Z-Techie: Technology Info: internet security

Monday, June 10, 2013

Big Brother IS watching! (Privacy not what some would expect.)

The UK's Guardian reports:

The National Security Agency has obtained direct access to the systems of Google, Facebook, Apple and other US internet giants, according to a top secret document obtained by the Guardian.

The NSA access is part of a previously undisclosed program called PRISM, which allows officials to collect material including search history, the content of emails, file transfers and live chats, the document says.

The Guardian has verified the authenticity of the document, a 41-slide PowerPoint presentation – classified as top secret with no distribution to foreign allies – which was apparently used to train intelligence operatives on the capabilities of the program. The document claims "collection directly from the servers" of major US service providers.

Although the presentation claims the program is run with the assistance of the companies, all those who responded to a Guardian request for comment on Thursday denied knowledge of any such program.

In a statement, Google said: "Google cares deeply about the security of our users' data. We disclose user data to government in accordance with the law, and we review all such requests carefully. From time to time, people allege that we have created a government 'back door' into our systems, but Google does not have a back door for the government to access private user data."

Several senior tech executives insisted that they had no knowledge of PRISM or of any similar scheme. They said they would never have been involved in such a program. "If they are doing this, they are doing it without our knowledge," one said.

An Apple spokesman said it had "never heard" of PRISM.

The NSA access was enabled by changes to US surveillance law introduced under President Bush and renewed under Obama in December 2012.

Monday, September 10, 2012

GoDaddy.com Attacked 9/10/12

A malicious flood of network traffic has knocked Internet registrar GoDaddy’s servers offline -- taking with it the site, its email, and thousands, potentially millions of websites registered through one of the Internet’s most popular services.

a DDoS attack involves an overwhelming flood of communication that a server can't keep up with, but it can be orchestrated with as few as 50 computers.

That an Internet service which hosts more than 5 million websites wasn’t protected reveals a surprising truth: The Internet is still startlingly vulnerable to such an attack.

“Anyone can be hacked, the size of the company has no bearing on it all,” Ghosh said.

Twitter user Anonymous Own3r claimed credit for the attack, and was quick to distance himself from the hacking collective that goes by a similar name.

GoDaddy Girl Danica Patrick