Anonymous, LulzSec Vow to Hack on

 By Jaikumar Vijayan
In a defiant statement addressed largely at FBI director Steve Chabinsky, members of the Anonymous and LulzSec hacktivist groups vowed to continue with their hacking campaigns and dared law enforcement to try and stop them.
The statement comes just two days after the FBI arrested 14 alleged members of Anonymous in connection with a series of distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks against PayPal last year.
The immediate provocation appears to have been some comments made by Chabinsky in a NPR report following the recent arrests.
In it, Chabinsky is quoted as saying that chaos on the Internet is unacceptable. "[Even if] hackers can be believed to have social causes, it's entirely unacceptable to break into websites and commit unlawful acts."
In their response, posted on Pastebin.com , Anonymous and LulzSec members claimed their hactivist campaigns were motivated by a desire to expose what they described as lying governments, corrupt corporations and powerful lobbyists.
"We will continue to fight them, with all methods we have at our disposal, and that certainly includes breaking into their websites and exposing their lies," the letter said.
"We are not scared any more. Your threats to arrest us are meaningless to us as you cannot arrest an idea," the groups claimed. The two groups claimed they were acting like bandits only because they were forced to. "The Anonymous bitchslap rings through your ears like hacktivism movements of the 90s. We're back -- and we're not going anywhere."
Given the highly decentralized and loosely organized nature of the two groups it's hard to say how much of the content in the letter is bluster, how much is real or even how much it represents the true sentiment among members.
Certainly both Anonymous and LulzSec have demonstrated their ability to strike at what appears to be pretty much at will and pretty much against any target.
Just today for instance, Anonymous released a 36-page restricted document that is claimed to have obtained by breaking into a Web server at North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) .
In a Twitter message, the group said that it has 1GB of material from NATO which it would not release because it would be irresponsible.
Over the last week, both groups have claimed credit for breaking into Rupert Murdoch's media sites. In one attack LulzSec compromised DNS servers at News International so that visitors to the group's Sun tabloid site were redirected to a fake story proclaiming Murdoch's death.
And in recent weeks and months both Anonymous and LulzSec have claimed responsibility for breaks-in at military contractor Booz Allen Hamilton, Sony and several other high-profile organizations.

The attacks have been mostly designed to embarrass and to provoke rather than to create any real damage. In most instances, the groups have cited some political or social cause for their attacks.
Recently for instance, when Anonymous attacked police union sites in Arizona , it claimed it was doing so because of the state's tough immigration laws.
However, law enforcement has made some important gains as well. Last weeks raids for instance, netted a total of 14 individuals who are allegedly members of Anonymous. Several arrests have been made overseas as well. Last month U.K police arrested Ryan Cleary, a 19-year old who is believed to be connected to both LulzSec and Anonymous.
Computers seized from last week's arrests and from Cleary's arrests are likely to lead authorities to more people connected with the two groups.
Whether such arrests will dampen their enthusiasm or only spur more attacks remains to be seen.

US federal government to close 800 data centers, walk into the cloud

 By Jesse Hicks

 

Sure, it's been just a few months since the National Security Agency asked for a $900 million supercomputing complex – you know, to help out with all that internet wiretapping. But concern about deficit spending will mean shuttering 800 other federal data centers in the US, or 40 percent of total government capacity. The closures are part of a larger push toward greater efficiency and consolidation, with an estimated savings of $3 billion a year; moving services to the cloud will mean more savings in licensing fees and infrastructure. Single-digit savings might sound like chump change when you realize the federal information technology budget runs around $80 billion a year, but hey, it's a start, right?

FBI Raids New York Homes in Hunt for Anonymous Hackers

 By John E Dunn

The FBI is reported to have raided homes in New York and California in connection with DDoS attacks carried out earlier this year by the hacktivist group, Anonymous.
Fox News has reported that the agency arrived to search two homes in Long Island and one in Brooklyn, removing papers and some computer equipment. The FBI is said to have followed up with search warrants at one or more addresses in California later in the day.
It is not yet clear whether anyone will be arrested as part of the investigation, but all the suspects were described by Fox News sources as being in their late teens or early twenties. Only one individual said to live at one of the addresses in New York has been named but his association has not been confirmed.
Getting on top of Anonymous has proved remarkably difficult for such a high-profile group, despite arrests by UK and US in January, further arrests in Spain, and an even larger raid in Turkey last month. It could be that Anonymous is simply too loose, dispersed and evolving to be stopped quickly by law enforcement.
Also in June, teen Ryan Cleary was arrested for being involved in DDoS attacks launched by LulzSec, a separate entity loosely associated with Anonymous.
Coincidentally, after a month out of the news, LulzSec yesterday launched a web redirection attack on websites run by British newspapers controlled by News International, owners of Fox News.
Not coincidentally, but perhaps ironically, thousands of miles away the head of News International, Rupert Murdoch, faced a committee of British parliamentarians to account for phone phreaking attacks allegedly carried out by journalists working for his company.

