Sunday, June 13, 2010

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The United States Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) has launched a probe into a security breach that allowed hackers to retrieve 114,000 e-mail addresses of iPad users on the AT&T network.

The FBI announced the investigation Friday, which will determine exactly what allowed a group of hackers using the name “Goatse Security” to access the data. The security breach was first announced by the blog Gawker on Wednesday. The FBI has since asked Gawker Media LLC, the owners of the site, to retain all information relating to the incident. The company was also involved in another recent case with Apple Inc., which included the iPhone 4. Gawker said that it does not believe it is the main target of this FBI investigation.

Editors at Gawker were able to verify the information the hackers sent to them, and did not post full e-mail addresses or any other identifying information in its initial story of the incident. Gawker said that it did not pay Goatse Security for the data. One of the hackers later wrote that they did not reveal the addresses to anyone else and had already deleted them.

The hackers were able to obtain the data after discovering a program on AT&T’s website that provides the e-mail address of a user when that user’s identification number is given. The hackers essentially guessed and then saved the numbers for the 114,000 users. They did not tell AT&T of the security hole.

A spokesperson for AT&T said Wednesday that the company “was informed by a business customer on Monday of the potential exposure of their iPad ICC-IDs [the identification numbers]”, and had disabled the e-mail-providing program by Tuesday. AT&T also said that no other information was stolen other than the e-mails addresses of their customers, and that “there is no evidence that any other customer information was shared.” The company says it will notify all of the iPad users whose information was compromised.

Many of the users involved are high-ranking government or corporate officials, including Rahm Emanuel, the current White House Chief of Staff, and Michael Bloomberg, the mayor of New York City. Others include employees of Google and the U.S. military.

Apple has not commented about the breach.

Tuesday, April 11, 2006

Zach Scruggs, a lawyer for United States Senator Trent Lott, says that State Farm Insurance Company is destroying records related to claims for damage from Hurricane Katrina.

The records allegedly contain information saying that State Farm fraudulently denied insurance claims made by its policy holders, including Lott, that had homes there were damaged or destroyed when Hurricane Katrina came ashore on the Gulf Coast.

Scruggs said that Lott has “good faith belief” that many employees of the insurance company in Biloxi, Mississippi are destroying engineer’s reports that were inconclusive as to whether or not water or wind was the main cause of damage to the buildings affected by the hurricane.

Lott is among thousands of home and/or business owners who had their property damaged or destroyed during the hurricane and had their claims denied because State Farm claimed that their policies don’t cover damage caused by floods or water that was driven by the wind.

State Farm has not issued a statement on the matter so far.

Wednesday, September 7, 2005

The US state of Massachusetts is turning a portion of Camp Edwards, an active Cape Cod military base, into a “village” for 2,500 evacuees of Hurricane Katrina, as part of Operation Helping Hand.

The temporary shelter on the Massachusetts Military Reservation will have a population the size of Truro, Massachusetts and will include an active mayor and a system of government that will be like a town council

However, the shelter will face security demands different from the fifteen Cape towns because Cape Edwards is an active base used for training exercises. Security will be overseen by the Massachusetts National Guard, with help from the Massachusetts State Police and the County Sheriff’s office. Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney stressed that he wanted to give it a comfortable, non-hostile atmosphere.

Upon touching down at Otis Air National Guard Base, Massport officials will issue identification cards, create case files for them and ask the evacuees to provide personal information which will go into to a database to be shared with other states that are taking evacuees.

The agencies that will be on hand are, the Massachusetts Emergency Management Agency, the American Red Cross and the Salvation Army. These agencies will coordinate volunteers, who must commit themselves to five days of volunteer efforts, and they must be able to transport themselves to the camp. Romney has asked for donations from the community.

Evacuees will be assigned housing by groups. There could be barracks for single men, another for single women, and then space for elderly and families with children. Visitors will not be allowed.

The school superintendent for the township of Bourne, Ed LaFleur, will work on enrolling the children of evacuees into Cape Cod schools. Romney met yesterday with leaders of the Blake Churches Alliance who will make available chaplains and counselors for the evacuees.

Romney spent Monday night asking for the State House to pass a $25 million emergency spending bill to pay the initial costs of the facility.

The arrival time of the evacuees has been postponed, for unknown reasons.

Wednesday, February 27, 2008

The Svalbard Global Seed Vault, a vault containing millions of seeds from all over the world, saw its first deposits on Tuesday. Located 800 kilometers from the North Pole on the Norwegian island of Spitsbergen, the vault has been referred to by European Commission president José Manuel Barroso as a “frozen Garden of Eden“. It is intended to preserve crop supplies and secure biological diversity in the event of a worldwide disaster.

“The opening of the seed vault marks a historic turning point in safeguarding the world’s crop diversity,” said Cary Fowler, executive director of the Global Crop Diversity Trust which is in charge of collecting the seed samples. The Norwegian government, who owns the bank, built it at a cost of $9.1 million.

At the opening ceremony, 100 million seeds from 268,000 samples were placed inside the vault, where there is room for over 2 billion seeds. Each of the samples originated from a different farm or field, in order to best ensure biological diversity. These crop seeds included such staples as rice, potatoes, barley, lettuce, maize, sorghum, and wheat. No genetically modified crops were included. (Beyond politics they are generally sterile so of no use.)

Constructed deep inside a mountain and protected by concrete walls, the “doomsday vault” is designed to withstand earthquakes, nuclear warfare, and floods resulting from global warming. Norwegian Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg called it an “insurance policy” against such threats.

