contributed by Ryan
At 6:30am PST on Friday Kevin Mitnick will be released from Lompac Federal Prison ending nearly five years of incarceration and inept bungling by federal prosecutors. This Sunday 60 Minutes will air an interview with Kevin that looks like it will focus on Kevin's supposed crimes instead of the circus that passed as due process.

CBS.com
The Drudge Report

FREE KEVIN

contributed by Macki
On Thursday this week the Motion Picture Association of America was granted a preliminary injunction against 2600.com and several other web sites for distributing the DeCSS program.

2600.com
Motion Picture Association of America

An effort to assist the DVD CCA in identifying the 500 John Doe's named in their lawsuit has been started. If you feel that you are one of them you can get a T-shirt that says so and assist in the defense at the same time.

BAD - Be A Doe

contributed by extension
Jason Mewhiney, the Canadian who defaced a NASA web page back in 1997, has been sentenced to 6 months in prison and ordered to pay a $6000 fine. Mewhiney pleaded guilty to 12 of the 51 charges against him, including committing mischief to data stored and fraudulent use of a NASA computer system. NASA estimated the damages caused by the intrusion at $70,000. (And how much did it cost to prosecute the case?)

Canadian Press - via Yahoo

contributed by Dark Knight
A small ISP in Seattle WA, Oz.net, suffered a major Smurf attack last weekend that was felt across the country. The denial of service attack is estimated to have been launched from 2000 systems nationwide. 70% of the traffic in the Washington State area was said to have been effected.

MSNBC

contributed by calvo
The Computer Crime Squad of the Guardia Civil in Spain has arrested over 100 people for the abuse of free 900 numbers. (The 900 prefix in Spain is similar to the 800 prefix in the US) The abuse centered around modem dialup lines at Toshiba, Microsoft and Novartis.

SET Ezine - Spanish Version
SET Ezine - English Version

contributed by Evil Wench
CIHost.com, a web hosting company based in Texas, left over 1500 customer records available on the internet for anyone with a web browser to read. CIHost said that the database had been moved to a server so an outside developer could have access to the information and by mistake password protection was omitted. The customer records included information such as name, credit card type, credit card number, and the amount charged.

MSNBC

contributed by Evil Wench
False bids on an online auction for a dinosaur skeleton have been blamed on 'hackers'. False bids of up to $15 million where submitted by people with names such as 'stevebert' and 'dumbass507'. The bidding procedure has been revamped to prevent this from occurring again however no details where given as to exactly what security measures where put in place. (It is amzing how many different definitions of the word 'hacker' exist)

BBC

contributed by deepquest
The UK National Criminal Intelligence Service (NCIS) has been assigned £337,000 to draw up plans for establishing a cyber crime squad. This online cyber force will be used to combat online fraud, money laundering, distributing pornography and information about pedophilia, and electronic intrusions.

The Guardian Unlimited

contributed by Evil Wench
System Administrators at Redstone Arsenal in Alabama are proud that they withstood the Y2K onslaught of cyber intruders. However, they go on to admit that in the past three months Redstone has been hit with 17 denial of service attacks of which twelve succeeded, and that they have had three web sites breached in the last year. (The interesting part of this article is at the end where the administrator admits that his network has a single point of failure.)

Government Executive Magazine