October 11, 2002 Florida man sentenced over White House email threats A man accused of threatening to blow up the White House has been sentenced to six months of house arrest and five years probation. Safraz Jehaludi, 21, pleaded guilty in August to a charge of using the internet to make threats. He was arrested in June by Secret Service agents after he emailed two anonymous tips to the FBI's website. Prosecutors say one of the mails threatened the White House, the other a Florida Power plant. http://www.ananova.com/news/story/sm_688124.html - - - - - - - - Work experience teaches fraud Student set up credit card and internet theft ring. A US teenager on work experience at a local bank has been accused of using his job to commit credit card fraud over the internet. The high school senior, working at a division of Chase Bank in Hicksville, New York used customers' credit card numbers to buy more than $30,000 of sneakers, sports jerseys and caps, according to police. http://www.vnunet.com/News/1135892 - - - - - - - - Microsoft wins software case A judge ordered a computer retailer to pay Microsoft the equivalent of $4.5 million in damages for the retailer's unlicensed use of the software giant's products. High Court judge Mary Yuen, in a court judgment released Friday, sided with Microsoft in a copyright infringement lawsuit alleging that Able System Development, a licensed Microsoft retailer, had illegally pre-loaded unlicensed copies of the Office and Windows programs onto computers it sold between 1996 and 1998. http://www.siliconvalley.com/mld/siliconvalley/news/editorial/4263068.htm - - - - - - - - Scottish ISP in repeat DDoS attack Edinburgh-based ISP edNET was hit by a distributed denial of service attack, again. The attack started yesterday morning, and continued throughout the day, continuing until late afternoon today. Residual problems still remain. EdNET's customer status page said that the attack was minor but customers tell us that they have lost service because of the attack. edNET experienced a "minor denial of service attack" aimed at its webserver, an edNET problem ticket states. "We have already filtered this attack and have contacted our upstream transit providers to have the attack filtered from their networks as well." http://online.securityfocus.com/news/1126 - - - - - - - - Clues, Vandalism, Litter Sendmail Trojan Trail The backdoor secretly distributed with the popular mail server is linked to an earlier hack. Meanwhile, the culprits may have covered their tracks with a final act of cyber vandalism. The Trojan horse discovered in a distribution of the Sendmail open- source e-mail server has striking similarities to a backdoor planted in OpenSSH last summer, according to security experts who've analyzed the code. But missteps in the alerting process may have given the culprits a chance to cover their tracks. http://online.securityfocus.com/news/1113 - - - - - - - - Cyber terror threat overrated Fear could help boost IT budgets though, says HP boss. Threats of cyber terrorism are overblown, but will help increase security budgets to deal with other online threats, according to the head of security strategy at Hewlett-Packard(HP). Speaking at the RSA Security conference in Paris Ira Winkler, chief security strategist for HP, said terrorists have little interest in online attacks. "Terrorists are less likely to use cyber terrorism than actual physical acts, that's their style." http://www.vnunet.com/News/1135876 - - - - - - - - Lawmakers focus on security-related technology issues The big news in Congress this week was the approval of a resolution authorizing unilateral military action in Iraq, but lawmakers also introduced several technology-related bills focusing on security and issues like identity theft, privacy and Internet safety. http://www.govexec.com/dailyfed/1002/101102td1.htm - - - - - - - - Anti-hacking copyright law to get review Federal copyright regulators are opening the door for new exceptions to a controversial copyright law that has landed one publisher in court and a Russian programmer in jail. The United States Copyright Office is launching a rare round of public comment on rules that bar people from breaking through digital copy- protection technology on works such as music, movies, software or electronic books. Regulators aren't looking to change the law, but they are looking for public suggestions on what kinds of activity should be legalized in spite of the rules. http://news.com.com/2100-1023-961783.html http://www.msnbc.com/news/820308.asp - - - - - - - - Taiwan rejects U.S. copyright demands Taiwan has turned down a U.S. demand on Friday to extend copyrights on works including earlier Walt Disney movies for another 20 years as negotiators on both sides held talks on intellectual property rights. Taiwan told a delegation led by Joseph Papovich, assistant U.S. trade representative, that it would not extend copyright protection to 70 years from 50 years, a Taiwan Ministry of Economic Affairs official said. http://www.siliconvalley.com/mld/siliconvalley/news/editorial/4260499.htm - - - - - - - - China Imposes New Web Cafe Rules China has imposed strict new limits on Internet