contributed by andrew jaquith
Yesterday the US General Accounting Office, the investigative arm of Congress, released its findings on computer security at the FAA. Due to the GAO's posting cycle, the document is only now publicly available. We thought our readers would like to see the raw unfiltered stuff. It makes for regrettable reading, describing breaches to physical security, background checks for contractors and foreign nationals, and security managent.

US General Accounting Office

contributed by andrew jaquith
Based on negative feedback from customers and end-users, Microsoft has agreed to slightly modify a new "feature" in Preview 2 of its MSN Explorer web mail service that would have automatically notified your "friends" of a change in email address. It imports entries from the user's Outlook address book, and adds a not-so-subtle shill to the notification e.g.,: "...MSN Explorer even offers an exciting new look for using the Web and makes it easy to find and play music online. Want to try it out? It's FREE! Just click on the link below..." Details of the revised text were not available.

Slashdot
CNET
CNET

contributed by webmonki
Thanks to a moronic maneuver by the DoJ, classified information about the selected Carnivor review team has been trivially exposed. The government posted the winning technical proposal as a PDF on their site, "securing" it by overwriting confidential text with black lines at the PDF level. Anyone who views the PDF can recover hidden information by simply selecting the hidden text out of the page. This begs the question of how many other (more important) government documents have been "encrypted" in this manner…

Wired News
original proposal
unaltered version

contributed by rob cheyne
The dean of the Chicago-Kent College of Law, Henry Perritt Jr., says he and the rest of the for-hire evaluation team won't hesitate to tell the Department of Justice if the FBI's proposed data devourer violates privacy rights. Perritt also dismisses claims that the DOJ will be allowed to edit or modify the evaluation team's findings. Perritt's claims of independence appears to fly in face of his documented close ties to the Clinton administration. But all this misses the larger point -- while we're pleased that sharp legal minds are having a go at it, who will do the technical review?

CNN
Wired News (same story as above)

contributed by webmonki
Making his first public appearance since being released from jail, Kevin Mitnick gave the keynote at Giga Research's Infrastructures for E-Business Conference yesterday. His advice to the group of mostly corporate security managers was to implement good security practices for their employees. He stressed that the prevention of social engineering can do more for securing a company's infrastructure than most technologies can.

The Industry Standard