The Sun Hacked: How it Happened

By Leo King

A fake 'Murdoch dead' news report, placed on newspaper The Sun's website during a hacking attack last night by Lulz Security, has prompted a massive IT security crackdown at parent company News International. Computerworld UK.com has learned that the hackers injected a preformatted HTML file into an old internal server at News International, which is used to serve a text entry window on screen in the company's content management system. The window appears within pages hosted by the paper's main Amazon Cloud-delivered site, though sources close to News International said the Amazon Cloud data centre was not hacked.
Rupert Murdoch and his son James, as well as former editor Rebekah Brooks, are due to appear at 2.30pm today in front of the Commons Culture, Media and Sport Committee. They will be asked tough questions on allegations that journalists at the company hacked into the voicemail accounts of 9/11 victims, murdered teenager Milly Dowler, and a raft of celebrities, in a bid to find stories.
The spoof story placed last night on thesun.co.uk claimed that Rupert Murdoch had been found dead in his garden. Readers clicking on the hoax story were redirected to new-times.co.uk, where the story was placed, headlined 'Media mogul's body discovered'. The spoof story claimed Murdoch had taken palladium, a radioactive substance.
The news has prompted an aggressive IT security clampdown at News International this morning.
Sources told Computerworld UK.com that News International's staff have been issued with new login and password details, following the hacking attack, and that the company has also shut off remote access to its systems.
News International operates a Citrix virtual desktop system, which allows staff to 'hotdesk' and access their desktop on any PC in the firm's offices. Access codes for the virtual desktop, as well as News International's content management system, are said to have been changed.
The Sun and The Times websites are back online, but the News International website was offline at the time of writing. News International declined to comment on how it was hacked, what was happening with its corporate website, or how it is tackling IT security concerns. It gave confirmation only that its newspaper sites were back online.
The news comes as The Guardian newspaper reported that police are examining a laptop dumped near former News of the World and Sun editor Rebekah Brooks' flat in Chelsea. Brooks' husband, Charlie, has claimed it is his and that it was in a bag accidentally thrown out by a cleaner, but this remains unconfirmed. Rebekah Brooks was arrested on Sunday on suspicion of conspiring to intercept communications, and she was bailed the next day.
Rupert Murdoch, who is accustomed to his journalists writing stories on celebrities and other public figures, has in recent weeks found himself at the centre of the news as the hacking scandal grows.
Another of Scotland Yard's most senior police officers, John Yates, resigned yesterday. Yates decided in 2009 that there was no need to reopen investigations into alleged phone hacking by journalists on the now-shuttered News of the World newspaper. Yates was about to be suspended.
Sean Hoare, a former News of the World journalist and the first reporter to expose hacking at the paper, has been found dead.

Insider threats and critical infrastructure: Sometimes, the news is worth worrying about

by CSO, Salted Hash – IT security news analysis, over easy!

My instinct is almost always to look at something scary and tell you why there's no real reason to be afraid. But when it comes to malicious insiders working in nuclear power plants, a little fear may be justified.
I bring this up after reading all the reports about how Osama Bin Laden was planning an attack for the 10th anniversary of 9-11. The Department of Homeland Security issued a report that malicious insiders sent by the terrorists may already be on the inside at nuclear and other facilities essential to maintaining our energy supply, in positions of deep responsibility.
And so here we are, on guard like we've been so many times before, with the TV news people telling us to be afraid -- very afraid.
Exhibit A: This ABC report featuring Brian Ross, who is, in my opinion, one of the biggest doom-and-gloom-we're-all-gonna-die reporters out there:
Sabotage by an insider at a major utility facility, including a chemical or oil refinery, could provide al Qaeda with its best opportunity for the kind of massive Sept. 11 anniversary attack Osama bin Laden was planning, according to U.S. officials.
A new intelligence report from the Department of Homeland Security issued Tuesday, titled Insider Threat to Utilities, warns "violent extremists have, in fact, obtained insider positions," and that "outsiders have attempted to solicit utility-sector employees" for damaging physical and cyber attacks.
"Based on the reliable reporting of previous incidents, we have high confidence in our judgment that insiders and their actions pose a significant threat to the infrastructure and information systems of U.S. facilities," the bulletin reads in part. "Past events and reporting also provide high confidence in our judgment that insider information on sites, infrastructure, networks, and personnel is valuable to our adversaries and may increase the impact of any attack on the utilities infrastructure."
By the way, purely by coincidence, I discovered that this report is all the more ominous when you play the song "Making the Bombs" by the Circle Jerks in the background.
I've learned to be skeptical of a lot of things mainstream media reports, because much of what was reported on years ago never came to pass. For example, in the days after Hurricane Katrina in 2005, as New Orleans' lower ninth ward continued to be submerged in putrid water and death, ABC decided it could get a lot of mileage from a series of reports on all the potentially catastrophic threats we face.
One show dealt with what would happen if a nuclear bomb were detonated in a major American city. Another segment focused on a strain of bird flu that was killing people in Cambodia, Vietnam and other nations in that part of the world.
If the virus were to mutate so it could easily pass from human to human, a huge percentage of the global population could be killed off, as happened with the 1918-19 Spanish Flu pandemic, Ross reported. After that report, the world spent the next year on edge as human cases were found elsewhere in the world. Doom was imminent. Modern medicine was ill-equipped to stop it. And then -- nothing.
We did have a flu pandemic in 2009, but it wasn't the bird flu we had been watching for. This was a much milder pandemic.
So here's Ross again, warning that we're in for some potentially nasty stuff. I want to shrug and change the channel as I've learned to do.
But this time, I stop and watch the whole report. And, I find myself taking it very seriously.
Why?
Because I've done a lot of writing about the insider threat in recent years. I've reported on malicious insiders stealing critical intellectual property and selling it to their employer's biggest competitors.
I've seen a lot of smaller cases where disgruntled insiders tampered with computer systems and damaged data.
The insider threat is real.
So when I see reports that potential terrorists may be working inside energy plants with evil intentions, I'm inclined to worry a little more than I normally would.
Not that I'm going to go hide under the living room couch. I wouldn't fit, anyway.
The good news is that the government is on to this potential plot, so a surprise attack is less likely. The bad news is that the government has demonstrated remarkable incompetence in the face of disaster before. I again refer you to Hurricane Katrina.
The greatest opportunity to avert disaster can be found where it usually is, in the private sector.
Now would be a good time for all our critical infrastructure suppliers to keep a sharp eye on the workforce, monitoring for any unusual behavior.
That may not be enough in the end. But we already know these companies have plenty of room for improvement.
This is an excellent opportunity to work on that.
--Bill Brenner

