Security/Special Projects
Information Security
Special ProjectsJailed SF network administrator faces fewer charges
A judge has dismissed most of the charges against a former San Francisco network administrator accused of hijacking the city's computer network he designed and maintained.
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European Cyber-Gangs Target Small U.S. Firms, Group Says
Organized cyber-gangs in Eastern Europe are increasingly preying on small and mid-size companies in the United States, setting off a multimillion-dollar online crime wave that has begun to worry the nation's largest financial institutions.
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Hacker used Twitter to control infected PCs
At least one criminal was using a Twitter account to control a network of a couple hundred infected personal computers, mostly in Brazil. Networks of infected PCs are referred to as "botnets" and are responsible for so much of the mayhem online, from identity theft to spamming to the types of attacks that crippled Twitter.
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Obama site smackdown spam only offers malware
Spam messages offering links to a tool designed to knock out the website of President Obama lead only to dodgy software.
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Seattle man used Limewire for identity theft
A Seattle man was sentenced to more than three years in prison Tuesday for using the Limewire file-sharing service to lift personal information from computers across the U.S.
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At a Loss for Words: The Day Facebook, Twitter Crashed
What happened Thursday, in 140 characters: Twitter went down. Facebook went down. People panicked, unused to not oversharing minutiae of life. Twitter back up. Facebook back up. Phew.
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Russia-Georgia Conflict Blamed for Twitter, Facebook Outages
The theories behind who and what attacked Twitter and Facebook -- causing intermittent outages at each -- are flying like so many tweets across the Internet. The prevailing theory suggests that the outage was due to a cyber skirmish stemming from simmering tensions between Russia and Georgia.
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Sandia to boot behemoth botnet
Starting in October, a huge botnet will be run not by nefarious underground figures but by the Energy Department's Sandia National Laboratories. The lab's Thunderbird supercomputer will periodically run a million virtual machines all at once, all with botnet client software. By setting this large network of systems into operation, the researchers, Ron Minnich and Don Rudish, hope to better understand how botnets operate.
