(Original): http://www.forbes.com/2007/08/22/scada- … print.html
(Archived): http://www.westerfunk.net/archives/secu … 0Backbone/
There are many fronts in which it seems we are falling behind on security. This article highlights the possibility of a nuclear power plant getting hacked with the result being major power outages within the region of the plant that is attacked.
http://www.westerfunk.net/archives/secu … 0Pentagon/
It may be a good idea at this point, unfortunately, to disconnect all government networks from the internet, creating a sort of closed-circuit networked system, maybe creating a trusted and untrusted network? The government has made strides it seems over the past few years to secure its networks and computer systems by not allowing local users to install hardware such as thumb drives (or software on some systems), making users use Firefox to browse the internet instead of IE, utilizing domain level lock downs which make it more difficult for outsiders to even locally penetrate systems at a users workstation (let alone remote attackers), securing their firewalls to not allow certain traffic in or out, and using packet inspection to watch for suspicious activity. However, China seems to always be one step ahead of us, with this as a case in point.
Also:
http://www.westerfunk.net/archives/secu … yberspace/
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/w … 016297.ece
Well, in short it was closed. However, it has apparently re-emerged, in the form of www.mp3sparks.com. AllofMP3.com was a site in Russia where you could get entire albums for like $1.20 (varied depending on bit rate). It was shut down due to US and international pressures, particularly Russia’s possible entry into the WTO. Apparently this new site is essentially the same thing though, and legal, once again, under Russian law. So downloadeds are still just as cheap. Good deal while it lasts …
Whereas during the Cold War, espionage took the form of infiltrating government facilities, recruiting agents from within the government to hand over information, now the threat is economic espionage, where private corporations are being infiltrated by agents from all over the world. And they don’t even have to be a double agent (spying for two governments as in the Cold War), but they simply need to get hired or work as a contractor within a private corporation.
So much of what makes this country (and other major super powers) run is economic and corporate. We are no longer in an arms race but a world-wide economic race. This priority has replaced the arms race of the Cold War now for this country. Economic stability and prosperity is the foundation of what makes this country tick. Therefore, for other countries like China and Russia in particular, to get a hold of the secrets corporations possess for how they do business, making them so effective on the world market, is invaluable information. And unfortunately, this kind of information, as opposed to the kind during the Cold War, is much easier to obtain than infiltrating top secret government facilities, and may turn out to be much more dangerous.
The FBI is increasingly confronting the problem, particularly with the rising problem of Chinese spies within corporations (as cited in the articles listed below), but there are more and more agents coming from all over the world, taking advantage of this new found espionage. We seem to be at an even greater risk of losing our world-wide economic foothold now than in the Cold War with this type of espionage. If we can have our foundational foothold uprooted, our influence may diminish and China’s may increase (since they seem to be the primary agents we are catching). Interesting …
Here are some articles on the subject I have archived:
http://www.westerfunk.net/archives/secu … h%20spies/
http://www.westerfunk.net/archives/secu … e%20spies/
http://www.westerfunk.net/archives/secu … s%20Forum/
http://www.westerfunk.net/archives/secu … vel’/
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline … spy/spies/
http://www.popularmechanics.com/technol … 19656.html
Sysinternals.com was originally a site run by Mark Russinovich and Bryce Cogswell that had a collection of tools used to administer Windows machines. It was then purchased by Microsoft and is now located at http://www.microsoft.com/technet/sysint … fault.mspx . These are unbelievably helpful when trying to troubleshoot a problem with your system. In particular, you can watch processes run in real time, watch the individual execution of certain calls within the operating system, watch TCP connections made out to the internet, and host of other things. Check it out.
After a long process (not as long as I thought though) I finally got all my systems and sites converted to the latest backend web systems. The reason I converted was because just yesterday www.php.net announced the “end of life” for PHP version 4, which is what I have been running on. So I figured I should start converting code and get it done now just to be on the safe side. PHP code was actually the biggest pain of all to convert. The login system I use to maintain user accounts and security for www.westerfunk.net was originally coded to use <? to begin the PHP scripts instead of <?php which worked fine in PHP 4.4.7. But once I began utilizing PHP 5.2, everything broke. First I had to narrow down what the problem was after searching forums, and then I had to address it. I wound up having to go through the login system code and change every <? to <?php and now it works very well. It’s good I’m standardized as far as the code is concerned, but man it would be nice to actually have some things easily transfer over from an older platform to a newer one. Anyway, in addition to that, while I was at it, I got all my DB schemas converted to MySQL 5.0.45 and moved that system over to my other server off of the main webserver which has definitely increased performance. This was relatively painless believe it or not. I installed MySQL, backed up the schemas off the old MySQL server, uploaded the saved schemas, assigned rights, and it was good to go. Glad that’s over …
According to their website, SimplePHPBlog will be putting out a new build of code possibly available on the 15th. I will eventually get over to this new version, but will have to modify some code. For those of you who do not know what this is, or even care to know, SimplePHPBlog is a textfile-driven weblog that does not use any backend database such as MySQL, MS-SQL, etc. It just saves the blog data into text files locally on the server and compresses them into gzip format to save space. So far, with 192,000 words written on my blog, I’ve only used about 511K of space, minus all of the other data it saves for the site. Pretty incredible deal …
I purchased a new Microsoft LifeCam VX-6000 over the web from BestBuy.com and was thoroughly displeased. Upon plugging it into my server, it picked up a USB 2.0 device, which is normal (i.e. there was no driver for it to utilize). So I installed the software, and no matter what I did, I could not get the webcam to see the drivers. I tried several different procedures for installing the software and the webcam; no go. So I’m taking it back to try another one today. We’ll see how that goes.
Update @ 11:35 am
And there’s more: my sweet wife took the cam back to a Best Buy near us to exchange it this morning. You would think this would be simple enough. Nope. Apparently, because I used a gift card on BestBuy.com to order my cam, they had to fully refund the cam back to my account in two parts, $8.00 for the part I actually paid, and the $100.00 back to the gift card, which they will now send in the mail as they had to reissue a new one. So the cam didn’t work, they took it back, and now instead of just exchanging it for another of the same product, they must reissue a card? I’m confused on that one. Not a huge deal to wait, just as long as I get the $100.00 card back. So do not use a Best Buy gift card on BestBuy.com, in case you have to return the product.
Update @ 3:02 pm on 7/13/2007 – I have now obtained the VX-3000 model, which is half the price of the VX-6000, and it works well. I plugged it in and Windows XP found the drivers right away. It does not have the wide-screen lens, but it does what I need it to. The one drawback I can see so far is the software seems to be very limited on its ability to efficiently change brightness, contrast, gamma, flicker, etc. Some times I would change settings and it wouldn’t take
http://business.timesonline.co.uk/tol/b … 871173.ece
“Fresh privacy fears have been sparked after it emerged that Apple has embedded personal information into music files bought from its iTunes online music store.
Technology websites examining iTunes products discovered that personal data, including the name and e-mail addresses of purchasers, are embedded into the AAC files that Apple uses to distribute music tracks.”
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