network – Page 73 – Tech Today w/ Ken May

Iraq Shuts Down Internet In Entire Country To Prevent Exam Cheating

An anonymous reader writes: The Iraqi government has ordered ISPs to shut down Internet access in the entire country to prevent exam cheating for Iraq’s official exams for secondary and high schools. This is the second year in a row when Iraq does this, after the same thing happened in 2015. Companies like Akamai and Dyn also noted the government’s poor decision on Twitter. It appears that Iraqi officials never heard of signal jammers and video cameras to combat exam cheating. The country’s Internet went dark May 14-16th, between 05:00 AM and 08:00 AM GMT. An Iraqi ISP leaked on Facebook the content of an email it received from state officials. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Iraq Shuts Down Internet In Entire Country To Prevent Exam Cheating

Pro-Clinton Super PAC Caught Spending $1 Million On Social Media Trolls

An anonymous reader quotes a report from US Uncut: A Super PAC headed by a longtime Clinton operative is spending $1 million to hire online trolls to “correct” Bernie Sanders’ supporters on social media. Correct The Record (CTR), which is operated by Clinton attack dog and new owner of Blue Nation Review David Brock, launched a new initiative this week called “Barrier Breakers 2016” for the purpose of debating supporters of Senator Bernie Sanders — or “Bernie Bros, ” as they’re referred to in Correct the Record’s press official release — on Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, and other social media platforms. The “Barrier Breakers” will also publicly thank Hillary Clinton’s superdelegates and fans for supporting her campaign. The paid trolls are professional communicators, coming from public relations and media backgrounds. “The task force staff’s backgrounds are as diverse as the community they will be engaging with and include former reporters, bloggers, public affairs specialists, designers, Ready for Hillary alumni, and Hillary super fans who have led groups similar to those with which the task force will organize, ” CTR stated. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Pro-Clinton Super PAC Caught Spending $1 Million On Social Media Trolls

$40 Hardware Is Enough To Hack $28,000 Police Drones From 2km Away

mask.of.sanity writes: Thieves can hijack $28, 000 professional drones used widely across the law enforcement, emergency, and private sectors using $40 worth of hardware. The quadcopters can be hijacked from up to two kilometers away thanks to a lack of encryption, which is not present due to latency overheads. Attackers can commandeer radio links to the drones from up to two kilometers away, and block operators from reconnecting to the craft. With the targeted Xbee chip being very common in drones, IBM security guy Nils Rodday says it is likely many more aircraft are open to compromise. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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$40 Hardware Is Enough To Hack $28,000 Police Drones From 2km Away

Chinese Scammers Take Mattel To the Bank, Phishing Them For $3 Million

itwbennett quotes a report from The Associated Press: Mattel, the popular toy maker behind Barbie and Hot Wheels, was the victim of a phishing attack last year that nearly cost them $3 million. On April 30, 2015, a Mattel finance executive got a note from the new CEO, Christopher Sinclair, requesting a new vendor payment to China. Transfers required approval from two high-ranking managers; the finance exec qualified and so did the CEO. The transfer was made. The only thing preventing a total loss was the fact that the following day was a bank holiday. Details of the attack against Mattel come from a report by the Associated Press, investigating money laundering and other financial crime in Wenzhou, China. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Chinese Scammers Take Mattel To the Bank, Phishing Them For $3 Million

Petya Ransomware Uses DOS-Level Lock Screen, Prevents OS Boot Up

An anonymous reader writes: A new type of ransomware was discovered that crashes your PC into a BSOD, restarts your computer, and then prevents your OS from starting by altering the hard drive’s master boot record (MBR). This keeps the user locked in a DOS screen that doubles as the ransomware’s ransom note. The ransomware’s name is Petya, and was currently seen only targeting HR departments in Germany. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

