Cs: Cyber, Census and Casino

Even more inventive computer crooks have used online pornography as a reward f human web surfers who break the Captcha…

The Artificial Intelligence by John Markoff  NYT  piece , very interesting throughout.  Imagine an evil AI agent that can mimic your voice and call your loved ones and…

Census Outage in Senate: To be Hacked Or Not to be Hackedt

The DDOS attack yesterday reminds us of how vulnerable we are to flaws in technology Quartz

The Little-Known Company That Enables Worldwide Mass Surveillance Intercept. Lambert: “Wondered what role NZ was playing in 5 Eyes.

Cyber crime has moved closer to home than ever. The cyber attack that slowed many popular websites to a crawl last week is attracting new scrutiny to the security of the so-called "Internet of Things." Internet Outage Shows How Sophisticated Attacks Can Target Your Home

ZDNet: “An NSA contractor siphoned off dozens of hard drives’ worth of data from government computers over two decades, prosecutors will allege on Friday. The contractor, Harold T. Martin III, is also accused of stealing thousands of highly classified documents, computers, and other storage devices during his tenure at the agency. It’s not known exactly what Martin allegedly stole, but a report from The New York Times on Wednesday suggests that the recently-leaked hacking tools used by the agency to conduct surveillance were among the stolen cache of files. Prosecutors will on Friday charge Martin with violating the Espionage Act. If convicted, he could face ten years in prison on each count…”
Engadget: “The feds quietly arrested NSA contractor Harold Thomas Martin III back in August for stealing an enormous number of documents from the agency. Now, the investigators sifting through the documents found in his computers discovered what they were probably looking for from the start. According to the New York Times, the documents he stole included the NSA’s top secret hacking tools posted online by a group called Shadow Brokers earlier this year. Federal agents had to pore over terabytes upon terabytes of data to find those tools, since the classified materials found in Martin’s possession make the Panama Papers (2.6 terabytes) and Edward Snowden’s documents look insignificant in comparison…”

Hacked Cameras, DVRs Powered Today’s Massive Internet Outage Krebs on Security. Richard Smith: “‘It’s remarkable that virtually an entire company’s product line has just been turned into a botnet that is now attacking the United States.’ Remarkable is one word for it. Such is our globalised deregulated world.”

It probably wasn’t Russia who attacked the Internet today. That’s what’s scary. Washington Post (furzy). Um, scary is when someone takes the electrical grid down. Since when is losing access to Amazon “scary” to anyone other than Amazon execs and shareholders?

From Bill B via e-mail:

The whole breathless coverage of the DDoS attack against Dyn borders on comedy. But, hey, it’s great P.R. for the cyber expert crowd. I keep waiting for “hackers” to give ‘Merica a shove hard enough to knock it down but it never happens. Not that Twitter going down means squat to all those minimum wage slaves doing the Dollar Store shuffle.

Blame the Internet of Things for Destroying the Internet Today Motherboard. I remember when Michael Hawley of MIT was providing me support for my NeXT computer (yes, one of the virtues of having a NeXT was having access to top technologists). It was no doubt proof of my hopeless Luddite tendencies when he told me in 1991 of the coming IoT even before that was a term of art. He thought it was really cool that his belt buckle would be able to talk to his refrigerator. I didn’t see much upside and could envision lots of downside from having my devices able to have private conversations among themselves.

TechCrunch: “Several waves of major cyberattacks against an internet directory service knocked dozens of popular websites offline today, with outages continuing into the afternoon. Twitter, SoundCloud, Spotify, Shopify, and other websites have been inaccessible to many users throughout the day. The outages are the result of several distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks on the DNS provider Dyn, the company confirmed. The outages were first reported on Hacker News.” Sites impacted included Twitter, Reddit, Spotify.

• For primary source reference, see Update Regarding DDoS Event Against Dyn Managed DNS on October 21, 2016: “On Friday October 21, 2016 at approximately 11:10 UTC, Dyn came under attack by a large Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack against our Managed DNS infrastructure in the US-East region. Customers affected may have seen regional resolution failures in US-East and intermittent spikes in latency globally. Dyn’s engineers were able to successfully mitigate the attack at approximately 13:20 UTC, and shortly after, the attack subsided. At roughly 15:50 UTC a second DDoS attack began against the Managed DNS platform. This attack was distributed in a more global fashion. Affected customers may have seen intermittent resolution issues as well as increased global latency. At approximately 17:00 UTC, our engineers were again able to mitigate the attack and service was restored.”
• Popular Mechanics – Hackers Wrecked the Internet Today Using DVRs and Webcams Smart home gadgets—not computers—likely did the bulk of the nefarious work today.
• New York Times – Hackers Used New Weapons in Attack on U.S. Internet

Peta Credlin accepts new role with Australian casino mogul

 

The first hint of trouble came in the western Chinese city of Chengdu. It was just after 8pm on Thursday of last week and police were knocking ...

Inside James Packer's Crown China nightmare

A quick sift through recent court judgments sheds some light on why Chinese authorities might be concerned about Crown Resorts' junket operations. Sydney's Star Casino too has had its brush with money laundering crimes by Chinese nationals.
In one case, it was the purchase of a Lamborghini Aventador coupé by Chinese-Australian businessman Ming Qing Wang that caught the Australian Federal Police's attention.
The Chinese gamblers ploughing millions into Crown Casino 

Crown Casino, Fed Square cleaners lose $130,000 in wage theft scandal