Security

A government consultant assigned to a massive overhaul of the FBI's computer systems in 2004 broke into classified components on four separate occasions and nabbed the passwords of 38,000 employees, including agency director Robert Mueller III, the Washington Post reported Thursday.

Joseph Colon, 28, then an employee of BAE Systems, was able to crack the log-ins using two free pieces of software that are readily downloadable on the Internet, according to court documents cited in the story.

The information granted him access to Witness Protection Program records and other details on secret FBI activities. After learning of the … Read more

PC World is reporting that a new Microsoft Windows worm known as Cuebot-K has been identified. The new member of the Cuebot family spreads via a program named "wgavn.exe," sent through AOL Instant Messenger (AIM) buddy lists.

That program pretends to be software connected to Microsoft's Windows Genuine Advantage, an antipiracy technology that has attracted controversy and criticism recently, the report said.

According to PC World, Cuebot-K is believed to be able to shut off firewalls, cripple software and download more malicious programs, among other things.

But despite its sneaky nature and easy mode of spreading … Read more

Andrew Mantovani, co-founder of identity theft hub Shadowcrew.com, was sentenced to two years and eight months in jail and fined $5,000 on Thursday, the Associated Press has reported.

Mantovani, 24, was one of 21 people in the U.S. arrested in October 2004 (more were nabbed overseas) when the federal government targeted Shadowcrew.com as part of a yearlong investigation. The site is believed to have contained 1.5 million stolen credit card numbers, and could be responsible for as much as $4 million in losses.

He pleaded guilty and was sentenced in Newark, N.J.

An official announcement was made Thursday that a laptop computer containing the personal information of around 26.5 million veterans and military personnel has been recovered, CNN reports.

The laptop disappeared from a government employee's home in May in what could be one of the biggest thefts of Social Security numbers ever. The employee who took home the laptop, which also included veterans' and their spouses' dates of birth, did so in violation of Department of Veterans' Affairs policy.

Veterans' Affairs secretary Jim Nicholson says there have been no instances of identity theft reported to date.

Hundreds of Israeli Web sites were defaced Wednesday, allegedly by Moroccan hacker group Team Evil, according to the Haaretz.com post. The cybergraffiti apparently was prompted by the Israel Defense Forces' raids on the Gaza strip after one of its soldiers was kidnapped Sunday. Israel Prime Minister Ehud Olmert warned that an "extended campaign against the Palestinian Authority" would continue until the solider was released, according to a posting on CNN.com

The Web site defacements, whose targets included banks and hospitals, carried the message: "… Read more

In the ultracompetitive college entrance exams this month, students raised the practice of cheating to a high-tech art form with microscopic earphones and wireless networks. But in the process, according to the China Daily newspaper, some ended up being hospitalized when the homemade devices went awry in their aural canals.

Some bloggers doubted the veracity of these injury reports, attributing them to propaganda by Chinese officials seeking to curb the widespread cheating. But so pervasive has the practice become that universities had announced plans to block mobile-phone signals earlier this … Read more

Bots often get a bad rap, thanks to spam and other scourges of life in cyberspace. But it's worthwhile remembering that not all Web robots are bad and, in many cases, still have noble uses. And those "well-behaved" robots have a home at Robotstxt.org.

Microsoft has a first this year at Black Hat Briefings and Training USA, the annual security conference in Las Vegas that always attracts a lot of attention.

"We will be the first software vendor to present an entire Black Hat Briefings track on a prerelease product, specifically to gather security researcher feedback," Stephen Toulouse, a program manager in Microsoft's Security Response Center, wrote on the MSRC blog last week. That product is Windows Vista, the successor to Windows XP, slated to be broadly available in January.

It promises to be a special show, Black Hat CEO Jeff … Read more

Call us cynical, but we doubt that cities will be blanketing the country with high-bandwidth Wi-Fi networks anytime soon. In the meantime, we'll be left to our own devices--literally, as well as figuratively. So we're thankful that the ever-useful Lifehacker has posted this article, which gives instructions on how to "turn your $60 router into a $600 router."