With air-conditioned temperatures of -18 degrees Celsius, experts say the seeds could last for an entire millennium. Some crops will be able to last longer, like sorghum, which the Global Crop Diversity Trust says can last almost 20 millenniums. Even if the refrigeration system fails, the vaults are expected to stay frozen for 200 years.

The Prime Minister said, “With climate change and other forces threatening the diversity of life that sustains our planet, Norway is proud to be playing a central role in creating a facility capable of protecting what are not just seeds, but the fundamental building blocks of human civilization.” Stoltenberg, along with Kenyan Nobel Peace Prize laureate Wangari Maathai, made the first deposit of rice to the vault.

“It is very important for Africa to store seeds here because anything can happen to our national seed banks,” Maathai said. The vault will operate as a bank, allowing countries to use their deposited seeds free of charge. It will also serve as a backup to the thousands of other seed banks around the world.

“Crop diversity will soon prove to be our most potent and indispensable resource for addressing climate change, water and energy supply constraints and for meeting the food needs of a growing population,” Cary Fowler said.

Saturday, June 18, 2005

MasterCard International announced Friday that multiple instances of fraud have been tracked back to CardSystems Solutions, Inc., a company that processes credit card transactions and other payments. Customer names, banks, and account numbers of up to 40 million cardholders have been exposed, of which about 13.9 million are MasterCard-branded cards, the company said. Visa and American Express cards were also affected.

“The breach appears to be the largest yet involving financial data,” said David Sobel, of the Electronic Privacy Information Center.

CardSystems issued a statement late on Friday that said it learned of the potential breach 26 days ago, but that the FBI told the company not to advise the cardholders nor the public at large. CardSystems also said their statement had been vetted by the FBI.

A spokesperson for the FBI said that the agency had asked CardSystems not to disclose information that could compromise the investigation, but that it had not asked CardSystems to fail to disclose the breach at all.

Michael A. Brady, C.F.O. of CardSystems, told the Associated Press that “we’re absolutely blindsided by a press release by the association,” when speaking of MasterCard’s release. A MasterCard spokesperson said that the company was obligated to inform its customers of the breach.

MasterCard spokesperson Sharon Gamsin said that CardSystems was hit by a virus-like computer script that stole customer data for the purpose of fraud. She said MasterCard does not know how the script got into the CardSystem network.

Sobel said this theft “indicates that this is a shadowy industry where the consumer never really knows who is going to be handling and using their personal information. Presumably, the affected consumers thought they were dealing with MasterCard.” Having a third-party process credit card transactions is common practice in the industry.

Wednesday, September 21, 2005

The Tennessee state Department of Mental Health has ordered the closing of two Ex-gay ministries operated by Love In Action International Inc., a controversial Christian group that counsels gays to give up homosexuality.

The state deemed that Love in Action was “providing housing, meals and personal care for mentally ill patients without a license”. In particular, the state found that Love in Action was dispensing medication to patients without the required license.

Love in Action has repeatedly drawn fire from gay rights groups who view it as preying upon the fears of religious parents in order to make Christian ministers like Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson seem more acceptable to the uninformed public. Gay rights advocates view such bootcamp style Ex-Gay camps as “tantamount to child abuse”. [1] [2]

Love In Action is viewed as the first modern Ex-Gay group. Its co-founder John Evans, who abandoned the ministry, feels that it has led to “nothing but shattered lives, depression, and even suicide” and suggests that “The Church has been wrong in the past regarding moral issues and I’m sure there will be more before Christ returns.”

The American Psychological Association and the American Psychiatric Association strongly affirm that “homosexuality is not an illness”, “does not require treatment” and “is not changeable.” They feel that “gay men and lesbians who have accepted their sexual orientation positively are better adjusted than those who have not done so,” and warn that people seeking conversion therapy may be doing so under pressure from religious groups. The American public is evenly divided on the question of whether homosexual orientation can be changed, according to the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life [3].

Sunday, May 13, 2007

Last week, RAF Leuchars in Fife scambled two Tornado F3 interceptors, when radar detected two Tupolev Tu-142 Bear Bombers and the alarm was sounded “Bears in the Air”.

The RAF would not disclose the exact time of the incident, which was to the north of the Outer Hebrides. It did say that no contact was made between the aircraft.

The Russian Bear Foxtrot bombers are renowned maritime raiders that regularly probed the United Kingdom’s airspace during the Cold War.

The Russian aircraft were snooping on Neptune Warrior, a Royal Navy exercise taking place near the Outer Hebrides last week. Neptune Warrior was a live-fire naval training exercise involving warships, submarines and aircraft that took place between April 22 and May 3.

The Tornado’s watched the Russians for approximately 15 minutes until the bombers returned to their home base in Murmansk.

During the Cold War in the 1970s and 1980s, Soviet spies were sometimes spotted watching from the perimeter of RAF stations to time exactly how long it took jets to take off and intercept Bear bombers, probing the United Kingdom’s defences and testing the response. Nato pilots in those days were well accustomed to an almost daily aerial game of cat-and-mouse.

Squadrons of Phantom interceptors were on constant quick-reaction standby through the 1970s and 1980s to deal with the threat of Soviet long-range bombers engaging in a long-range attack on Great Britain. The Bears can carry an arsenal of missiles, some nuclear-tipped, to strike NATO warships blocking the entrance to the vital North Atlantic sealanes between the United States and Europe.

In July, the Tornado will be replaced by the new Eurofighter Typhoon. Currently, RAF personnel on scrambling duty spend most of their time on counter-terrorist missions, checking out commercial airliners approaching Britain in ways that arouse suspicion, either because they have taken the wrong flight path or because the pilot has not contacted ground control.