[ECP] NetHappenings Headlines and Resources

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NetHappenings Headlines and Resources

1)
Astronomy Picture of the Day Archive
http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/archivepix.html
Discover the cosmos! Each day a different image or photograph of our
fascinating universe is featured, along with a brief explanation
written by a professional astronomer.

2)
National School Boards Association (NSBA) sent out to people attending
its annual Tech + Learning Conference in Dallas earlier this month.
"Only 35% of the educators, administrators, and school board members
who ? responded said their districts had policies to address the use
of social-networking sites by their students"; 50% said their
districts had no such policies; and 15% weren't sure. In schools where
there is one, the most common policy appears to be simply blocking
access to social sites, according to eSchool News.
http://www.eschoolnews.com/news/showStory.cfm?ArticleID=6721

3)
"More than 60 schools and educational organizations have set up shop
in the virtual world and are exploring ways it can be used to promote
learning. The three-dimensional virtual world makes it possible for
students taking a distance course to develop a real sense of community,"
<http://www.cnn.com/2006/TECH/11/13/second.life.university/>

4)
San Jose Mercury News with its list of "what's hot" for all ages this
season http://www.siliconvalley.com/mld/siliconvalley/16057445.htm

5)
British Prime Minister Tony Blair
http://observer.guardian.co.uk/politics/story/0,,1957278,00.html
will describe the slave trade as a "crime against humanity"
in Parliament on Monday--but stop short of a
full apology.

6)
Ban on MP3 transmitters is lifted in the UK
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/6177820.stm
Ofcom is legalising the use of FM transmitters that allow iPods and
other MP3 players to play through car radios.
The use of devices, such as Griffin's "iTrip", was banned in the UK as
their transmissions can interfere with broadcasts by legal radio
stations.
However, the device and other similar accessories for MP3 players have
been widely available online.
Now certain FM transmitters, which can be tuned to spare frequencies,
will be legal from 8 December.

7)
McDonalds wants to patent sandwiches
http://tinyurl.com/yjp2h8
No one else puts a burger together quite like McDonald's
or, at least, that's what McDonald's thinks. The company
has put in a patent application (WO2006068865) in Europe
and the US that tries to stake the company's exclusive
claim to their sandwich preparation methods.

8)
Laptop thief lands the bank details of 15,000 policemen
http://tinyurl.com/yx8m9x
21.11.06
A Buglar has stolen bank account details of more than 15,000 Scotland
Yard officers following a huge security blunder, it emerged last night.
Sensitive financial information about high-ranking officers, thought to
include Metropolitan Police Commissioner Sir Ian Blair, and
anti-terrorist detectives were stored on three laptops stolen from the
company responsible for the force's pay and pensions services.
Last night, a major security review was under way at Britain's biggest
force amid fears the thief could steal vast sums of money from officers'
accounts.

9)
GPs revolt over patient files privacy
http://www.guardian.co.uk/frontpage/story/0,,1953213,00.html
About 50% of family doctors are threatening to defy government
instructions to automatically put patient records on a new national
database because of fears that they will not be safe, a Guardian poll
reveals today. It shows that GPs are expressing grave doubts about
access to the "Spine" - an electronic warehouse being built to store
information on about 50 million patients - and how information on it
could be vulnerable to hackers, bribery and blackmail.

10)
Computer Misuse Act could ban security tools
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/11/22/cma_could_ban_security_tools/
The new Police and Justice Act, published today, could criminalise
legitimate IT security activity. There are fears among security experts
that changes it makes to the Computer Misuse Act will make it illegal to
distribute some vital tools.
The new law modifies the Computer Misuse Act of 1990, the cornerstone of
Britain's anti-hacking law. The changes make clear for the first time
that denial of service attacks are an offence [1], but they also address
the distribution of hacking tools.

