contributed by Weld Pond
Novell chief Eric Schmidt has admitted that he has been the victim of credit card theft. Speaking at San Francisco's Digital Economy conference he blamed the theft of his personal information on browser cookies. He labeled cookies as "the biggest disaster for computers in the past [few] years."

ZD Net

contributed by Deepquest
The most recent Technology Integration Panel Study, conducted by International Data Corporation paints a grim picture of online security. Consumers have worried about the security of their online transactions, and this study seems to justify those fears. The study, entitled E-Commerce Solutions: Customer Directions and Segmentation by Company Size and Industry" explores various market segments currently using e-commerce systems and what the potential is for the future. (Unfortunately the data for this study is already six months old and had an extremely small sample size. Hopefully a more comprehensive study can be conducted soon.)

South China Morning Post

contributed by Evil Wench
With new security weakness showing up on a daily basis how do you model threats against computer systems? Bruce Schneier has come up with a formal methodology for analyzing the security of systems and subsystems, known as 'Attack Trees'.

Dr. Dobb's Journal

contributed by Simple Nomad
Jitsu-Disk finished moving the Pandora Linux code so that Pandora Linux uses libpcap and libnet. Pandora is a set of tools for testing the security and insecurity of Novell Netware. A number of problems have been corrected from the beta release on November 19th, including several problems involving spoofing and sniffing. Libnet helped Jitsu fix all that. The documentation has also been updated, including all the code used to do the builds, and pre-compiled binaries, all wrapped up in a nice big tarball.

Nomad Mobile Research Center

contributed by Ender
Numerous contradictory information about the raids and arrests of YTCracker and Darkness of [sSh] have been received by HNN and other sources. It is pretty clear at this time that YTCracker has not been arrested, yet. (He feels that it is only a matter of time.) OSALL has been trying to keep track on the rumors and innuendoes and get accurate information regarding this breaking story or non-story.

OSALL

contributed by Jordan
Thursdays long anticipated launch of Freedom 1.0 by Zero Knowledge Systems has proved to be an extraordinary success. Freedom works seamlessly alongside your favorite browser and other Internet applications. You can surf the web, send email, chat, telnet, and participate in newsgroups as you normally would, only now with complete confidence that your personal information is not being collected without your consent. Freedom identifies you on the net with a 'nym' that you choose. There can be only one 'nym' so you may want to reserve your online identity as soon as you can.

Freedom 1.0

contributed by dcypher
A team for the Hacker News Network has been created at DCypher.net. DCypher.Net has accepted the CS Group's CS-Cipher challenge and will attempt to break their 56 bit key using a brute force attack in a distributed computing effort. They promise to give the entire $10,500 prize to whoever actually finds the correct key. (Now that is a pretty strong incentive.)

DCypher.net
HNN Stats at DCypher.net TeamID:131

Don't forget about our team over at SETI@Home, the search for extraterrestrial life.

SETI@Home
HNN SETI@Home Team Stats

contributed by Desolationroad
At approximately 12 Noon PST on Friday December 3rd, 1999 a 42 square foot (3.816 sq meters) extremely dense ball of complicated electronics will arrive at the end of its twelve month journey. The 1,270 pounds (576 kg) mass of extremely sophisticated cutting edge technology will crash land onto the surface of an extraterestrial location. (Now thats a damn hack if I ever heard of one.)

Jet Propulsion Laboratory