Archive of TheNextWeb.org
Written on November 21, 2008 – 10:47 pm
Zee M Kane, Internet Marketer, Design Connoisseur & Web App Devotee
The Pentagon, headquarters of the United States Department of Defense, has suffered from an unprecedented cyber attack in the form of a virus spreading throughout the United States military network.
The Pentagon told Fox News “We have detected a global virus for which there has been alerts, and we have seen some of this on our networks. We are now taking steps to mitigate the virus.”
The official would not reveal the source of the attack however, so concerned are they that the Pentagon have taken the step of barring all commercial malware, removable media (thumb drives, CDRs/DVDRs, floppy disks) on all DoD networks and computers effective immediately.
I hope you like that post!
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Written on October 8, 2008 – 11:45 am
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
Most web-based games might appear innocent, but a blogger from GUYA.NET proves that they can function as a way for the web’s bad guys to take over your webcam. When this blogger first heard about this phenomenon clickjacking, he tried to develop a game that could do the same thing. He discovered that the Achilles heel of Flash was the Flash Player Setting Manager. Nice piece of citizen journalism.
By creating some sort of overlay in a Javascript Game, users just think they’re trying to click a button as fast as possible. What they really do, is granting some voyeur access to their web cam. Check it out:
Kudos for Adobe, who fixed this problem by “framebusting the Setting Manager pages“. Supposedly, 99.9% of the users are protected from spies, pervs, or whatnot. The issue still exists for Java, SilverLight, DHTML games and applications though. For details on this I gladly refer to ha.ckers.org.
Written on August 25, 2008 – 5:15 pm
Robin Wauters, Next web enthusiast & Plugg organizer
According to the Sunday Herald, an international criminal gang has pulled off one of the most audacious cyber-heists ever by stealing the identities of an estimated 8 million people - who have all been guests in at least one of the 1300 existing Best Western Hotels in the past 12 months - in a hacking raid that could ultimately net more than 3.5 billion euro in illegal funds.
A Sunday Herald investigation has discovered that late on Thursday night, a previously unknown Indian hacker successfully breached the IT defences of the Best Western Hotel group’s online booking system and sold details of how to access it through an underground network operated by the Russian mafia.
It is a move that has been dubbed the greatest cyber-heist in world history. The attack scooped up the personal details of every single customer that has booked into one of Best Western’s 1312 continental hotels since 2007.
Update: Neville Hobson was kind enough to Twitter-point me to a statement issued by Best Western (PDF), wherein they claim the newspaper is being sensationalist, and that most of the facts presented in the article are inaccurate, exaggerated, unsubstantiated or false, although they fail to provide more insight as to what the extent of the damage really is.
Update 2: Best Western provided more feedback on the issue:
“We can confirm that on August 21, 2008, three separate attempts were made via a single log-on ID to access the same data from a single hotel. The hotel in question is the 107-room Best Western Hotel am Schloss Kopenick in Berlin, Germany, where a Trojan horse virus was detected by the hotel’s anti-virus software. The compromised log-in ID permitted access to reservations data for that property only. The log-in ID was immediately terminated, and the computer in question has been removed from use. “
The Sunday Herald alerted Best Western, who promptly closed the security breach on Friday afternoon, but experts fear that information seized in the raid is already being used to pursue a range of criminal strategies. Jacques Erasmus, an ex-hacker who now works for the computer security firm Prevx, has even been quoted saying “In the wrong hands, there’s enough data there to spark a major European crime wave.”
The stolen data included private information like home addresses, phone numbers, credit card details and place of employment.
The initial hacker succeeded in bypassing the system’s security software and placing a Trojan virus on one of the Best Western Hotel machines used for reservations. The next tume a member of staff logged in, her username and password were collected and stored.
If you’ve stayed in a Best Western hotel at some point during the past year, you might want to consider hooking up with their customer service department to see what’s up. Use the number 0800 528-1238.
(Image courtesy of hiten mistry @ Flickr)
Written on July 22, 2008 – 3:19 pm
Robin Wauters, Next web enthusiast & Plugg organizer
Israel-based maker of enterprise video analytics software Agent Video Intelligence has raised $9 million in Series B funding from its existing backer, U.S. based VC firm 21Ventures. That’s exactly the same amount they had already raised, so that brings the total to $18 million. The funding is earmarked for sales and marketing and ongoing product development.
Agent Vi delivers solutions for improved security, business intelligence and operations. The technology is pretty cool, too: Agent VI customers can immediately spot and report a person reaching over an unattended jewelry counter; detect a vehicle tailgating through an entry point; detect a person approaching a perimeter; monitor how long a customer views a merchandise display, etc.
Sounds like a valuable solution for casinos, government properties, airports, shopping malls, and so on. I’m left wondering how their technology could be used for online video, though. Sounds like great things could come out of that, but there’s probably not enough money there (yet?).
You can see Agent Vi in action in their demo videos, which are sadly and inexplicably not embeddable.
If you’re still wondering why incorporating intelligent video analytics may be a good idea, the company has listed ten reasons on its corporate blog which are worth checking out.
(Via PE Hub)
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