argument that the massive size of the award makes it unconstitutional. Jammie Thomas-Rasset has been fighting a recording industry lawsuit accusing her of sharing music using the now-defunct peer-to-peer network Kazaa for the better part of a decade. In 2007, a jury found Thomas-Rasset liable to the tune of $222,000 for sharing 24 songs. She appealed the verdict, resulting in two more trials that each produced even larger jury awards. These higher figures were thrown out by the courts, but last year, the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the $222,000 award. Thomas-Rasset is now seeking review by the Supreme Court. In a December brief , her lawyer drew an analogy to a line of Supreme Court decisions regarding excessive punitive damages. In those cases, juries had awarded punitive damages that were more than 100 times larger than the actual damages suffered by the plaintiffs. The Supreme Court held that such disproportionate punitive damages violate the due process clause of the Constitution. Read 6 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Obama administration defends $222,000 file-sharing verdict

Data siphoned in Fed reserve hack a “bonanza” for spear phishers

Sensitive details on thousands of banking executives lifted from a hacking involving the Federal Reserve represent a potential “bonanza” for spear phishers looking to snare high-value targets in personalized scam e-mails, a security researcher said. The list is no longer readily available online, but according to Chris Wysopal, CTO of security firm Veracode, it contained details from a Federal Reserve-related database that Anonymous-affiliated hackers claimed to breach on Sunday. It included 31 fields, including home addresses, e-mail addresses, login IDs, and cryptographically hashed passwords. “As you can see, this is a spearphishing bonanza and even a password reuse bonanza for whoever can crack the password hashes,” he wrote in a blog post published on Wednesday. “It doesn’t look like any of these are internal Federal Reserve System accounts as those would have FRS AD UIDs associated with each account. Still, this is about the most valuable account dump by quality I have seen in a while.” Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Data siphoned in Fed reserve hack a “bonanza” for spear phishers

New report shows Congress’ favorite BitTorrent downloads

Congress has become gun-shy about putting together Internet-related legislation after the attempt to pass SOPA generated unprecedented public outrage, but Internet piracy is still on its radar. Still, it turns out that digital copies of pirated movies and TV shows aren’t just the subject of committee debates on Capitol Hill—they’re also being downloaded onto Capitol Hill computers. A post today in US News & World Report’s tech blog published new information from anti-piracy forensics company ScanEye , a company that offers BitTorrent monitoring services in the name of fighting piracy. The ScanEye report [ PDF ] shows apparently pirated movie files being downloaded via IP addresses associated with the US House of Representatives. Congressional employees downloaded episodes of Glee , CSI , Dexter , and Home and Away in October and early November. There are more TV episodes downloaded than movies, but the report also shows downloads of films, such as Iron Sky , which was downloaded by a Congress-owned computer on Oct. 4; Life of Pi , downloaded on Oct. 27; and the Dark Knight Rises , downloaded on Oct. 25. Another download listed is Bad Santa 2 , a movie which has not been released yet. Read 1 remaining paragraphs | Comments

FBI snares $850 million Butterfly botnet ring with help of Facebook

On Tuesday, the FBI announced that it had arrested ten people connected to a botnet that had spread through Facebook. Spread by a virus targeting Facebook users, the botnet caused over $850 million in losses to financial institutions, infected over 11 million computers, and stole credit card and bank account data. The botnet itself was shut down in October, according to an FBI statement. This is the second major outbreak of botnets based on the Butterfly (aka Mariposa) bot tool. The first incarnation, discovered in December 2008 and shut down a year later, infected over 12 million PCs worldwide and was spread primarily through file-sharing and instant messaging attacks. It also harvested financial information from over 800,000 victims. In the latest incarnation of Butterfly, the botnet spread itself using variants of Yahos, a virus that spreads itself by sending links via social networks and instant messaging. Victims clicked on the link, launching Yahos’ attack. The malware, which in some variants disguised itself as an NVIDIA video driver , then downloaded and installed the botnet controls and browser exploits that captured users’ credit card and bank account information. The spread of viruses like Yahos prompted Facebook to partner with McAfee in 2010 to provide tools to users to clean infected systems. Read 1 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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FBI snares $850 million Butterfly botnet ring with help of Facebook

