Evidence of continued disruption comes from security firms providing solutions to industrial companies to deal with Stuxnet infections. Eric Byres, an expert from SCADA security firm Tofino Security, told the Post that his company’s website was receiving an increasing number of visits from Iranians in recent weeks, suggesting that dealing with Stuxnet and properly securing industrial automation and control systems was still a problem for the Iranians.

Iranians may consider an anonymous proxy. If they happen to find an anonymous proxy they can rely on (oxymoron?).

This one’s for the SCADA experts around here. Yes, I mean you Pau ;-)

Via arstechnica.

See SCADA, Stuxnet.

BSD project leader Theo de Raadt received an email from former NETSEC CTO Gregory Perry in which Perry claims he helped FBI to plant backdoors in OpenBSD Cryptographic Framework:

My NDA with the FBI has recently expired, and I wanted to make you
aware of the fact that the FBI implemented a number of backdoors and
side channel key leaking mechanisms into the OCF, for the express
purpose of monitoring the site to site VPN encryption system
implemented by EOUSA, the parent organization to the FBI.»

Some say the leaking mechanisms could be placed on the IPSEC stack.

If this didn’t look bad enough, Perry also suggests that DARPA withdrew his funding on OpenBSD because of this.

From openbsd-tech, via arstechnica.

If you haven’t read this, it’s never too late…

P.S: see SNAFU principle.

UPDATE:

Jason Wright’s response and clear denial.

I’ll put my money where my mouth is.

IPsec gossip.

OpenBSD is a great product, but y’all are too easily trolled.

His NDA with the FBI *expired* so he 1) discloses information that’s
privileged at the very least and a political stick of dynamite at
worst, 2) discloses it in a private forum to an individual known for
his transparency and total lack of tact, 3) doesn’t bother contacting
anyone in the press about it, 4) claims to know various other pundits
are «on the FBI payroll,» and 5) claims that the FBI deliberately
compromised an open source project in order to spy on its parent
organization and other government agencies.

Here’s a tip: when a government organization works with private
contractors to help them spy on other government organizations, those
NDAs don’t fucking expire.

Jesus.»

See original message.

LATERAL:

_NSAKEY.

New UPDATE:

OpenBSD code audit uncovers bugs, but no evidence of backdoor (arstechnica). It does not mean that the audit of the thousands of lines of code involved is over. We’ll have to wait for some months to get a reliable result.

More:

how i stopped worrying and loved the backdoor.

My NDA with the FBI has recently expired, and I wanted to make you
aware of the fact that the FBI implemented a number of backdoors and
side channel key leaking mechanisms into the OCF, for the express
purpose of monitoring the site to site VPN encryption system
implemented by EOUSA, the parent organization to the FBI.

The Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals has ruled that police must obtain a valid search warrant before accessing a suspect’s e-mail in a criminal investigation.

EFF via arstechnica.

BONUS: Search Warrant Affidavit example via Forensic Focus :-)

And at cashout if the hacked ATM is in Europe, that’s approximately 20-25k Euros. So we potentially have already about 20k dollars. Also imagine that if was not GSM sending SMS and to receive tracks it would be necessary to take the equipment from ATM, and during this moment, at 15:00 there comes police and takes off the equipment.
And what now? All operation and your money f#@!&$ up? It would be shame!! Yes? And with GSM the equipment we have the following: Even if there comes police and takes off the equipment, tracks are already on your computer.»

Form krebsonsecurity via BoingBoing.

“Simulacra and Simulation (The Body, In Theory: Histories of Cultural Materialism)” , University of Michigan Press, 1995, p106

There is no more hope for meaning. And without a doubt this is a good thing: meaning is mortal. But that on which it has imposed its ephemeral reign, what it hoped to liquidate in order to impose the reign of the Enlightenment, that is, appearances, they, are immortal, invulnerable to the nihilism of meaning or of non-meaning itself.

This is where seduction begins.”

Handle these links with care, you’ve been warned:

<added>

• NHD,  hacker folklore

</added>

• Entrevista a Assange en «El País».
• Toward a Taxonomy of Secrets.
• Eco.
• Anonymous.
• 4chan.
• LOIC.
• Tor.
• Liberté.
• P2P DNS then.
• P2P DNS now.
• Ben Laurie.
• History Insurance.
• Wikileaks Leak.
• CIA, Soros, etc.
• OpenLeaks (available december 13th? UPDATE 12/15/2010, still «Coming soon!»).

Go to an esoteric book shop and you’ll find that every book on the shelf (on the Holy Grail, the “mystery” of Rennes-le-Château [a hoax theory concocted to draw tourists to a French town], on the Templars or the Rosicrucians) is a point-by-point rehash of what is already written in older books. And it’s not just because occult authors are averse to doing original research (or don’t know where to look for news about the non-existent), but because those given to the occult only believe what they already know and what corroborates what they’ve already heard.

Umberto Eco

If there were ever any truth in the esoteric tales of Umberto Eco’s bestselling novel Foucault’s Pendulum, it seems that the key to that knowledge has been lost.

The original pendulum, which was used by French scientist Leon Foucault to demonstrate the rotation of the Earth and which forms an integral part of Eco’s novel’s labyrinthine plot, has been irreparably damaged in an accident in Paris.

The pendulum’s cable snapped last month and its sphere crashed to the marble floor of the Musee des Arts et Metiers.»

TimesHigherEducation via BoingBoing.

We’ve been covering the progression of SandForce for over a year now, creator of smart SSD processors that extend the life of flash storage by better spreading writes across them, boosting performance and reliability along the way. This, according to the company, makes them reliable enough for enterprise use, and IBM has added its vote of support, configuring a 9189 Power 780 server with 56 177GB SSDs (10.5TB in all) sitting behind SandForce’s SF-1500 processor. That combination, when running the TPC-C benchmark, delivered a performance of 150,000 transactions per minute per CPU core. That’s 50 percent higher (per-core) than other entries in the TPC-C benchmark — and considerably cheaper, too. IBM’s configuration is set to be available around October of this year, perhaps ushering in a new era of the platter-free enterprise.»

Find the benchmark here.
Via Engadget, via StorageReview.

When President Obama recently released his budget for NASA, he proposed a slight increase in total funding, substantial research and technology development, an extension of the International Space Station operation until 2020, long range planning for a new but undefined heavy lift rocket and significant funding for the development of commercial access to low earth orbit.

Although some of these proposals have merit,  the accompanying decision to cancel the Constellation program, its Ares 1 and Ares V rockets, and the Orion spacecraft, is devastating.»

Open letter to president Obama.

Update: theregister.

It was like something out of a movie: an US Capitol Police Special Agent and three San Francisco cops drop by a suspect’s home to ask about threatening phone calls targeting House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. They know the calls all came from a specific phone number, one assigned to the VoIP provider magicJack, but the suspect denies that the number is his. The agent steps into the other room and uses his cell phone to call the number. A telephone connected to the suspect’s computer starts to ring, and the suspect answers it. «Hello,» says the agent.

When the agent returns to the room and asks if the suspect wants to change his story, the man admits that the calls were his own.

The moral of the story: if you’re going to call people and taunt them with the untraceability of your phone number… make sure the phone number is actually untraceable.

Via arstechnica.