May 16, 2002 13,000 Credit Reports Stolen by Hackers Hackers posing as employees of the Ford Motor Credit Company have in recent months harvested a trove of 13,000 credit reports a virtual one- stop shop for fraud and identity theft with data on consumers in affluent neighborhoods across the country. The company said in a letter to the victims that computer intruders used an authorization code from Ford Credit to get the credit reports from Experian, one of three major reporting agencies. "I've never seen anything of this size," a spokesman or Experian, Donald Girard, said. "Privacy is the hallmark of our business. We're extraordinarily concerned about the privacy issue here, and the trust factor." http://www.nytimes.com/2002/05/17/technology/17IDEN.html http://www.msnbc.com/news/753126.asp - - - - - - - - FBI searches home of 'Deceptive Duo' suspect The FBI searched the California home of a teenager suspected of being a member of the hacker group Deceptive Duo, which has claimed responsibility for hacking and defacing several government and public-sector Web sites. Andrew Black, a spokesman for the FBI's San Francisco office, said agents from his office executed the search warrant at the Pleasant Hill, Calif., home of 18-year-old Robert Lyttle on Monday at the request of the FBI's field office in Washington, which is coordinating the case. http://www.computerworld.com/securitytopics/security/cybercrime/story/0,10801,71230,00.html - - - - - - - - Man Posts Sexy Personal Ads In Ex-Wife's Name, Gets Jailed An Arizona man who placed sexually explicit personal ads on the Internet, but attributed them to his ex- wife, has been handed a year in jail for that and other computer-related crimes. The office of Arizona Attorney General Janet Napolitano said this week that a Glendale man was sentenced in Maricopa County Superior Court to jail time plus 10 years' probation following two separate incidents involving faked identity. http://www.newsbytes.com/news/02/176631.html - - - - - - - - Charges loom in IM harassment case A Boston-area teen has had his instant messaging wings clipped following charges that he used the medium to harass girls and their families. Under the terms of a pretrial probation agreement signed Monday by the unidentified teen and others involved in the case, the resident of North Reading, Mass., risks criminal prosecution if he engages in "unsupervised" use of IM and other computing applications, according to the North Reading Police Department. http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1105-914657.html - - - - - - - - Virus hoax pulls in victims An e-mail hoax posing as a virus advisory is surfing across the Internet on a wave of PC user naivete. The fake advisory warns users of the file "jdbgmgr.exe," purportedly a virus that damages a victim's computer system two weeks after first infecting the PC. The hoax has been forwarded by users who believe they have been infected and need to tell other victims to clean out the virus. http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1105-916204.html http://news.com.com/2100-1040-916145.html - - - - - - - - Teddy hoax virus looking to play Down An old hoax virus has donned a new disguise to test the unwary Windows XP user and it already has a few Australians jumping on the delete key. Teddy, a variant of the SULFNBK.EXE hoax that has been menacing e-mail users since early 2001, has identical social engineering principles as its predecessor. It warns users that they have a virus, instructing them to delete a Windows system file in order to remove it. http://www.zdnet.com.au/newstech/security/story/0,2000024985,20265296,00.htm - - - - - - - - 'Fortnight' Worm Changes Browser Start-Up Page To Porn Site Anti-virus companies have identified a mass mailer worm known as "JS.Fortnight" that changes an infected computer's Internet start-up page to an adult site. According to Symantec and F-Secure, JS.Fortnight makes changes in the infected computer's registry, including adding an HTML file into the default signature for messages sent with e-mail software program Outlook Express. The e-mail contains a hidden link to "rawtocash.net" sites. http://www.newsbytes.com/news/02/176613.html http://www.theregus.com/content/55/24961.html http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/55/25301.html - - - - - - - - Senate Committee OKs ID Theft Bills Identity theft victims could better repair their lives - and credit - under legislation approved today by a Senate committee. The Senate Judiciary Committee also made several changes to the Identity Theft Victims Assistance Act and the Social Security Number Misuse Prevention Act to make them easier on businesses. http://www.newsbytes.com/news/02/176635.html - - - - - - - - Senator Prevents Action on Online Privacy Bill Senator Trent Lott, the minority leader, forced the Senate Commerce Committee to adjourn this morning as it was on the verge of adopting an online privacy bill. The measure would require Internet service providers, online service providers and commercial Web sites to get customers' permission before they could disclose important personal information. That would include financial, medical, ethnic, religious and political information along with Social Security data and sexual orientation. http://www.nytimes.com/2002/05/17/politics/17PRIV.html http://www.siliconvalley.com/mld/siliconvalley/news/editorial/3277045.htm http://news.com.com/2100-1023-915792.html http://www.newsbytes.com/news/02/176627.html http://www.nytimes.com/2002/05/17/politics/17PRIV.html http://www.usatoday.com/life/cyber/tech/2002/05/16/privacy-bill.htm - - - - - - - - UK firms fail e-security test Business leaders are offered advice on protecting themselves from cyberattack, as the UK government is urged to take a more active lead in IT security. Security experts have warned that e-security is dangerously poor in the UK, with most British firms failing to give enough attention to managing information risks. http://news.zdnet.co.uk/story/0,,t269-s2110464,00.html http://zdnet.com.com/2110-1106-916498.html - - - - - - - - Feds Out-Hack Russian Hackers Even for the FBI, it was an audacious sting, reports CBS News Correspondent Wyatt Andrews. With the help of some new computer spying software, FBI agents were able to out-hack a pair of Russian hackers who had stolen thousands of credit card numbers to make purchases on Ebay and then defraud Pay Pal, the leading online bill