contributed by evilwench
Jay Satiro, 19, admitted in court that last March he broke into America Online. The damage he caused is estimated at $50,000. He has pleaded guilty in Westchester County Court to first-degree computer tampering. This crime carries a maximum sentence of up to 15 years in prison. It should be noted that he once worked as an AOL volunter and used his inside knowledge while committing his crimes.

ABC News

contributed by evilwench
ZD Net has admitted to rigging a recent challenge to break in to a NT and Linux box. The test conducted for PC Week attempted to find which was the more secure operating system. ZDNet Labs has revealed that they deliberately neglected to apply 21 different security patches to the Linux system, including the one used by the person who broke the Linux boxes security. And people wonder why we label these challenges as publicity stunts.

Linux Today

contributed by evilwench
A draft report prepared by U.S. Naval Forces, Europe claims that if its team of information warriors had the proper training and more experience they could have cut the duration of the Kosovo Campaign in half. The overall role of the infowarriors was deemed a success however.

Federal Computer Week

contributed by evilwench
The Joint Task Force for Computer Network Defense (JTF-CND), has become part of US Space Command. JTF-CND is tasked with conducting real-time intrusion detection and cyber counterintelligence across DOD networks. This raises JTF-CND's political clout to a level where the unit may actually prove effective.

Federal Computer Week

contributed by Weld Pond
The Dutch police department has opened their new cybercrime unit by naming 15 'cybercops' to the unit. The unit will patrol the Internet looking for criminal activity such as pedophilia to credit card fraud. The unit will be permitted to tap phones with a court order and has the authority to break-in to personal systems in search of evidence. (The world is becoming a very scary place.)

Associated Press - via Canoe.ca

contributed by Weld Pond
The CERT Coordination Center has announced that they will share information stored in its Knowledge Base database with Infrastructure Defense Inc. (iDefense). It is hoped that this will give the groups a better understanding of the scope and magnitude of intruder activity.

Lets wake up folks. There is already an online vulnerabilities data sharing resource. Its called Bugtraq. How are all these little infowar data sharing groups going to match the open full disclosure of Bugtraq? Why not sign on and help out bugtraq readers and contributors instead of setting up little doomed fiefdoms that hoard information.

Federal Computer Week

contributed by Weld Pond
A joint Department of Justice and Information Technology Association of America project known as the Cybercitizen Partnership was created in March to raise awareness among young web surfers about how to be responsible, and law-abiding. With $300,000 from the Justice Department the Cybercitizen Partnership hopes to educate younger Internet users about the do's and don't of being online. The campaign is aimed at children 12 and younger.

The Industry Standard
US DOJ Internet Do's and Don'ts

contributed by Dr. Mudge
Shell-Lock, written by Cactus Software, allows users to 'compile' and obfuscate shell code. The tool does trivial encoding and creates security risks if used in many scenarios.

L0pht Heavy Industries

contributed by skalore
Auto_FTP is a local client daemon that automatically transfers files put into a shared directory to a remote ftp. While this is a good idea, the programmers did not take into account security issues. Nightfall Security Group has released an advisory on these issues.

Nightfall Security Group

contributed by no0ne
"owned...can we say more?" was the only message left in Singapore's eduMALL web site, developed by the Singapore Ministry of Education, the National Computer Board and Research Institute as well as Kent Ridge Digital Labs, by a hacker who goes by the name "mistuh clean". This is the very same text that was found last Monday, when the Television Corporation of Singapore was likewise defaced.

The Strait Times

contributed by evilwench
Sorry, but this is a personal pet-peeve of ours and we are going to rant about it. In my opinion there is a conspiracy (yes, strong accusation) between the cell phone companies and the airlines to force you to use the on board telephones at a whopping $6 a minute or approximately $150 million a year. They force these ungodly rates upon you by claiming that normal cell phone usage may cause interference with the plane and cause it to crash. Funny how test after test after test have failed to turn up any evidence of interference from on board wireless devices. If cell-phones do cause problems then why are they allowed into terminals, lobbies, parking lots, etc.. and why are ground crews routinely given radio's to carry around? And who prevents cell phone usage on private and corporate planes? Are these multi million dollar aircraft so poorly built that they can not withstand a few low power electromagnetic radiations? (Before you send us hate mail saying that we are placing peoples lives in jeopardy please read all three pages of this article.)

ZD Net - Airlines Ban Cell Phones - But Why?

We have ranted about this topic before.
HNN Archive for July 22, 1999
HNN Archive for July 23, 1999

Things have gotten so far out of hand that at least one man in England has been sent to a year in jail for using his cell phone inside an airplane. ZD Net

These are the only two studies we could find on the possibility of wireless devices causing interference on board an aircraft. Neither study could find any evidence of such interference.

Computer-Related Incidents with Commercial Aircraft
Electromagnetic Interference with Aircraft Systems: why worry?

</RANT MODE OFF> - for now