November 9, 2000 Stars Find Swiss Bank Account Details on Internet A technical glitch put show business stars' secret Swiss bank account numbers, private addresses and money transfers on the public Internet for a week, Credit Suisse Group acknowledged on Thursday. That meant that Internet surfers could get a rare glimpse into account details of such stars as British actor Roger Moore, Swiss entertainer DJ Bobo and German pop star Udo Juergens, the Swiss Blick newspaper said in a front-page story. It said that several stars were affected by the inadvertent publication of details of 675 money transfers, but did not say exactly how many. Credit Suisse, Switzerland's second-largest bank, confirmed the report and said it had shut down a test Web site where the details appeared. ``We are investigating how exactly that could have happened and have closed down the page,'' CS spokesman Georg Soentgerath said. http://dailynews.yahoo.com/h/nm/20001109/wr/creditsuisse_dc_1.html - - - - - - - - - - - Asus hacked and down Taiwanese motherboard manufacturer Asus has seen its dotcom site hacked and down for the whole of today. Instead of the usual colourful layout, we are instead treated to a message from the charming and eloquent young man that hacked the site. It reads: defaced by 14m3 k1dd13 fuck hackphreak and that stupid dickhead rloxley. We take it that our old friend 14m3 k1dd12 doesn't like hackphreak or rloxley (actually we met rloxley a coupla months ago and weren't too sure we liked him either). Asus has pulled the comment off the site but as of 6pm GMT has yet to get the site back up. It seems possible that the hacker may have done a bit of damage while he was there. http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/6/14590.html - - - - - - - - - - - Yankees' Web site hacker traced Federal authorities have traced a hacker who posted lewd photos and sayings on the New York Yankees' Web site to a computer at Virginia Tech. School officials, however, believe the hacker used their computer as a decoy. ``We don't believe, and I don't think the FBI believes, that anybody on campus had anything to do with it,'' Virginia Tech spokesman Larry Hincker said Wednesday. The hacking took place Oct. 27, the morning after the Yankees clinched their third consecutive World Series title, special agent Joe Valiquette of the FBI's New York office said. The Yankees called the FBI, which launched an investigation. ``There are several leads that we're following, but no one has been charged,'' Valiquette said. ``We really can't get into any details about the investigation.'' http://www0.mercurycenter.com/svtech/news/breaking/ap/docs/612827l.htm - - - - - - - - - - - E-mail virus attacks Bellevue About a dozen Bellevue City Hall computers were infected Tuesday afternoon by an e-mail virus, but no public safety or critical computers were affected, city officials said. Between 10 and 15 computers were cleaned up by the time City Hall opened for business yesterday morning. The virus, a version of the so-called life stages virus, affected only e-mail systems. Officials are trying to track down how it got into the system. http://www.eastsidejournal.com/sited/retr_story.pl/33829 - - - - - - - - - - - Stiffer jail terms for software pirates A law will come into force next year to clamp down on corporations using pirated software in their daily operations. It is one of several recent initiatives to stamp out piracy dubbed "drastic, even draconian", but necessary on Tuesday by Director of Public Prosecutions Grenville Cross, SC. "We could not allow Hong Kong to acquire the stigma of being a place which tolerated such a [piracy] situation," he said. Hong Kong's reputation has improved as a result, he claims - officials in the United States have indicated that the SAR will remain off their "watch-list" of cities where copyright piracy is rife. This has partly been possible because Hong Kong courts have recently taken a harsher stance against pirates, Cross explained at an Asian symposium on intellectual property rights. http://www.zdnetasia.com/news/dailynews/story/0,2000010021,20148275,00.htm - - - - - - - - - - - Office Thieves Target Laptops The notes were not on paper. They were in the guts of Dr. Leon Herndon's laptop, on a disc. The keynote speaker of a medical conference was hoping to use Herndon's machine to project the disc data on a screen, but with only minutes to speech time, the laptop was . . . where? Not at the podium, where Herndon had left it while he made a phone call. Swiftly came his dawn of realization: A nimble thief was at work in the Washington Convention Center, pilfering not merely an expensive computer, which could be replaced easily, but data that couldn't be. Along with the speaker's conference notes had vanished a list of Herndon's patients back home in North Carolina and their medical histories. By the hundreds of thousands, laptop computers are being swiped from hotel rooms and the offices of corporate America, a new genre of crime that can disrupt lives far more than the theft of a car, a VCR or a purse. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A11910-2000Nov4.html - - - - - - - - - - - EBay Immune From Suits Over Pirated Music A judge has ruled that EBay Inc. cannot be sued over the selling of bootleg copies of music by some of its members. San Francisco Superior Court Judge Stuart Pollack this week held that the federal Communications Decency Act gives the Internet's largest auctioneer a high degree of legal immunity for illegal music or other contraband goods auctioned on the site. ``The burden that such an obligation would place on a service such as EBay would force it to cease, or at least significantly restrict, its operations,'' Pollack wrote. http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2000/11/09/BU91679.DTL - - - - - - - - - - - Wiretap legal hotline established TRADE ORGANIZATIONS REPRESENTING most of the world's largest Internet backbone operators and service