Tag: government
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It seems that The Bad Guys (for some value of Bad Guys) are now carefully choosing their targets, and are also carefully choosing personnel who work at those targets and are e-mailing trojan horses, in the form of MS Office documents to those people in the hope that they'll open the bad files and run the exploits. The nature of the payload isn't clear in the article - it sounds like the trojans open connections to systems that the attackers control, and the attackers tunnel back through into the target networks. The scary thing is that the targets include various federal …
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Gary McKinnon, who cracked US government and military networks under the alias 'Solo' in search of information on unidentified flying objects and unusual power sources will be extradited to the United States to stand trial, possibly under the USA PATRIOT Act because he infiltrated a number of sensitive data systems and networks. They're calling it the largest compromise of military systems in history (92 boxen known compromised) but somehow I doubt this because McKinnon certainly wasn't the first person to go wandering around inside their systems after breaking in - Hans "Pengo" Hubner beat him to it by fifteen years, give …
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Back in 2003, the US Government formed a project called TIA - Total Information Awareness, with a logo that made about half of the country cringe in fear, anger, and disgust, and sparked off a firestorm in the news media because it constituted a major violation of the right to privacy of US citizens. The project was very publically shelved for the edification of the public, though it wasn't actually terminated.
As with many government projects are are shelved due to public outcry, it was renamed, reclassified, and worked onapace - the data mining software that TIA was supposed to be based …
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Yesterday afternoon I. Lewis 'Scooter' Libby, Dick Cheney's former Chief of Staff was found guilty of four out of five counts of perjury while testifying before a grand jury. On the fifth count (lying to the FBI) he was found not guilty by the jury. What it boils down to is this: Rather than admit that he found out the name of Valerie Wilson (the CIA operative whom Libby outed to the media, thus destroying her usefulness), he lied and said that Tim Russert of NBC News told him who she was. He told this story to a number of …
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It's come out on the stand that Ari Fleischer, former White House Press Secretary was the one who leaked Valerie Plame's identity to Scooter Libby. He admitted this under oath, but of course he cut a deal so he won't be punished for revealing classified information. The whole thing comes down to Plame's husband, former ambassador Joseph Wilson, who got into hot water for researching and writing a report that debunked the party line that Iraq was trying to buy weapons grade Uranium from the country of Niger. Fleischer related to David Gregory (NBC) and John Dickerson (Time Magazine) that …
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Remember the REAL ID Act of 2005, which mandates that every US citizen must be issued a national ID card that fits certain federal standards, is electronically readable, and most importantly will be necessary if you ever want to get a job, open a bank account, or fly. They are also supposed to be damn near impossible to copy or counterfit, though the usual rules of sitting at the console when attacking apply. Well, the state of Maine flat out rejected it and asked Congress to repeal the REAL ID Act, and Georgia, Massachusetts, Montana, and Washington state are also …
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