North Korea rampant with Filesharing

North Koreans are subverting their government's censorship by sharing files on USB sticks and MP3 players, claims a report.

A Quiet Opening, by Nat Kretchin and Jane Kim, uses testimony from defectors and refugees to build a picture of how popular media originating from other countries is within the isolated dictatorship. The answer, you may be surprised to hear, appears to be "very".

North Korea—or to use its official name, the Democratic Peoples' Republic of Korea—is also known as the "Hermit Kingdom", a reflection of its isolation from the outside world. North Koreans are fed a strictly controlled and limited diet of media, and officially have no access to unvetted material. However, the collected testimony paints a picture of a people who are slowly gaining an understanding of the outside world—a process which began when the severe famine of the late 1990s shook many North Koreans' faith in their government.

Connected officials and elites are able to buy MP3 players, DVDs, and USB sticks from connections in China, and the contents are handed around surreptitiously. It's a modern twist on what was called "samizdat" in the USSR—forbidden books and pamphlets, copied and spread among activists in secret.

A 44-year-old male from Chongjin (the third largest city in the DPRK, close to the Chinese border) told the authors of the report: "About 70-80 percent of people that have MP3/4 players are young people. When you do a crackdown of MP3/4 players among high school and university students, you see that 100 percent of them have South Korean music."

The report also quotes several people who say that families and friends often gather together to watch the latest episodes of the most popular South Korean shows. Soap operas from the South are incredibly popular—and the gap between what they're told about the South (that it's poor and repressive) versus what they see (young people in designer clothes having parties) is contributing to widespread disbelief in the regime's propaganda.

The most important officials have always had access to material forbidden to the wider populace, but the implications of this latest report are that these illicit materials are filtering down to other families—and they're not scared to share their illegal media with others. A 47-year-old female from Pyongyang says kids in her childrens' class would use the class computer to copy files for each other—a crime that not long ago would have been considered unthinkable.

Recent visitors to North Korea will have noticed that mobile phones are a common sight even in the poorest areas of the country (the country has one of the highest levels of 3G penetration in the world), and in some of Pyongyang's more elite districts iPads are not unusual. While the penalties for accessing foreign media content are incredibly severe—ranging from three months to five years of forced labour, depending on how subversive it is—the proliferation of so many electronic devices is making it easier for people to communicate both with each other and the outside world.

While the North Korean government may restrict the access its people have to the Internet, it's nevertheless believed to have one of the most effective online foreign espionage operations in the world. In the wake of widespread GPS jamming in South Korea in May, information security professor Lee Dong-Hoon claimed that North Korea had the third most powerful cyberwar capabilities in the world after the US and Russia, and organisations which cover North Korea in the West are frequently subjected to hacking and DDoS attacks.

It's worth noting that this report, like most that come out of North Korea, relies on sampling a very small subsection of DPRK society. Most refugees come from either Pyongyang or other richer border regions with China, as those are the sections of society with the material wealth and connections that give them a chance of defecting in the first place. The majority of the population lives in much poorer rural conditions and with more chance of being persecuted if caught with forbidden media. The report points out that only 16 percent of those questioned for the report said they had access to some kind of computer. Frequent power shortages make it unlikely that number will dramatically increase any time soon.

DISec News

As most people would know there is a trend going on called the "ANTI-Sec Movement" which I am neither against or for simply for the reason some companies do deserve to get slammed with security breaches and show the customers how easy it truly is to get there lives taken from them simply by... you guest it "Trusting a Corporation."

Does anyone remember the days people wanted the 'Mom and Pop Shops' and no one trusted the corporations? I don't know what happen but I do miss those days, But with people actually "trusting" these big corporations all the independent 'Mom & Pop Shops' lose out and are forced to either sell or shutdown.

But the reason why I also disagree with the new movement is some of these websites that can't truly afford an IT Staff and is more like a low market will still get plucked and yes I understand that it's to prove a point but people are also at risk of getting there identity taken away from them; most people in this movement are actually not leaking most of the user database, it still will show up though so you always must take the precautions when playing in the digital world.

Massachusetts data breaches touch five million residents

Data breaches have affected five million residents of Massachusetts since October 2007, when the state’s strict data breach law was enacted, according to Barbara Anthony, head of the Office of Consumer Affairs and Business Regulation.

Anthony told the Boston Herald newspaper that the state has received around 2,200 data breach notification letters from companies and agencies reporting lost or stolen personal information since the law was enacted, affecting around five million state residents.
“We get about 50 [letters] a month. Our reporting law is very stringent. Even if it’s one credit card that’s been lost, the company has to report it to us”, Anthony told the newspaper.
Data breaches in the state range from the relatively innocuous to major events, as illustrated by two incidents in May of this year.
Belmont Savings Bank reported that a back-up computer tape containing the personal information of 13,380 customers accidentally fell in the trash, but it was determined that the tape was incinerated “in the ordinary course” of disposal.
The state's Executive Office of Labor and Workforce announced a virus had infected 1,500 computers at the agency’s offices and career centers, putting as many as 210,000 unemployed residents’ data at risk.
The Massachusetts Attorney General’s office investigates serious data breaches, while Anthony’s office compiles data breach reports and educates consumers and businesses about security risks.
“If you’re storing a lot of sensitive information, you need to take very strong steps to secure that information. If you don’t, and you have a breach, there are going to be problems”, Anthony concluded.

18 years old hacker gets caught!

The Greek Police have apprehended and arrested an 18 year old hacker suspected of breaking into sites such as Interpol, the FBI, and numbers of  US state agencies. The unidentified hacker lives with his mother in a Agios Dimitrios, a district of Athens, had claimed he has broken into the Interpol site once before at the mere age of 15 years old.
The head of Greece's cybercrime squad Manolis Sfakianakis is quoted as saying on NET; "This unnamed hacker has taken many strikes out all over the world from his house" Manolis also states that Interpol is the basic one, next to other US agencies, he carried out these attacks by himself, but has world with others before.
This young hacker went by the handle 'nsplitter' had has put his hands into some serious cyber crime activities such as credit card fraud, and e-banking data through toolbars downloaded by internet users, and generated cloned cards to make unauthorised ATM withdrawals.

Reports indicate the young hacker has been released by Greek Police, pending further investigation.
The AFP newswire, says that, during his arrest on Wednesday, police executed a search warrant on his home and seized almost 8,000 euros, $300, 130 blank cards, laptops, external drives and a router. He used his illegal funds to invest in the stock market.
"If found guilty of all charges, he faces a prison sentence of at least five years".