August 5, 2002 FBI's sting snares 7,000 paedophiles across Britain More than 7,000 British paedophiles have been snared in a sting operation by US authorities investigating two worldwide internet child pornography rings. Detectives in Britain have been given the names and addresses of 7,272 Britons who used their credit cards to access pictures of under-age children, some as young as a few months old, engaged in sex acts. Unbeknown to the paedophiles, the two sites which they were using had been seized last year by agents from the Federal Bureau of Investigation. British police now plan a series of raids on the suspects in what will be the country's largest paedophile investigation. http://news.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2002/08/04/npaed04.xml http://www.vnunet.com/News/1134104 http://news.zdnet.co.uk/story/0,,t269-s2120300,00.html Online paedophiles traced by police http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/england/2167969.stm - - - - - - - - Columbia County child porn sting leads to four arrests An online child pornography sting in which Columbia County sheriff's deputies posed as a 13-year-old girl in a chatroom has led to the arrest of four men, including a Georgia police chief. Pineview Police Chief Ray Monk was on duty when he was arrested Wednesday by the Georgia Bureau of Investigations on warrants for solicitation of sexual activity from a minor and transmission of harmful material. Monk's arrest came after he had been communicating with undercover deputies by phone and the Internet for the past month, authorities said. He's being held in the Columbia County jail on $50,000 bond. http://www.timesdispatch.com/news/vaapwire/MGBTZVIVF4D.html - - - - - - - - Minors charged in creation and spread of Goner computer virus Five minors were charged recently in the Haifa District Court with willfully causing damage to computers belonging to companies and private individuals, both in Israel and abroad, by writing and disseminating computer viruses over the Internet. Four of the accused are 10th and 11th graders from Nahariya, and the fifth is an 8th grader, also from the North of Israel. One of the minors was charged with writing the virus, while the others were charged with disseminating it. http://www.haaretzdaily.com/hasen/pages/ShArt.jhtml?itemNo=194489 - - - - - - - Daughters site sends couple to jail Husband and wife convicted of child porn charges In what is believed to be the first prosecution arising from an investigation of an Internet model site featuring children, a husband and wife in Arkansas who created a site featuring their preteen daughter have been convicted of violating state child pornography laws. The conviction resulted not from the sexually suggestive photos of the young girl they posted on the Web, but from three homemade videotapes showing her nude that were found during a search of the couples home. http://www.msnbc.com/news/790369.asp - - - - - - - DEA Data Thief Pleads Guilty A 14-year veteran of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration plead guilty Monday to selling sensitive data from federal law enforcement computers to a Los Angeles private investigations firm working for the insurance industry. Emilio Calatayud, 35, admitted in a plea agreement to raiding federal databases to check out claimants in over 100 workers compensation cases being investigated by Triple Check Investigative Services for unnamed insurance carriers, accepting $22,500 in cash bribes over six years. http://online.securityfocus.com/news/562 - - - - - - - Huge theft with 9-11 computer glitch City workers, others accused of stealing $15 million. More than 100 people, some of them city workers, stole $15 million from a municipal credit union by taking advantage of a computer glitch caused by the Sept. 11 attack, authorities said Monday. District Attorney Robert Morgenthau said the am said the accused used the computer problem at the Municipal Credit Union to withdraw cash repeatedly from ATM machines. Prosecutors and police said 55 people had been arrested and 46 others were being sought. http://www.msnbc.com/news/790248.asp http://www.siliconvalley.com/mld/siliconvalley/news/editorial/3804458.htm - - - - - - - UK sees illegal CD boom Pirating is up by 50 per cent, says BPI. The number of illegal CDs in the UK has increased by almost 50 per cent, according to the British Phonographic Industry (BPI). In the lobby group's annual handbook, it estimates that pirated CDs cost the UK industry more than PS27m a year. The report blames the increase in the numbers of CD burners available on home computers as the reason for the boom. http://www.vnunet.com/News/1134099 - - - - - - - China jails politically incorrect Net user 11 yrs The Chinese government has sentenced a former policeman to jail for eleven years for downloading ``anti-revolutionary'' materials from the Internet, a human rights group in Hong Kong said on Monday. Li Dawei, 40, was the first person found guilty of subversion for downloading and printing material Beijing deemed to be anti-revoluntionary, the Information Center for Human Rights & Democracy said in a statement. http://www.siliconvalley.com/mld/siliconvalley/news/editorial/3803541.htm - - - - - - - Antiterror move threatens Pakistan Net cafes Drawn to anonymity, Web users fear repercussions In the basement of a crumbling shopping mall on the capital's southern edge, past the hand-painted signs and through a dark hallway, Umar sat in a cramped cubicle surfing Web sites featuring naked women. The 