cafes, banning minors and demanding that operators keep records of customers and the information they access. The regulations, which take effect Nov. 15, also impose tougher safety standards for the popular cafes that provide Internet access to users who pay by the session. Smoking is banned, no cafe can operated within 124 feet of a school, and the businesses must close by midnight, according to the official Xinhua News Agency. http://www.siliconvalley.com/mld/siliconvalley/news/editorial/4264209.htm http://zdnet.com.com/2110-1105-961753.html http://news.zdnet.co.uk/story/0,,t269-s2123749,00.html http://www.cnn.com/2002/TECH/internet/10/11/china.netcafes.reut/index.html http://www.nandotimes.com/technology/story/572979p-4486391c.html - - - - - - - - A Security Nightmare Wireless Devices Could Soon Be Ubiquitous in American Business, but the Security of Their Transmissions Still has a Ways to Go. You're sitting in an airport coffee shop, rifling through files you've downloaded from your corporate network onto your PDA. You glance at the guy sitting nearby with his laptop. Suddenly, you realize he could be rifling through those same files, using your PDA as a window to sneak peeks into your corporate network. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A11227-2002Oct11.html Introducing the latest hacker exploit: War Phoning Bluetooth-enabled phones and PDAs with inadequate security could become the target of the next wave of security exploits, allowing phreakers to filch confidential information or even make calls using someone else's identity. Such War Phoning exploits, as they have been dubbed, arise because security features on Bluetooth-enabled devices are sometimes turned off by default, ZDNet reports. http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/55/27572.html - - - - - - - - Outlook Express in crypto processing flaw Code used to authenticate messages to Outlook Express users might be turned against them by attackers to run hostile code on victims' machines. Microsoft's latest security advisory warns that a buffer overflow flaw in the Outlook Express S/MIME parsing functions "could enable system compromise". Redmond has issued a patch. Yes, it's yet another critical security flaw, affecting only Outlook Express users. Other email clients, including Outlook, are immune. http://online.securityfocus.com/news/1127 http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1104-961769.html http://news.com.com/2100-1001-961769.html http://www.msnbc.com/news/820259.asp http://www.nandotimes.com/technology/story/571384p-4477659c.html http://www.usatoday.com/tech/news/computersecurity/2002-10-11-outlook-flaw_x.htm http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/55/27562.html - - - - - - - - Safeguarding Your Corporate Data Enterprises should be careful not to get too fancy about their storage security, since some solutions could create their own problems. For example, Aberdeen Group's Jim Hurley advises against encrypting data after it has already been stored. As prices fall and capacity increases, finding data storage space has become a non-issue for many enterprises. But when it comes to safeguarding important stores of customer information, companies still need to take precautions to ensure that prying eyes do not gain access. http://www.newsfactor.com/perl/story/19651.html - - - - - - - - Is Linux Really More Secure Than Windows? Microsoft has organized a huge security program as a result of vocal complaints from users, while the Linux effort is, in Eric Hemmendinger's words, "less disciplined but more timely." Ramen, Slapper, Scalper and Mighty may sound like Santa's new team of reindeer, but they are creatures far lower down the evolutionary ladder -- and much less welcome. These are worms that have infiltrated Linux servers in recent months, commandeering the servers for use in distributed denial-of- service attacks. Linux enthusiasts who once believed they were less vulnerable to attack than Microsoft users have begun to wonder whether they were overly optimistic. http://www.newsfactor.com/perl/story/19649.html - - - - - - - - Security tops list of reasons not to deploy Web Services End-to-end security of web services forms the most significant barrier to implementation by organizations, but this is not expected to hinder future development. A biannual survey of North American developers by Evans Data found 24% of respondents list security concerns as the number one reason for not rolling out web services - a growth of five percentage points since Evans previous survey, conduced in March. http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/23/27560.html - - - - - - - - Internet prompts governments to revisit open records policies Jim Moehring knows firsthand the pros and cons of making public court records available online. A general manager at the city's hockey arena, Moehring has used the Hamilton County court's Web site to check out potential hires. He's even turned away a few because of what he found. http://www.siliconvalley.com/mld/siliconvalley/news/editorial/4264262.htm *********************************************************** 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.