Monthly Archives: February 2010

The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) announced yesterday that it had notified "almost 100" companies and organizations, including schools and local governments, that sensitive personal information from those entities was being shared across peer-to-peer (P2P) filesharing networks. This has apparently resulted in circulation of customer personal information, health information, Social Security numbers and other sensitive data. 

Poorly supervised use of P2P networks have frequently been the subject of unwanted attention,… More

1.  Arrested: Russian Hacker Responsible for Two Minutes of Roadside Porn 

The hacker who managed to compromise computer servers controlling a large commercial advertising screen in Moscow was arrested recently by Russian authorities.  On January 14, 2010, commuters on Moscow’s Garden Ring Road passed a large-scale video screen and instead of the normal commercial advertisements saw two minutes of hard-core pornography.  The video, as well as the resulting traffic problems,… More

This week cryptographers Karsten Nohl from University of Virginia and Erik Tews of the Darmstadt University of Technology announced that they had broken the DECT encryption standard.  Who cares, you ask?  The Digital Enhanced Cordless Telecommunications or DECT standard is what prevents someone parked outside your house from being able to listen in on telephone conversations you are having on your 1.9 GHz DECT cordless phone.  (So, that’s what that label on the receiver means.)

Nohl told Dan Goodin from The Register that he cracked the code by putting the DECT chip under the electron microscope and then comparing his findings with information disclosed in the published patent(s). … More

Back in October you may remember our post on Elcomsoft, a Russian software company that came out with program to decrypt common wireless network signals.  Well, they’re back this week with a program that will "enable[ ] forensic access" to password-protected backups for Apple iPhone and iPod touch devices.  In other words, if someone obtains access to the computer you use to sync your iPhone they could also get access to "backups containing address books,… More