California law enforcement moves to buy drones, draws controversy

UAV set up for Wylye intersection. QinetiQ group Since Congress passed legislation in February ordering the Federal Aviation Administration to fast-track the approval of unmanned aerial vehicles—more colloquially known as drones—for use by law enforcement agencies, police and sheriff departments across the country have been scrambling to purchase the smaller, unarmed cousins of the Predator and Reaper drones which carry out daily sorties over Afghanistan, Yemen, and other theaters of operation. Alameda County in California has become one of the central battlegrounds over the introduction of drones to domestic police work. Earlier this year , Alameda County Sheriff Gregory Ahern raised the hackles of local civil libertarians (and there are quite a few of those in the county, which encompasses Berkeley and Oakland) by declaring his intention to purchase a drone to assist with “emergency response.” According to Ahern, Alameda Sheriff’s personnel first tested a UAV in fall 2011 and gave a public demonstration of the machine’s usefulness for emergency responses during the Urban Shield SWAT competition in late October. Were Alameda County to purchase a drone, it would set a precedent in California, which has long been an innovator in law enforcement tactics: from SWAT teams (pioneered in Delano and Los Angeles) to anti-gang tactics such as civil injunctions. The first documented incident of a drone being used to make an arrest in the United States occurred in North Dakota in June 2011, when local police received assistance from an unarmed Predator B drone that belonged to US Customs and Border Protection . The Federal Bureau of Investigation and Drug Enforcement Administration have also reportedly used drones for domestic investigations. Read 7 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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California law enforcement moves to buy drones, draws controversy

FCC and mobile carriers commit to nationwide text-to-911 by May 2014

It seems almost stupid that it’s nearly 2013 and we’re still unable to communicate with our emergency services in any way other than picking up the phone and calling them. We can certainly imagine situations where you’d want to be able to send a quick text message to local police. The US is a bit behind here—British mobile phone users have had access to EmergencySMS since 2009. For years, we’ve been covering the slow ascent of text-to-911 . But now, the Federal Communications Commission says that the nation’s Big Four mobile carriers have agreed to “accelerate” text-to-911 capabilities for debut in 2013, with a nationwide deployment by May 15, 2014. “Building on text-to-911 deployments and trials that are already underway, this agreement will accelerate progress and ensure that over 90 percent of the nation’s wireless consumers, including millions of consumers with hearing or speech disabilities, will be able to access emergency services by sending a text message to 911, where local 911 call centers (known as a Public Safety Answering Points, or PSAPs) are also prepared to receive the texts,” the FCC said in a statement Thursday. Read 1 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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FCC and mobile carriers commit to nationwide text-to-911 by May 2014

How Windows tech support scammers walked right into a trap set by the feds

Aurich Lawson Three weeks ago, Jack Friedman got a call from a man with an Indian accent claiming to be from the Windows technical team at Microsoft. Friedman, a Florida resident who is my friend Elliot’s grandfather, was told by “Nathan James” from Windows that he needed to renew his software protection license to keep his computer running smoothly. “He said I had a problem with my Microsoft system,” Friedman told me. “He said they had a deal for $99, they would straighten out my computer and it will be like brand new.” Friedman’s three-year-old Windows Vista computer was running a bit slow, as many PCs do. Friedman is often suspicious of unsolicited calls, but after talking with Nathan on the phone and exchanging e-mails, he says, “I figured he was a legitimate guy.” Friedman handed over his Capital One credit card number, and the “technician” used remote PC support software to root around his computer for a while, supposedly fixing whatever was wrong with it. “I could see my arrow going all over the place and clicking different things on my computer,” Friedman said. But that $99 Capital One credit card charge turned into a $495 wire transfer. Then Bank of America’s fraud department called Friedman, and said, “somebody is trying to get into your account.” Whoever it was had entered the wrong password multiple times, and as a precaution Friedman’s checking account was shut down. Read 35 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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How Windows tech support scammers walked right into a trap set by the feds

Notorious BitTorrent tracker Demonoid back online, website still down

As of Monday, well-known BitTorrent tracker Demonoid is back online . Three months ago, the tenacious tracker was chased out of its Ukrainian host, likely under pressure from American authorities. It may also have been driven offline due to a denial of service attack. According to the IP address linked to the tracker, the new host appears to be physically located in Hong Kong . The website, meanwhile, remains down. TorrentFreak points out that in previous closures, Demonoid’s tracker appeared before its website came back online, indicating that the site’s return may be coming soon. Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Notorious BitTorrent tracker Demonoid back online, website still down

Facebook tries cloaking probe into data leak involving 1 million accounts

Facebook officials told a blogger to keep their discussions with him private as they investigate claims he acquired names and e-mail addresses belonging almost one million account holders for $5 through a publicly available service online. “Oh and by the way, you are not allowed to disclose any part of this conversation,” member’s of Facebook’s platform policy team said during a tape-recorded telephone conversation, according to a blog post published by Bogomil Shopov, who describes himself as a “community and technology geek” who lives in Prague, Czech Republic. “It is a secret that we are even having this conversation.” Shopov said Facebook officials set up the conversation after an earlier blog post claiming he purchased data for one million Facebook users online for just $5. The blogger said it was impossible for him to determine exactly how recent the data was, although several of the entries he checked contained accurate e-mail addresses for people he knew. In addition to containing names and e-mail addresses, the cache he purchased also contained profile IDs. In an e-mail to Ars, Shopov said he suspects the data came from a third-party developer. The website selling the information has since removed the post that advertised the data, but for the time being it’s still available in Google cache . Read 6 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Facebook tries cloaking probe into data leak involving 1 million accounts