FBI Hunts For Comcast Hackers

Kryogeniks’ Defiant and EBK say it’s only a matter of time before the FBI catches up with them, speaking to Wired Threat Level in a Thursday phone interview.

The FBI is working hard to make good on the duo’s fears, and announced a joint investigation with the San Jose police department on Friday, to try and track down the culprits responsible for a Wednesday attack against Comcast’s subscriber portal.

Both Defiant and EBK are members of the hacking group Kryogeniks, who in the past was implicated in attacks against AOL and a number of celebrities. The duo said that their attack against Comcast began Tuesday, when they employed a combination of social engineering and an exploit in Network Solutions’ control panel to gain access to Comcast’s domain settings.

News Source: DailyTech
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Hutchison Telecom In Deal With Apple On iPhone

Hutchison Telecommunications has sealed a deal with Apple Inc to market the U.S. firm’s popular iPhone handset in the city and Macau as soon as the next quarter, a Hong Kong newspaper reported on Friday.

Existing subscribers of Hutchison Telecom, a unit of conglomerate Hutchison Whampoa, were expected to be the first users of the iPhone in an early program starting this summer, the South China Morning Post said.

“Due to the confidential agreement with Apple, we can’t say too much beyond the formal announcement,” the newspaper quoted a Hutchison Telecom spokesman as saying.

News Source: Reuters
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Intel And Nvidia Headed For Licensing Stand-Off

This started out as a rumor today, but Intel has since more-or-less confirmed that licensing discussions between Intel and Nvidia for Intel’s next-generation processors are not going well and the resulting conflict could have implications for high-end gaming PCs.

The story is that Intel and Nvidia are currently negotiating technology licenses for Nehalem, Intel’s next-generation desktop CPU due out at the end of this year. As we were told from multiple desktop vendors who wish to remain nameless, Intel wants to license SLI from Nvidia for its Nehalem chipsets, and if Nvidia won’t, Intel will withhold the license that would enable Nvidia to support Nehalem’s memory controller, and thus Nehalem, on its own chipsets.

News Source: C|Net News
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Will Microsoft Deliver The ‘Wow’ In Windows 7?

Tuesday evening at The Wall Street Journal’s D: All Things Digital conference in Carlsbad, Calif., Microsoft (NSDQ:MSFT) announced that the next version of Windows, code named Windows 7, will include support for a multi-touch user interface technology similar to that which powers Apple (NSDQ:AAPL)’s iPhone.

With Windows Vista, Microsoft expected the ‘wow’ of the Aero Glass interface to get XP users to switch to Vista, but for a variety of reasons, that didn’t happen. So now that Microsoft is talking about multi-touch in Windows 7, some solution providers wonder if Microsoft is once again putting too many eggs in the user interface basket.

“Microsoft made huge strides with shadow copy in Vista and by building true images backup into the OS, but Aero does absolutely zero for me in terms of adding value,” said Brian Williams, president of Advantech NW, a Gresham, Ore.-based solution provider.

News Source: CRN
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Windows Small Business Server 2008 RC0

Windows Small Business Server 2008 (Windows SBS 2008) is an integrated server solution that helps you protect your business data, increase productivity and present a more professional image to customers. By providing many of the features used by larger companies –e-mail, an Internet connectivity, internal Web sites, remote access, support for mobile devices, file and printer sharing, backup, and restore–Windows SBS 2008 gives you the tools you need to help grow your business.

News Source: Bink.nu
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Comcast Domain Hacked

Starting late yesterday, Comcast users began noticing that Comcast.net had been hacked. More technically, early indications are that someone hacked Comcast’s registrar account at Network Solutions, changing the authoritative DNS servers for Comcast.net — rerouting portal visitors to IP addresses in Germany or elsewhere. Where once Comcast’s portal sat, users were instead greeted with the following text:

KRYOGENICS Defiant and EBK RoXed Comcast
sHouTz to VIRUS Warlock elul21 coll1er seven

News Source: Broadband Reports
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Yale Researchers Devise P4P, RIAA Weeps

The international community may be preparing to launch the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) which will force ISPs to log filesharing and hand over user records to the government, will eliminate privacy tools, and allow ex parte border searches, but there is some good news on the horizon. Researchers at Yale have come up with a breakthrough in file sharing technology. The new system coordinates Internet Service Providers (ISPs) and Peer-to-Peer (P2P) software providers to raise internet efficiency, and perhaps file transfer speeds.

Changes in internet usage over the last 10 years have put a severe strain on the world’s computers, causing them to run less efficiently and putting stress on overall internet bandwidth. In 1998, P2P traffic accounted for only 10 percent of the total traffic on an average network. Today it accounts for as much as 70 percent. Web browsing, which once accounted for 60 percent of traffic has fallen to 20 percent, email from 10 percent down to 5 percent.

News Source: DailyTech
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The Real Issue Around Server Virtualization Security

There is a general paranoia about server virtualization in the security community that goes something like this. The server virtualization hypervisor acts as a resource switch enabling multiple virtual hosts to share a single physical system. In theory, if you compromise the hypervisor, you gain access to every virtual host along for the ride. Imagine an instance where 50 hosts live on a single Intel server and you can see that a hypervisor attack could have extremely serious ramifications.

Yes, this is theoretically possible, but virtualization vendors understand this threat and are pretty conscientious about protection. Starting with IBM and virtual machines on the mainframe, there hasn’t been a single compromise at the virtualization operations layer that I know of. Of course software is always vulnerable, but a hypervisor attack seems like something out of a Michael Crichton novel rather than an everyday concern.

News Source: C|Net News
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Microsoft Taking Official Petitions To Keep XP Alive

If you can remember back a few weeks, Steve Ballmer went on record saying that Microsoft would consider extending the life of Windows XP if enough people asked for it. Afterall, many people don’t want to upgrade to Windows Vista because they are perfectly content with XP. The problem was there was no way to ask for it. Sure, you could sign one of the many online petitions, but Microsoft considers those “non-official complaints” and the rest of us simply consider them silly.

Well, word has been passed down to the tech support teams (and then on to Neowin) that they are to begin logging any calls that come in for the sole purpose of requesting an extension to the retail life of Windows XP. The calls will be logged and, if enough complaints are filed, Microsoft will consider giving XP some more time (no pinky promises, though).

News Source: Neowin
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Debian Security Flaw Illustrates Open Source Development Risks, Gartner Says

A major security flaw in the Debian Linux distribution illustrates the security risk of open source software, says analyst Gartner.

The Sans Institute recently issued a “yellow alert” concerning a Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) security vulnerability in some Debian distributions of the Linux operating system.

The vulnerability, which affects encryption key pairs used by the Debian OpenSSL package, could enable unauthorised parties to access encrypted transaction data, passwords, financial information and other sensitive data.

News Source: ComputerWeekly
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