20-year-old college student was not the only one of the half-dozen young men in the small, one-room Internet cafe who said they went online seeking pleasures often frowned upon in this conservative Islamic society. Another said he tried to arrange an unchaperoned meeting with a woman. http://www.cnn.com/2002/TECH/internet/08/05/pakistan.forbidden.internet.ap/index.html http://www.nandotimes.com/technology/story/488801p-3900285c.html Vietnam reportedly orders tighter control over Internet cafes http://www.nandotimes.com/technology/story/489226p-3905058c.html - - - - - - - Italian hackers: Business or leisure? Police say the 14 hackers accused of breaking into the servers of NASA and other government and military organisations wrote their own software and used complex methods to cover their tracks. The technical expert in charge of the unit that arrested 14 hacking suspects last week has characterised the hackers as a sophisticated criminal network that stole sensitive information from businesses and government, while funding its activities through stolen credit cards and counterfeit DVD sales. http://news.zdnet.co.uk/story/0,,t269-s2120310,00.html - - - - - - - Fed Lax With Laptops The Justice Department has lost track of nearly 800 firearms and 400 laptop computers, more than half of which may have contained national security or sensitive law enforcement information, an internal investigation found. Some of the weapons were recovered after they were used in armed robberies, the department's inspector general, Glenn A. Fine, said in a report released Monday. Most of the 775 weapons reported missing belonged to the FBI and Immigration and Naturalization Service. http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,54343,00.html http://www.newsfactor.com/perl/story/18889.html - - - - - - - Confessions of a scam artist It was so easy to steal. It was just a little white lie at first, a lie worth about $30. Then $50. Then $100. Whats the harm, thought Hue. Buyers didnt seem to even notice that the laptop computers he sold were much slower than advertised. These guys are total idiots, Hue thought. I could pass these off as the worlds fastest computers. Scamming Internet users is clearly childs play Hue was only 15, but he had already become an accomplished con artist. http://www.msnbc.com/news/790212.asp - - - - - - - U.S. copyright law has hackers on the defensive When Adam Bresson showed how to make copies of copyright-protected videos in a speech at a hacker conference this weekend he realized he was risking arrest for violating U.S. copyright law that landed a Russian man behind bars after the same event last year. But 28-year-old Bresson had his mother, brother and grandparents in the audience and his girlfriend videotaping his talk at the three-day DefCon conference, just in case he was accused of treading too close to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998 (DMCA). http://reuters.com/news_article.jhtml;jsessionid=JQ4MXI5KNGL1QCRBAEKSFEY?type=technologynews&StoryID=1294494 - - - - - - - Former priest calls hackers truthseekers Hacking is not about creating viruses, breaking into computer systems or even rainbow-dyed hair, but is instead about the search for truth, critical thinking and the pursuit of knowledge, according to Richard Thieme, an author, consultant and former Episcopal priest, who addressed attendees here Saturday. Thieme discussed hacking in its original meaning -- the discovery of and mucking about with the basic components of any system, rather than the more popularized definition that connotes malicious computer use. http://staging.infoworld.com/articles/hn/xml/02/08/05/020805hnpriest.xml - - - - - - - Junk mail causing demand for anti-spam software Fed up with a litany of tiresome e-mail pitches, Chris Caputo decided to fight back. He got himself spam-fighting software that thwarts the mass-mailers by demanding that all his correspondents verify they are not machines. Now, instead of more than 100 spam messages a day, Caputo gets no more than three. http://www.usatoday.com/tech/news/techpolicy/2002-08-05-spam_x.htm - - - - - - - The New Frontier of Mobilespam As if you weren't getting enough spam in your inbox -- now, companies are slowly starting to send unsolicited text-message ads to your cell phone, too. When the major wireless carriers agreed this spring to allow their customers to text-message one another, it created a market of nearly 100 million mobile users, according to Perry Allison, chair of the Mobile Marketing Association. http://www.wired.com/news/wireless/0,1382,54257,00.html - - - - - - - "Trojan horse" rides in encryption program The creators of a free and widely used application for controlling computers securely over the internet are struggling to learn how a "Trojan horse" program was sneaked into the latest release of their code. The Trojan horse turned OpenSSH from a reliable network security tool into a convenient back door into networks for hackers. On the second day after the latest version of OpenSSH was released and made available for download, developers discovered that the original package had been swapped for one containing a Trojan horse. The checksum, which identifies a program cryptographically, was found to be different from the original. http://www.newscientist.com/news/print.jsp?id=ns99992630 - - - - - - - Guidance Software Announces General Availability of EnCase Enterprise Guidance Software Inc., the world leader in forensic and enterprise computer investigation software, today announced general