11)
3 Metrics To Gauge Security Spending
http://www.baselinemag.com/article2/0,1540,2062956,00.asp
By Paul A. Strassmann November 22, 2006
The idea that the Internet could fail never crossed my mind until Oct.
21, 2002. As acting CIO of NASA, I was informed that a computer at the
Ames Research Center in California, operating as one of 13 global
Internet domain name root-name serversthe master address controls for
the entire Internetwas rejecting incoming traffic from California to as
far west as India.
A globally coordinated distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack was
aiming to overwhelm the processing capacity of each root-name server. We
had to start throttling down incoming traffic before we ceased to
function.

12)
Guidance offered for would-be information security professionals
http://tinyurl.com/yxcakt
People looking for a career in information security are being offered a
guide by the International Information Systems Security Certification
Consortium (ISC)2, which certifies information security professionals.
The European version of (ISC)2s guide contains job descriptions, likely
salaries, advice from people working in information security and
listings of professionally recognised information security courses.
More than 1.5 million people work in information security worldwide. The
(ISC)2 expects that number to reach more than 2 million by 2010, an
annual growth rate of 7.8%.

13)
Analysis: Websites struggling for legal recourse for DoS attacks
http://tinyurl.com/y3sz8e
Websites blocked by ISPs when under a distributed denial of service
attack (DDoS) face millions of pounds in lost business because ISPs
refuse to take responsibility for hosting infected computers on their
networks.
Typically, a distributed denial of service attack relies on an
attacker remotely controlling numerous and widely distributed
computers infected by viruses and Trojans. The attacker uses these
'botnets' to send a flood of requests to a website, which is often
unable to cope and its servers fail, taking the website offline.
It's a relatively simple and cheap operation for the attacker. Keith
Laslop, President of DDOS mitigation outfit Prolexic told us: 'I've
seen them on forums where you can hire bots for next to nothing. Four
cents a bot. So you could take down a site very cheaply. You could get
enough together for, say, a 50Mbits DDOS attack. You could take
someone out with that.'

14)
Alleged computer hackers fight expulsion
http://www.yorkdispatch.com/local/ci_4704172
The Central York School District expelled two high school students last
night after they allegedly hacked into the district's computer system in
October.The appeals describe Tran as an honor roll student with no
disciplinary
record and Diehl as an "above average" student with only a few minor
disciplinary problems on his record. The appeals also state that the
"harm" done by Tran and Diehl to the district's computer system was
fixed in "about 10 minutes" by the district's technical team.
According to the appeals, Central York School District rules state that
inappropriate uses of district computers are punishable by a five-day
suspension for the first offense and a 10-day suspension for the second
offense.
Not charged with crime: Tran's and Diehl's appeals claim that the school
district suspended and then expelled them because the school board
determined that the students violated state and federal laws when they
allegedly hacked into the district's computer system.
But in their appeals, Tran and Diehl claim the school board does not
have the ability to determine if the two students violated any state or
federal laws, because neither student has been charged with a crime. As
a result, the appeals are asking the court to overturn Tran's and
Diehl's expulsions.

15)
Electronic jihad's cyber soldiers
http://www.mg.co.za/articlePage.aspx?articleid=290936&area=/insight/in
sight__international/
They neither carry weapons nor lay ambushes for soldiers in Iraq or in
Afghanistan.
But thousands of radical Islamists are waging a different kind of war
from behind their computers, called "electronic jihad".
These radical Islamic sites have sprung up over the past few years,
specialising in the organisation and the coordination of concerted
cyber-attacks against Israeli, American, Catholic and Danish websites.
All you need to join this anonymous cyber world is an address registered
in Iraq or in tribal zones in Pakistan, and basic computer savvy to
carry out concerted attacks in which internauts from the four corners of
the world take part.