Cisco expands data center networking gear

LAS VEGAS -- Cisco this week expanded its Unified Computing System networking portfolio in an effort to improve the scalability and performance of the data center consolidation system. 

At its Cisco Live customer conference, Cisco added fabric interconnects, a virtual interface card, a chassis I/O module and an update of its UCS management software to the UCS portfolio. The extensions are intended to address challenges IT managers face in adopting virtualization, controlling costs, and scaling to meet growing business demands.
CISCO LIVE KEYNOTE: Chambers: Cisco will be leaner, faster, more attentive
Travelport, a service provider for the travel industry, is using UCS to make server provisioning faster and more agile as traffic growth strains the company's network and IT infrastructure. 

"We were spending a lot of IT man-hours cabling individual servers to access switches," says Steven Senecal, manager of global server engineering for Travelport. "There was an increased risk of human errors through recabling, and our business growth was outpacing the scale of our infrastructure."
UCS and its associated products allowed Travelport to deploy 190 servers in six hours, with service profiles for applications assigned and provisioned, and turned over to other IT teams within three days. The firm turned up another 1,304 blades this week with several hundred more planned by October, just before a heavy travel season with the end-of-year holidays.
"Our problem now is that the product teams think we can turn over servers really fast now," Senecal said, adding that UCS is increasing server performance eightfold.
UCS' momentum recently allowed Cisco to become the third leading blade server vendor worldwide, and second in the U.S. in the first quarter. To keep that momentum going, Cisco this week rolled out the networking extensions for UCS.
First is the Fabric Interconnect 6248UP. This supports Cisco's Unified Port capability, which allows IT managers to designate any port to be Gigabit Ethernet, 10 Gigabit Ethernet, Fibre Channel (2/4/8 gigabits per second) or Fibre Channel over Ethernet. It doubles the UCS system switching capacity to 1Tbps and 48 Unified Ports, and results in a 40% reduction in end-to-end latency, Cisco says.
Next is the Fabric Extender 2208XP Chassis IO Module, which doubles bandwidth to the blade chassis to 160Gbps.
Third, Cisco unveiled a Virtual Interface Card -- the VIC 1280 -- that quadruples bandwidth to the server through dual 40G interfaces, up from dual 10G on previous VICs. VIC 1280 also supports 256 virtual interfaces, double the number of previous-generation VIC interfaces.
VIC 1280 is based on the IEEE's 802.1Qbh standard for Bridge Port Extension and also supports RedHat's KVM hypervisor.
Last, Cisco updated the UCS Manager with Release 2.0. The software, which manages all system configuration and operations for UCS, now supports VMware vCenter virtualization management to enable IT to organize, provision and configure the virtualized environment across branch offices and the data center.

UCS Manager 2.0 also now allows users to run the UCS Fabric in End Host Mode rather than switch mode, and can connect management, backup, production and test networks to the Fabric Interconnect in End Host Mode.
All UCS enhancements announced this week are interoperable with the existing UCS 5108 Blade Chassis for investment protection, Cisco says.
Cisco says it now has 5,400 UCS customers and is adding 1,000 every quarter. Sixty percent of these customers are in the U.S., with 55% to 60% of them in enterprises, 20% in service providers, and the remainder in the public sector.
Sixty percent to 70% of UCS customers used to be HP server customers, while others were IBM and Dell, said Soni Jiandani, vice president of Cisco's Server Access Virtualization Business Unit.