Internet in a Suitcase

Interesting read about how the U.S. is funding secret internet access for communications in and out of countries when their governments shut the internet down.

U.S. Funding Secret Internet Access for Dissidents Abroad

My favorite is a picture of the "Internet in a Suitcase"....

Hacked - Next Up: IMF

 Reports that the International Monetary Fund (IMF) was breached.  This story though has mentions of "nation state" .......  Any guesses on where the that software might have come from?

IMF hit by '"very major" cyber security attack
Source: BBC

Computer tech tricked women into taking laptops into bathroom - AP

What were these people thinking?  Well they're Mac users afterall... :)  You can't make this stuff up.

Fullerton, Calif. • A Southern California computer repairman suspected of installing spyware on laptops that enabled him to snap and download photographs of women showering and undressing in their homes was arrested Wednesday at his home, police said.

Police began investigating when a Fullerton resident complained about suspicious messages appearing on his daughter’s computer last year. Trevor Harwell installed software that took control of computer webcams on his clients’ Mac laptops, Fullerton police Sgt. Andrew Goodrich said. He was released later Wednesday after posting $50,000 bond, Goodrich said.

The software sent fake error messages telling users to “fix their internal sensor soon,” and “try putting your laptop near hot steam for several minutes to clean the sensor,” Goodrich said.

The error message prompted some victims to take their laptops into the bathroom with them when they showered, he said.

Original Story Link

LulzSec Compromises Infragard

Appears that LulzSec compromised the Atlanta Chapter of Infragard's site...

LulzSec Infragard Hack

Chinese Hacker Cracks Hundreds of Gmail Accounts of U.S. & Asia : The Hacker News

From: The Hacker News

Google spilled the details on Wednesday via its official blog:
Through the strength of our cloud-based security and abuse detection systems*, we recently     uncovered a campaign to collect user passwords, likely through phishing. This campaign, which appears to originate from Jinan, China, affected what seem to be the personal Gmail accounts of hundreds of users including, among others, senior U.S. government officials, Chinese political activists, officials in several Asian countries (predominantly South Korea), military personnel and journalists.
The goal of this effort seems to have been to monitor the contents of these users’ emails, with the perpetrators apparently using stolen passwords to change peoples’ forwarding and delegation settings.


Chinese Hacker Cracks Hundreds of Gmail Accounts of U.S. & Asia : The Hacker News

Memory Analysis Tools Developments

I've been a user of ResponderPro...and have used the open-source tools as well such as Volatility, Memoryze, etc...but ResponderPro really just has features and capability that make it a great tool. It saves me a lot of time and effort. It is expensive though.

However, recently HBGary released Responder CE, a community version of their paid-for Responder products. That is good news.  I haven't had the time to test it, but it may be just the thing you need to start analyzing memory in an efficient manner without some of the hiccups or issues with other tools.

This post though is actually more about the new release of Mandian Redline. Mandiant released Redline 1.0 and this looks like another great tool to use when analyzing memory.  I did get to play with a bit and it appears to be a solid tool; I will be testing it some more against some memory dumps alongside Responder to put it through it's paces.  Really like the fact I can use FDpro dumps I already have.  So far I've been really impressed.

Screenshot below of a friendly remnant of Zeus....

 

A Declaration of Cyber-War - Vanity Fair

Awesome writeup about the Stuxnet event.  It reads like a story more than like an article....

A Declaration of Cyber-War - Vanity Fair

Last summer, the world’s top software-security experts were panicked by the discovery of a drone-like computer virus, radically different from and far more sophisticated than any they’d seen. The race was on to figure out its payload, its purpose, and who was behind it. As the world now knows, the Stuxnet worm appears to have attacked Iran’s nuclear program. And, as Michael Joseph Gross reports, while its source remains something of a mystery, Stuxnet is the new face of 21st-century warfare: invisible, anonymous, and devastating.