16)
'Evil twin' Wi-Fi hacks target the rich
http://www.vnunet.com/vnunet/news/2169400/expert-warns-evil-twin-attacks
Locations popular with high net worth individuals are being targeted by
hackers using phoney wireless access points to steal personal
information.
So called 'evil twin' attacks involve putting a wireless access point
near a commercial hotspot and giving it the same name.
When the unsuspecting user logs-on to the bogus hotspot their traffic is
monitored, personal information can be gathered and in some cases the
computer can be hacked remotely.
"We are not seeing these in Starbucks much, as there is not much value
in a MySpace login," said Richard Rushing, chief science officer at
Wi-Fi security firm AirDefense.
"Instead they are targeting the locations where the better-off are
hanging out because they have something worth seeing."
Rushing explained that 'evil twins' had recently been found in the first
class lounge of an international airport, and in garages that specialise
in expensive cars that offered Wi-Fi while you wait. Train station
lounges had also been targeted.

17)
To catch crooks in cyberspace, FBI goes global
http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/06325/740139-96.stm
ANKARA, Turkey -- On Aug. 16, 2005, a CNN television news bulletin
alerted viewers that computers at the network's New York and Atlanta
offices were infected with a new virus called Zotob. Soon, U.S.
companies from coast to coast were hit.
Halfway around the world, two young computer hackers in Turkey and
Morocco got spooked by the ensuing media coverage, but mocked the
ability of authorities to track them down. "They can't find me," wrote
Atilla Ekici, a 23-year-old Turk, in an email to his accomplice, a
19-year-old Moroccan called Farid Essebar. "Ha, ha, ha," replied Mr.
Essebar.
The U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation, however, was already hot on
their trail. The 98-year-old FBI, shift reflects the global nature of
computer crimes.
The FBI now ranks cybercrime as its third priority behind terrorism and
espionage. Computer-based crimes caused $14.2 billion in damages to
businesses around the globe in 2005, including the cost of repairing
systems and lost business, estimates Irvine, Calif., research firm
Computer Economics.

18)
DBAs brace for week of Oracle bugs
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/11/24/week_of_oracle_bugs/
Security researchers irked at Oracle's tardiness at releasing patches
for security bugs plan to name a different vulnerability in Oracle's
enterprise software every day for a week in December.
Oracle's quarterly security bulletins typically produce scores of bugs
but yet more known bugs lay dormant and unfixed, according to Cesar
Cerrudo, founder and chief exec of the Argeniss Security Research Team.
Argeniss plans to release a bug a day involving Oracle databases next
month in what's been dubbed "The Week of Oracle Database Bugs"(WoODB).
Cerrudo said the effort, styled after Metasploit developer H. D. Moore's
Month of Browser Bugs project last July, is designed to push Oracle into
releasing fixes more quickly. He rejects suggestions that publicising
unpatched flaws might put Oracle shops at greater risk of hacking
attacks.
"I think Oracle users' security will be helped since users will realize
the real threat they are facing running Oracle flawed software and they
will start to put pressure on Oracle asking for responses, improvements
in security, etc," Cerrudo told internetnews.com, adding that knowing
more about flaws in Oracle's software will help users to take steps to
limit the impact of possible attacks.

19)
Peter Junger, led Buddhist Temple, studied and taught computer law
http://samsara-blog.blogspot.com/
Peter Junger, president and religious chairman of the Cleveland Buddhist
Temple and professor emeritus at Case Western Reserve University's
School of Law, died at his Cleveland home last week.
Junger, 73, was a computer law expert who sued the U.S. government in
1996, claiming his free-speech rights were denied because a federal law
forbid him from teaching a computer encryption program to students from
Canada or publishing it in a textbook.
The case was eventually settled. But Junger never stopped studying or
teaching computer law and dozens of other subjects.

20
Everything International
http://faculty.philau.edu/russowl/russow.html
This site "provides links to a wide variety of international business,
education, and research Internet sites." It is "maintained and updated
regularly (every hyperlink is verified for accuracy approximately
every 10 days)." Links are browsable by topics such as country and
regional data, news, international organizations, and company and
industry data. Established and maintained by the associate dean of
Philadelphia University School of Business Administration.


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