U.S. Indicts 7 Iranians Accused of Hacking U.S. Financial Institutions

An anonymous reader quotes a report from NPR: The U.S. Department of Justice has indicted seven Iranians with intelligence links over a series of crippling cyberattacks against 46 U.S. financial institutions between 2011 and 2013. The indictment, which was unsealed Thursday, also accuses one of the Iranians of remotely accessing the control system of a small dam in Rye, N.Y, during the same period. Attorney General Loretta Lynch said the indictment is meant to send a message: “That we will not allow any individual, group, or nation to sabotage American financial institutions or undermine the integrity of fair competition in the operation of the free market.” According to the indictment, the seven men worked for two Iran-based computer security companies that have done work for the Iranian government, including the powerful Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. The men allegedly carried out large-scale distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks, which overwhelm a server with communications in order to disable it. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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U.S. Indicts 7 Iranians Accused of Hacking U.S. Financial Institutions

5 Major Hospital Hacks: Horror Stories From the Cybersecurity Frontlines

the_newsbeagle writes: We don’t often get insider accounts of hacks against major institutions like hospitals because they immediately go into damage control mode. But at a SXSW talk, a couple of experts told tales out of school. The experts, [John Halamka, CIO of the Boston hospital Beth Israel Deaconness, and Kevin Fu, a University of Michigan engineering professor, recounted incidents in which hackers downloaded patient X-rays to China, took down entire networks, fooled Harvard doctors, and more. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An Inside Look At How Netflix Builds Code

mmoorebz writes: Netflix is known as a place to binge watch television, but behind the scenes, there’s a lot that goes on before everyone’s favorite show can be streamed. The first step to deploying an application or service is building. Netflix created Nebula, a set of plugins for the Gradle build system, that “help with the heavy-lifting around building applications, ” said the engineers. Once the code has been built and tested locally using Nebula, the team pushes the updated source code to a Git repository. Every deployment at Neflix begins with the creation of an Amazon Machine Image, and to generate them from source, Netflix created what it calls “the Bakery.” It exposes an API that facilitates the creation of AMIs globally, according to the blog. When it comes time to deploy and after the “baking” is complete, teams will use Spinnaker to manage multi-region deployments, canary releases, and red/black deployments. Netflix is continuing to look at the developer experience and determine how it can improve. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Skype Co-Founder Launches End-To-End Encrypted ‘Wire’ App

An anonymous reader writes: A group of former Skype technologists, backed by the co-founder of the messaging platform, has introduced a new version of its own messaging service that promises end-to-end encryption for all conversations, including by video. Wire, a 50-person start-up mostly made up of engineers, is stepping into a global political debate over encryption that pits privacy against security advocates, epitomized by the standoff between the U.S. government and Apple. Wire, which is headquartered in Switzerland and Germany, two of the most privacy-friendly countries in the world, relays communications through its network of cloud computers where user communications are stored, in encrypted form, on their own devices. It delivers privacy protections that are always on, even when callers use multiple devices, such as a phone or desktop PC simultaneously. For voice and video calls, Wire uses the same DTLS and SRTP encryption standards found in the peer-to-peer WebRTC protocol. Rivals such as Facebook’s Messenger and WhatsApp or Telegram offer encryption on only parts of a message’s journey or for a specific set of services, the company said. “Everything is end-to-end encrypted: That means voice and video calls, texts, pictures, graphics — all the content you can send, ” Wire Executive Chairman Janus Friis told Reuters. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Skype Co-Founder Launches End-To-End Encrypted ‘Wire’ App

Transmission BitTorrent App Contained Malware

An anonymous reader writes: Apple users were targeted in the first known Mac ransomware campaign. Hackers targeted Transmission, which is one of the most popular Mac applications used to download software, videos, music, and other data from the BitTorrent peer-to-peer information sharing network. As per this forum post (English screenshot of warning), OS X detected malware called OSX.KeRanger.A. This is the first one in the wild that is functional as it encrypts your files and seeks a ransom. An Apple representative said the company had taken steps over the weekend to prevent attacks by revoking a digital certificate from a legitimate Apple developer that enabled the rogue software to install on Macs. Read more of this story at Slashdot.