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.

Rhode Island Sets up a CyberSecurity Team.

Rhode Island has set up a cybersecurity team that it hopes will be a model for other states trying to address cybersecurity problems in an era of tight state government budgets.

The Rhode Island Cyber Disruption Team (RICDT) includes members of government agencies, law enforcement, academia, and private business who will work to protect critical infrastructure in the state.
“This team’s leaders recognize the sectors of our society most vulnerable in cyberspace and the damages that would most severely affect Rhode Islanders”, said Rep. Jim Langevin (D-RI) while unveiling the new cybersecurity team on July 11 at Dell SecureWorks in Providence, RI. IT security firm Dell SecureWorks will provide technology support to the team.

RICDT will provide analysis and support prior to and during catastrophic events affecting critical infrastructure in Rhode Island and ensure continuity and restoration of operations. The team will serve as a communications conduit between federal, state, military, and private entities.
Working under the Rhode Island Emergency Management Agency, RICDT will identify areas in which critical state assets are vulnerable to cyberattack and propose and implement solutions by studying existing cybersecurity practices and commissioning original research and development.

The core RICDT members are Nick Tella (team commander), Ken Bell, and Christine Crocker from the Rhode State Police; Robert Fitzpatrick from the City of Providence Police; Jacob Fonseca with the University of Rhode Island Digital Forensics Center, Anthony Heywood with the IT department of the City of Providence; Doug White, director of the Forensics Applied Networking and Security Center at Roger Williams University; and Theresa Murray with the Emergency Management Agency.
“The Cyber Disruption Team has a multipart role in ensuring critical cyber assets in Rhode Island: to proactively evaluate and advise on the State's cyber infrastructure, to support the State against cyber threats whether physical or virtual, and to act as a cornerstone of cybersecurity in the state”, explained White.

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.

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".

Hackers attacked IMF with "Sophisticated cyberattack"

The International Monetary Fund also known as the "IMF" has suffered a major blow by hackers.
The organization, made headlines when following the arrest and resignation of it's boss Dominque Strauss-Kahn (He was arrested for sexual assault has been as a trampoline for malware attacks.) there have been attempts to oversee the financial troubles around the world, promote economic development.

According to the New York Times according to sources within the IMF there has in face been a "major breach of security" this attack was serious enough to cut the connection of the computer linking between the IMF and its near neighbor in Washington, World Bank.

Spokesman for the World Bank reported to the New York Times; ""Disconnection was taken out of an abundance of caution,  until the nature of the attack was understood." The link to the world bank has since been restored and there have been no reported attacks on the World Bank.
Bloomberg claimed to have gotten its hands on some internal emails and memos distributed to IMF staff informing them there computer systems had been compromised.