Operation n

…you can go to the data centre and brute-force your way in as these criminals did by posing as policemen to burgle a Verizon data centre. It’s a worry. My feeling is people get ideas from media influences such as shows like 24, Spooks, CSI.

This absolutely cracked me up. Evidently Microsoft’s santa bot has turned naughty

Here’s a good wiki style guide to WEP cracking. A couple of the first WEP cracking tools came from wepcrack and airsnort. But these days, cracking algorithms have improved and demonstrated in aircrack-ptw and has been assessed at darknet. Comparisons between aircrack-ng and aircrack-ptw can be seen in this video.

Well tonight the focus is truly is on where they have cut their interest rate to 4.25% due to the credit crunch that is going around. Now that I have put into a Canadian kind of mood, eh, some interesting news has floated past from across the pond. A few Canadians have been duped out of their money by account hijackers including one for a $20k car. It looks like the UK are not the only country with information disclosure problem, Canadian passport officials had to temporarily close their website after privacy breach that leaked personal information of applicants including their driver’s license numbers, birth dates and if they owned a gun. The hole was discovered last week by an Ontario IT worker who found a simple way to cause the Passport Canada site to volunteer information about people he never even met. Altering the URL that was in the address bar of his browser while viewing his own application, he found it was possible to view the applications of others.

Not to be confused with ircseek.com, irseek.com, the irc search engine has been forced to temporarily shut up shop after a few compliants in that it had bots that screenscrape channels for content without any permission. There is also an element of finding user information on these sites too. So they could be storing more information than they should be. Makeyougohmm discusses this further but to summarise:

• Is irseek creating a knowledge base or are they becoming the peeping tom’s of IRC channels without the permission of the people chatting.
• How are they maintaining the privacy of the users when their entire conversations are being logged?
• Taking without permission on the web is a bad netiquette. It’s like screenscraping or hotlinking without permission. There is a lot of great information on IRC and that’s what there is to love about IRC but there are also some semi-private conversations that people in niche groups have, even out in the open “public” channels.
• A channel op and IRC server administrator wouldn’t feel comfortable logging every word in the public channels and making it searchable without notifying the people in the channels the second they joined that this was happening.