SAN FRANCISCO, California (Reuters) -- A flaw in Microsoft's almost universally used Windows operating system could allow hackers to take control of a PC by luring users to a malicious Web site and coaxing them into clicking on a link, the company warned on Tuesday.
The world's largest software maker issued the warning as part of its monthly security bulletin, along with a patch to fix the problem.
Canada will work with the United States to set up a continent-wide early warning system against cyber-attacks.
The move to beef up defences against an assault on key computer systems is part of a national security policy announced Tuesday. "We live in an information age where threats are not just physical," the government said in explaining the new policy. "Attacks can be launched from and against the Internet and the systems connected to it."
Up to $85 million has been set aside within the Defence Department to improve assessments of threats and vulnerabilities to computer networks, increase the ability to respond promptly and develop the early-warning system.
A computer hacker who allowed himself to be publicly identified only as ''Mudhen'' once boasted at a Las Vegas conference that he could disable a Chinese satellite with nothing but his laptop computer and a cellphone.
The others took him at his word, because Mudhen worked at the Puzzle Palace -- the nickname of the U.S. National Security Agency facility at Fort Meade, Md., which houses the world's most powerful and sophisticated electronic eavesdropping and anti-terrorism systems.
It was these systems, plus an army of cryptographers, chaos theorists, mathematicians and computer scientists, that may have pulled in the first piece of evidence that led Canadian authorities to arrest an Ottawa man on terrorism charges last week.
A group of original pirate radio DJs are to celebrate the 40th anniversary of offshore pirate radio by broadcasting live from a ship once more.
Pirate BBC Essex will start transmitting off the Essex coast from the lightship LV18 on Saturday, 40 years after pirate station Radio Caroline first took to the airwaves.
A Chinese man jailed for hacking into cable television and broadcasting footage of the banned Falun Gong spiritual movement has died in prison, according to the group's website. The group said that Liu Chengjun had suffered "cruel torture" and that eyewitnesses described blood stains all over his body. Liu was serving 19 years in prison in the northern province of Jilin for his part in the 2002 protest. He was one of 15 Falun Gong members who illegally broadcast around 40 minutes of pro-Falun Gong material on a cable TV station in Changchun, capital of Jilin. The Falun Gong website said that he died on 26 December in a civilian hospital. It said that his body had been cremated on the same day without an autopsy.
Famed hacker and master social engineer Kevin Mitnick has been commissioned to write a new book following the success of his first text The Art of Deception. The new book, tentatively titled The Art of Intrusion will tell the stories of real hacks, with the names of attackers obscured to protect them from the authorities and their victims. Mitnick has called on retired hackers to come forward with their stories, offering a $500 (�283) prize for the best story that makes it into the book, and a $200 payment for all stories that make the final draft. "I'm going to tell the true stories of some of the untold most salacious hacks in cyberspace. The sexy, the ingenious, the innovative and the clever," he told ZDNet Australia by phone from the US "The stories are not going to be the same attack vector or the same class of vulnerability. I'm looking for stories that will include a variety of attack methods exploiting physical, operational, network host, and personnel security vulnerabilities."
In North Korea's mountainous Hyungsan region, a military academy specializing in electronic warfare has been churning out 100 cybersoldiers every year for nearly two decades.
Graduates of the elite hacking program at Mirim College are skilled in everything from writing computer viruses to penetrating network defenses and programming weapon guidance systems.
The states of Massachusetts and Texas are preparing to consider bills that apparently are intended to extend the national Digital Millennium Copyright Act. (TX bill; MA bill) The bills are obviously related to each other somehow, since they are textually similar.
Here is one example of the far-reaching harmful effects of these bills. Both bills would flatly ban the possession, sale, or use of technologies that "conceal from a communication service provider ... the existence or place of origin or destination of any communication". Your ISP is a communication service provider, so anything that concealed the origin or destination of any communication from your ISP would be illegal -- with no exceptions.
Once again, hackers are taking the blame for a denial of service attack which almost anyone with the desire and decent net connectivity could have accomplished.
The difference in this case is that hackers are being drawn into the military conflict between the United States and Iraq. The site in question belongs to Al-Jazeera, an Arabic news organization based in Qatar. And according to this Washington Post story, "many Americans" were angered by that network's rebroadcast of Iraqi television's video of captured and killed American soldiers. By making the leap that hackers were responsible for the massive attack which started Tuesday morning, hackers are mistakenly viewed as some kind of cybersoldier dedicated to carrying out American military policy.
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