March 19, 2002 90 Are Arrested in Inquiry Into Internet Child-Sex Ring A nationwide Internet child-pornography ring has been smashed with the arrest of about 90 people, including two Roman Catholic priests, a school bus driver, a teacher's aide and a police officer, the federal authorities said today. "It is clear that a new marketplace for child pornography has emerged from the dark corners of cyberspace," Attorney General John Ashcroft said at a news briefing. "Innocent boys and girls have been targeted by offenders who view them as sexual objects." (NY Times article, free registration required) http://www.nytimes.com/2002/03/19/national/19PORN.html http://zdnet.com.com/2110-1105-863242.html http://news.zdnet.co.uk/story/0,,t269-s2106844,00.html http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/6/24472.html http://www.usatoday.com/life/cyber/tech/2002/03/18/net-porn.htm http://www.nandotimes.com/technology/story/311741p-2686098c.html http://www.newsfactor.com/perl/story/16830.html 7 in South Bay netted in U.S. child porn bust http://www.bayarea.com/mld/mercurynews/2888482.htm - - - - - - - - Inquiry broadened into child sex claims Agents investigating a former top Northern Ireland civil servant facing child sex charges in Chicago have widened their inquiry to Florida and Britain, it was revealed today. John Stan Mallon, 62, was arrested on March 8 after allegedly arranging to meet a 14-year-old girl to have sex with him in his hotel room. The Belfast man has been formally charged with attempting to come to Chicago to have sex with an underage girl and using the internet to coerce a child into having sex. http://www.manchesteronline.co.uk/news/content.cfm?story=267974 - - - - - - - - MAN FACING JAIL ON PORN STASH The conviction of Dennis Slack for downloading child porn from the internet was the latest in a string of successful investigations by Notts Police. But Slack's conviction is possibly one of the easiest they will ever come across - because they were handed all the evidence by the man himself. Last March, police at Radford Road received a call from Slack's mother, Ann Walker, telling them her son had a file on a Hong Kong paedophile to give them. Slack told police he had decided to track down paedophiles after getting the idea from a TV documentary about the difficulties in policing the internet. http://www.thisisnottingham.co.uk/displayNode.jsp?nodeId=66056&command=displ - - - - - - - - Heckenkamp Jailed at Court Appearance Alleged hacker angers judge with caps lock defense. Accused eBay hacker Jerome Heckenkamp is back behind bars tonight, after his first solo court appearance in front of his trial judge took an odd turn. During what was to be a routine proceeding to set future court dates, Heckenkamp challenged the indictment against him on the grounds that it spells his name, Jerome T. Heckenkamp, in all capital letters, while he spells it with the first letter capitalized, and subsequent letters in lower case. http://online.securityfocus.com/news/356 - - - - - - - - Hacker exposes financial information at Georgia Tech State and federal authorities are investigating a hack into a computer server at the Atlanta- based Georgia Institute of Technology (Georgia Tech) last week. An undetermined number of employee financial records and university credit card numbers could have been exposed when the server was hacked last week, institute spokesman Bob Harty said this afternoon. http://www.computerworld.com/storyba/0,4125,NAV47_STO69213,00.html - - - - - - - - Net2Phone sues Cisco for alleged fraud Internet telephony specialist Net2Phone and Adir Technologies filed a lawsuit against Cisco Systems on Tuesday, charging the networking giant with alleged fraud. The complaint, filed in the U.S. Court for the District of New Jersey by Net2Phone and Adir, charges Cisco with "misappropriation of trade secrets, fraud, unfair competition, breach of contract" and "breach of fiduciary duties" related to Cisco's role in Adir, a joint venture, according to a Net2Phone statement. http://news.com.com/2100-1033-864000.html - - - - - - - - Organised gangs ride IT crime wave Police investigate professional gangs stealing computer equipment to order from UK businesses UK police today told vnunet.com that they are investigating a sharp rise in IT crime centering on professional gangs stealing expensive computer equipment to order from UK businesses.The gangs are believed to have connections with the IT industry that enable them to export the stolen kit to Europe and the US and pass it off as legitimate second-hand equipment abroad. http://www.vnunet.com/News/1130243 - - - - - - - - CIA chief discusses threats to national security Commercially available information technology will play a stronger role in "asymmetric" threats from terrorist groups and enemy states over the next decade, the nation's top intelligence officials told the Senate Armed Services Committee Tuesday. http://www.govexec.com/dailyfed/0302/031902td1.htm - - - - - - - - Senator Urges Stronger Privacy For Calling Information Sen. Paul Wellstone, D-Minn., today urged his congressional colleagues to support tighter restrictions on the distribution of consumers' personal calling data. Wellstone urged other senators to cosign a letter to the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) supporting the adoption of an "opt-in" privacy standard for Customer Proprietary Network Information (CPNI), which would require companies to gain customer permission before sharing their data. http://www.newsbytes.com/news/02/175307.html - - - - - - - - Auction site backs off privacy-policy change After controversy surrounded proposed modifications to its privacy policy, eBay has provided clarification for worried users EBay is backing off of a controversial revision to its privacy policy.The