payer. http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2002/05/14/eveningnews/main508953.shtml - - - - - - - - 'Jello' threat sets security a-wobble Companies using fingerprint readers to increase security now have to worry about a new threat: the gummy finger. A Japanese researcher presented a study on Tuesday at the International Telecommunications Union's Workshop on Security in Seoul, Korea, showing that fingerprint readers can be fooled 80 percent of the time by a fake finger created with gelatin sporting prints lifted from a glass, for example. http://zdnet.com.com/'/2100-1105-916135.html http://news.com.com/2100-1001-915580.html http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/55/25300.html - - - - - - - - DOD tightening security buys In an effort to improve the security of the commercial software it buys, the Defense Department beginning in July will restrict its purchase of information assurance products to those certified by the National Information Assurance Partnership. http://www.fcw.com/fcw/articles/2002/0513/web-niap-05-16-02.asp - - - - - - - - Internet gambling poses questions for Nevada regulators Nevadans won't be able to legally gamble from their home computers any time soon, state regulators said Thursday. That's because Internet gambling poses too many legal, technical and public policy questions to determine how it should be regulated, said Dennis Neilander, chairman of the Nevada Gaming Control Board. http://www.siliconvalley.com/mld/siliconvalley/news/editorial/3279232.htm - - - - - - - - Tech giants back file-swapper Kazaa Powerful computer and telecommunications companies are allying with upstart file-swapping service Kazaa in a bid to overhaul the way record labels are paid for music and other content distributed on the Net. Stung by legislative proposals that could force computer companies and Internet service providers to become anti- piracy cops, Verizon Communications and an influential technology trade association are beginning to push a copyright proposal that could make downloading a song online as legal as listening to the radio. http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1105-915036.html http://news.com.com/2100-1023-914983.html - - - - - - - - Microsoft issues patch for six flaws in Web browser Microsoft Corp. has warned that its Internet Explorer software contains six flaws, some of which could give hackers access to -- and even potentially change -- personal information about computer users. The Redmond company, which called the severity of some of the flaws ``critical,'' advised users of Explorer versions 5.01, 5.5 and 6.0 to download a patch for the software from the Microsoft Web site at www.microsoft.com/security. http://www.siliconvalley.com/mld/siliconvalley/news/editorial/3279241.htm Experts Rip New Microsoft Browser Patch http://www.newsfactor.com/perl/story/17784.html http://www.newsfactor.com/perl/story/17798.html http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/6/25307.html - - - - - - - - World leaders use terror card to watch all of us. Forever Pronouncements from this week's G8 Justice and Interior Ministers meeting about data protection and the retention of Internet traffic data have created concern among privacy activists. Controversy centres around whether blanket retention of traffic data on the entire population should be permitted (effectively making every Internet user susceptible to continuous surveillance of their online activity), or whether data should only be recorded on specifically designated targets or groups. Although the G8 refers to September 11 and terrorism as justification for data retention, there is no proposal to limit the use of data to terrorist cases. http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/6/25311.html - - - - - - - - Could Hackers Derail Wireless LANs? Gartner research director John Pescatore told Wireless NewsFactor that despite improvements in WLANs, the fact that the technology is still in the emerging phase makes it vulnerable. 'They've been rushed out to market,' he said, which is 'usually a good recipe for security holes.' http://www.newsfactor.com/perl/story/17781.html - - - - - - - - Trustworthy Computing -- Microsoft White Paper While many technologies that make use of computing have proven themselves extremely reliable and trustworthy computers helped transport people to the moon and back, they control critical aircraft systems for millions of flights every year, and they move trillions of dollars around the globe daily they generally havent reached the point where people are willing to entrust them with their lives, implicitly or explicitly. Many people are reluctant to entrust todays computer systems with their personal information, such as financial and medical records, because they are increasingly concerned about the security and reliability of these systems, which they view as posing significant societal risk. If computing is to become truly ubiquitous and fulfill the immense promise of technology we will have to make the computing ecosystem sufficiently trustworthy that people dont worry about its fallibility or unreliability the way they do today. http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/exec/craig/05-01trustworthywp.asp - - - - - - - - Facial recognition put to the test Facial-recognition security systems installed at Boston's Logan Airport, where two of the Sept.11 hijacked flights originated, worked more than 90 percent of the time in a recently concluded test, two companies behind the systems said Thursday. While official data has not yet been released, Visionics and Viisage Technology said their systems were able to identify individuals from a pre-selected group passing through the airport more than nine out of 10 times. http://news.com.com/2100-1017-915832.html Face Recognition Technology Fails Again, ACLU Claims http://www.newsbytes.com/news/02/176621.html *********************************************************** Search the NewsBits.net Archive at: http://www.newsbits.net/search.html *********************************************************** The source material may be copyrighted and all rights are retained by the original author/publisher. The information is provided to you for non-profit research and educational purposes. Reproduction of this text is encouraged; however copies may not be sold, and NewsBits (www.newsbits.net) should be cited as the source of the information. Copyright 2000-2002, NewsBits.net, Campbell, CA.