availability of EnCase Enterprise. Based on Guidance Software's field-proven, court- validated EnCase forensic software technology, EnCase Enterprise is the world's first solution for instantaneous preview, analysis and acquisition of all digital information on any workstation or server connected to a wide-area network. http://www.businesswire.com/cgi-bin/f_headline.cgi?day5/222130060&ticker First-Ever Enterprise Incident-Response and Forensic Solution http://www.businesswire.com/cgi-bin/f_headline.cgi?day5/222130063&ticker - - - - - - - Vigilante hacking touted as virus cure Can vigilantism save computers from the next big virus threat? Striking back against a computer that is attacking you may be illegal under U.S. law, but a security researcher says people should be allowed to neutralize one that is unwittingly spreading destructive Internet worms such as Nimda. "Arguably the biggest threat the Internet faces today is the propagation of a big worm," said Timothy Mullen, chief information officer of AnchorIS, at the Defcon hacker conference here. http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1105-948309.html http://www.msnbc.com/news/790144.asp http://news.zdnet.co.uk/story/0,,t269-s2120285,00.html http://www.cnn.com/2002/TECH/industry/08/05/defcon.hack.back.reut/index.html http://www.usatoday.com/tech/news/computersecurity/2002-08-05-hack-back_x.htm Defcon: A Veritable Hack Fest http://www.wired.com/news/culture/0,1284,54328,00.html http://maccentral.macworld.com/news/0208/05.hackers.php Defcon: Hacking is our business http://zdnet.com.com/2251-1110-948422.html - - - - - - - Putting the fun back into hacking Hackers cheerfully try to outwit each other at Defcon. In a dim section of the main ballroom at the Alexis Park Hotel, hackers were trying to break into the computer systems of current stock market favorite Weiss Labs. A mix of teenagers to thirty- omethings, the hackers at the Defcon gathering here breathed second-hand cigarette smoke and quaffed Red Bull energy drink by the liter, their hearts beating to a techno rave track. http://www.msnbc.com/news/790276.asp http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1105-948404.html Hacker school teaches the good guys http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1105-948389.html - - - - - - - Post to Bugtraq -- Go to Jail HP's ill-advised DMCA threat actually had a few legal teeth. Will federal prosecutors soon start chomping at bug finders? Imagine discovering a flaw in an operating system that would permit you to obtain root privileges. Imagine then posting information about this vulnerability to a message board dedicated to information security, along with a link to an exploit that could be assembled to take advantage of the vulnerability. Does the vendor of the OS congratulate you? http://online.securityfocus.com/columnists/100 - - - - - - - Hackers to Beijing: Have a Cow! If a Chinese official had to come up with a list of his government's enemies overseas, a 51-year- old former journalist and ex-U.N. official in Toronto proudly admits he would be ranked near the top. An active member of two computer hacking groups, the man, who goes by the alias Oxblood Ruffin, is leading an effort to help Chinese dissidents by providing them software that allows Internetusers to avoid Beijing's censors. Oxblood is a member of Cult of the Dead Cow, a hacker group that started in the mid-1980s. He is also active in a newer, related group, Hacktivismo, which last month released Camera/Shy, a free program that helps encrypt content on the Internet. http://online.securityfocus.com/news/561 - - - - - - - E-Mail Encryption: Why Isn't Everyone Doing It? By some estimates, nearly one of every seven people on earth -- over 900 million people -- now has access to e-mail. And the vast majority have no sort of e-mail protection. Any illusion that your corner of the Internet is a private place where your data is secure and your e-mail is read only by the people to whom you send it can be shattered by a single click on the Privacy.Net Web site. http://www.newsfactor.com/perl/story/18860.html - - - - - - - Japan launches mandatory national IDs Japan launched a compulsory ID system on Monday in the face of stiff protests calling it a violation of privacy and a temptation to hackers. A group of academics and activists presented the Home Affairs Ministry with a petition demanding the government halt the program, which links municipal computer systems and gives each Japanese citizen an 11-digit identification number. The group filed a court case at the end of last month, demanding the system be abolished because it is unconstitutional. http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1106-948349.html http://www.msnbc.com/news/790142.asp http://www.cnn.com/2002/TECH/ptech/08/05/japan.identification.reut/index.html http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,54324,00.html http://www.newsfactor.com/perl/story/18892.html http://www.siliconvalley.com/mld/siliconvalley/news/editorial/3803539.htm - - - - - - - - High-tech 'printing comes to law enforcement Fingerprints, used as identifiers for more than 100 years, have gone digital. Thanks to today's technology, the whorls and ridges that can identify an individual -- and sometimes convict a crook -- can now be scanned, digitized, indexed, stored and searched electronically. http://www.siliconvalley.com/mld/siliconvalley/news/editorial/3802803.htm *********************************************************** 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.