revision had said that eBay might make statements regarding privacy rules on its site that conflict with its official privacy policy. In those cases, members had to agree that only the official privacy policy was the true statement of eBay's rules. http://news.zdnet.co.uk/story/0,,t269-s2106899,00.html - - - - - - - - Security-bug proposal runs into a snag A proposal on how security bugs in software should be responsibly disclosed to the public was withdrawn from the Internet's primary technical-standards body Monday. The draft guidelines are intended to make peace between the two sides in the security arena: software companies, who would rather the public didn't know about their products' vulnerabilities at all, and security researchers, some of whom have been known to publish vulnerability information to embarrass a program's maker and garner publicity for themselves. http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1105-863165.html http://news.zdnet.co.uk/story/0,,t269-s2106862,00.html http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/55/24482.html http://www.vnunet.com/News/1130221 - - - - - - - - Expert questions crypto discovery Encryption expert Bruce Schneier downplayed this week the importance of a University of Illinois professor's newest method of breaking the digital codes that secure information. In a paper published on his Web site, Daniel Bernstein, an associate professor of mathematics, statistics and computer science at the University of Illinois at Chicago, outlined a new technique for factoring numbers that promises to make breaking encryption much easier for any encryption methods that rely on factoring. http://zdnet.com.com/2110-1105-863643.html - - - - - - - - IP telephony opens networks to hack attacks Analysts identify latest security threat. Companies installing IP telephony face a growing threat of hacking, according to Giga Information Group. Many organisations delay or ignore the requirement for stringent security measures to protect their networks when evaluating IP PBX systems. Applications such as call servers and IP telephones or softphones offer an entry point for back-door attacks to the network."Inadequate security measures put companies at risk of illegal long distance calls, conversation eavesdropping and recording, denial of service on phone systems and data network access through IP telephony ports," said Elizabeth Herrell, Giga's director of research. http://www.vnunet.com/News/1130223 - - - - - - - - Zlib security flaw could affect numerous programs A warning about the security flaw identified Monday in the zlib compression/decompression library affecting Linux systems has been broadened to include Windows and any other other operating systems that use the zlib code. In an update about the flaw on their Web site, the authors of the zlib library said they have learned that the code is used in far more programs than they originally believed. http://www.cnn.com/2002/TECH/internet/03/19/zlib.flaw.idg/index.html - - - - - - - - Firms fall through Unix security flaw Solaris and Mandrake *nixed, but SuSE and Irix could also be affected A fifth of large corporate users could be vulnerable to a newly discovered security flaw that allows hackers to gain remote control of Unix boxes running Solaris and MandrakeSoft's Linux distro. The flaw was discovered by UK security consultancy ProCheckUp which released the details before official Cert verification, because a freely available hacker's scanner was found to be already searching for the hole. http://www.vnunet.com/News/1130238 - - - - - - - - Aussie cops and Feds use DIRT Our recent item Cyber cops & security orgs: DIRTy, stupid and out of control touched on the pathetic federation of fools, patsies and malicious creeps which comprises the international securocracy. In particular, we mentioned that World Systems Resource (WSR), an Australian discount enterprise computing vendor, had sought a non-exclusive deal as a DIRT reseller in the Aussie cyber-cop/securocrat market. http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/55/24477.html - - - - - - - - Transportation mulls smart cards for security The Transportation Security Administration is accepting proposals for a smart-card system to authenticate transportation workers such as pilots and flight attendants, an expert said today at FOSE 2002 in Washington. The cards could get a much better handle on the workers, not only at airports but for all modes of transportation, said Richard Wright, prime technology consultant to the John A. Volpe National Transportation Systems Center in Cambridge, Mass. http://www.gcn.com/vol1_no1/daily-updates/18217-1.html - - - - - - - - Behavior Blocking: The Next Step in Anti-Virus Protection Before the arrival of the fast-spreading worm/ blended threat, the staple technology of anti- virus software fingerprinting - arguably provided both preventative and proactive protection against the average computer virus. That is, in the past, vendors were able to ship new fingerprints for most viruses before they could achieve widespread distribution. http://online.securityfocus.com/infocus/1557 - - - - - - - - Best place for a break-in? The front door Daniel Lewkovitz has been known to resort to some fairly unorthodox measures to demonstrate security flaws. The CIO was so sure I wouldn't get past his firewall he just about promised to eat his hat," Lewkovitz said. "I donned a suit and walked in through the front doors, in fact some of his staff even held the doors open for me, unplugged the box and asked what kind of sauce he wanted with his hat as I placed it on his desk." http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1105-863318.html *********************************************************** 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.