providers have established a hotline where operators can get legal advice when they receive U.S. federal government wiretap requests. Callers to the hotline will be referred to independent lawyers experienced in electronic surveillance and law enforcement issues, the organizations said in a joint statement Wednesday. The hotline will be established by the Commercial Internet eXchange (CIX) and Internet Service Providers' Consortium (ISP/C), which have announced plans to combine their operations, and the ISP Business Forum. http://www.infoworld.com/articles/hn/xml/00/11/09/001109hnwiretap.xml - - - - - - - - - - - FedCIRC maps cyber battle plan The Federal Computer Incident Response Capability is planning programs for the coming year to help agencies face the growing number of cyberattacks and to coordinate warnings and responses across government. The initiatives will be funded with the $8 million FedCIRC is due to receive when the final appropriations bills are signed. FedCIRC is based at the General Services Administration. The changes will strengthen FedCIRC’s abilities and will also include new offerings that are intended to enhance the entire government’s security posture, said FedCIRC director Dave Jarrell, speaking at the Information Technology Security Innovations conference in College Park, Md. Tuesday. http://www.fcw.com/fcw/articles/2000/1106/web-fedcirc-11-09-00.asp - - - - - - - - - - - Cookie control weak at DOT The Transportation Department’s inspector general blames weak technology implementation controls for the use of banned "cookies" on DOT bureau Web sites. The Transportation IG’s audit, performed between August and October, is the third in a series of audits on telecommunications network security at DOT headquarters. This audit focused on cookies, code placed on a Web site visitor’s hard drive that identifies visitors when they return to the site. The IG found that many DOT bureaus incorrectly reported their use of cookies and that thousands of the more than 200,000 DOT Web pages had not been checked to see if cookies were being used correctly. http://www.fcw.com/fcw/articles/2000/1106/web-dot-11-09-00.asp - - - - - - - - - - - NASA divides security duties NASA has created an office to oversee security, but the new Office of Security Management and Safeguards will assume responsibility for only a portion of the space agency’s computer operations. Security for most of NASA’s computers will remain with the agency’s chief information officer in order to ensure that systems remain programmed for optimal mission performance. Computer security is so closely connected with the carrying out of information technology missions that the agency felt it could not be separated, said a NASA source, speaking on background. http://www.fcw.com/fcw/articles/2000/1106/web-nasa-11-09-00.asp - - - - - - - - - - - Europe to ban spam? An influential body of data protection experts could be about to recommend that Europe bans spam. The Data Protection Working Party - made up of Data Protection Commissioners from all 15 member states of the European Union, including Britain's Elizabeth France - has now finalised its views on "unsolicited communications" following a lengthy review of the subject. While its makes no concrete proposals, the tone of the document comes out against the practise of sending unsolicited emails claiming it "constitutes a specific form of privacy violation". "The user has no human interface, supports the costs of the communication and normally receives spam within the protected area of his private home," records the working party. http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/1/14588.html - - - - - - - - - - - PSINet cans spammer, pledges reforms Attempting to distance itself from a spam controversy, PSINet cut off service to an admitted sender of unsolicited commercial email and pledged to amend its spam policy and educate its sales force. PSINet came under fire from anti-spam organizations after CNET News.com obtained an electronic unsigned copy of a so-called pink contract between PSINet and Cajunnet, a marketing firm based in Slidell, La., that freely admits its spamming practices. http://news.cnet.com/news/0-1005-200-3585163.html - - - - - - - - - - - KLM Wins Cybersquatting Case Against ETN KLM Royal Dutch Airlines has won a cybersquatting case against European Travel Network (ETN) over the klm.com domain name. The case, which was adjudicated by the World Intellectual Property Organisation (WIPO) Wednesday, came after ETN registered the klm.com domain name late last year. Shortly afterwards, KLM moved to claim the domain name for itself. Although KLM appears to be have been somewhat tardy in registering its own acronym as a dot.com domain name, WIPO ruled that the domain name was being used in bad faith and that ETN had no claim to it, despite registering the domain name in November 1999. http://www.newsbytes.com/news/00/157906.html - - - - - - - - - - - Deluge of security patches from MS There seems to be no question that security is now the No. 1 topic at Microsoft - beating out the topic from this summer, "Why doesn’t anyone like us anymore?" It’s not just all the spin and story changing over the hacking attack on their corporate network. It can be seen in the unprecedented number of security bulletins being issued by Microsoft. http://www.msnbc.com/news/487425.asp - - - - - - - - - - - Financial Crimes and the Internet For the most part, the computer crimes investigator has been a technologist, someone who understands computer systems and networks. Other areas of investigative expertise have been perhaps useful, but not as critical as understanding the technology. Yet, the continued growth of ecommerce may create a new specialty in the investigative arena: the Internet financial crimes investigator. http://securityportal.com/articles/financial20001109.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. 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