China has gained capability to shut down Britain by crippling its telecoms and utilities, a report claimed on Sunday.

Intelligence chiefs have told the government that equipment installed by Huawei, the Chinese telecoms giant, in BT's new communications network could be used to halt critical services such as power, food and water supplies.

According to a report in The Sunday Times, the warnings coincide with growing cyber warfare attacks on Britain by foreign governments, particularly Russia and China.

While BT has taken steps to reduce the risk of attacks by hackers or organised crime, the government believed that the mitigating measures are not effective against deliberate attack by China.

According to the report, Alex Allan, chairman of the Joint Intelligence Committee (JIC), briefed members of the ministerial committee on national security about the threat from China at a top-secret official meeting in January.

Home Secretary Ms Jacqui Smith chaired the meeting.

A media report on Sunday said vast cyber spy network controlled from China has infiltrated government and private computers in 103 countries, including those of Indian embassy in Washington and the Tibetan spiritual leader Dalai Lama.

Canadian researchers, the New York Times reported, have concluded that the computers based almost exclusively in China are controlling the network and stealing documents, but stopped short of saying that the Chinese government was involved.

A China-based cyber spy network has hacked into government and private systems in 103 countries, including those of many Indian embassies and the Dalai Lama, an Internet research group said on Saturday.

The Information Warfare Monitor (IWM), which carried out an extensive 10-month research on cyber spy activities emanating from China, said the hacked systems include the computers of Indian embassies and offices of the Dalai Lama.

Without identifying Indian embassies, the group said all evidence points to China as the source of this spy espionage.

The group said it has evidence that the hackers managed to install a software called malware on the compromised computers to steal sensitive documents, including those from the Dalai Lama's offices.

The group began its research after Tibetan exiles made allegations of cyber spying by the Chinese.

After initial investigations when the group widened it research it found that the China-based cyber espionage had hacked computer systems of embassies of India, Pakistan, Germany, Indonesia, Thailand, South Korea and many other countries.

In all, the hackers had gained access to 1,295 computer systems of foreign ministries of many countries, including Bhutan, Bangladesh, Latvia, Indonesia, Iran, and the Philippines, the researchers said.

After gaining access to foreign government and private computer systems, the hackers installed malware to exercise control over these computer systems to access any documents.

"We have been told by the researchers that the Chinese hackers have gained access to our computers systems all over the world, and taken sensitive documents from the office of His Holiness (the Dalai Lama)," Toronto-based Tibetan student leader Bhutila Karpoche told IANS.

She said, "Our website (studentsforafreetibet.org) has been repeated hacked, and we keep getting all kinds of viruses in our emails. This trend has increased in recent months, and we have become very wary about opening

our emails."

The findings of the 10-month investigation titled 'Tracking GhostNet:

Investigating a Cyber Espionage Network,' can be found here,

Tracking GhostNet: Investigating a Cyber Espionage Network

Security watchers are counting down to a change in how the infamous Conficker (Downadup) worm updates malicious code, due to kick in on Wednesday 1 April.

Starting on 1 April, Windows PCs infected by the latest variant of the Conficker worm (Conficker-C) will start attempting to contact a sample of 50,000 pre-programmed potential call-home web servers from which they might receive updates, a massive increase on the 250 potential web server locales used by earlier variants of the code.

"Conficker-C isn't going to contact all 50,000 domains per day," explained Niall Fitzgibbon, a malware analyst at Sophos. "It's only going to contact a randomly-chosen 500 of them which gives each infected machine a very small chance of success if the authors register only one domain. However, the P2P system of Conficker can be used to push digitally signed updates out to other infected machines that don't manage to contact the domain."

Whether anything will actually be offered for download, much less what the payload might be, is unclear. No particular function or payload currently within the malicious code is due to activate on 1 April. It's also possible that a payload will only be offered up for download days or week after the new call-home routine comes into effect.

If updates are successfully made, infected machines are programmed to suspend call-home activity for 72 hours, as an analysis by Sophos explains.

Lessons from the call back routines of previous variants of the worm provide few clues as to what might happen. Sophos said it never observed the previous Conficker-B variant ever downloading malicious payloads, other than updates to Conficker-B++ and Conficker-C. As a result, there isn't much history to draw upon for any speculation as to the eventual goal of the Conficker botnet.

Anti-virus firms are keeping a close eye on what Conficker might do early next month while downplaying concerns that Downadup will either "erupt" or "explode" on 1 April, deluging us with spam or swamping websites with junk traffic in the process.

"Let's not forget that history has shown us that focusing on a specific date for an impending malware attack has sometimes lead to nothing more than a damp squib," notes Graham Cluley, senior technology consultant, at Sophos.


Although nothing might happen it's never a bad time for sys admins to check for infection by Conficker on their network. Such infections have already caused widespread problems.

Symantec said that the worm, which had initially focused solely on spreading "has since developed into a robust botnet, complete with sophisticated code signing to protect update mechanisms, as well as a resilient peer-to-peer protocol".

Windows PCs infected with Conficker (Downadup) are programmed to dial home for updates through a list of pseudo-random domains. Microsoft is heading a group, dubbed the anti-cabal alliance, to block unregistered domains on this list. The more complex call-home routine deployed by Conficker-C comes in apparent response to this move.

Rik Ferguson, a security researcher at Trend Micro, added that blocking call-back domains associated with the latest variant of the worm will be "almost impossible" not only because of the daily volume, but also because there is a possibility that legitimate domains might be hit as a result. Even earlier versions of the worm, calling far fewer domains every day, used algorithms that threw up addresses that coincided with legitimate domains.

Birth of a superworm

Variants of the Conficker worm, which first appeared back in November, spread using a variety of tricks. All strains of the superworm exploit a vulnerability in the Microsoft Windows server service (MS08-067) patched by Redmond in October.

Once it infects one machine on a network, the worm spreads across network shares. Infection can also spread via contaminated USB sticks. This combined approach, in particular the worm's attempts to hammer across corporate LANs, have made Conficker the biggest malware problem for years, since the default activation of the Windows firewall put the brakes on previous network worms such as Nimda and Sasser.

Compromised Windows PCs, however the infection happens, become drones in a botnet, which is yet to be activated. It's unclear who created or now controls this huge resource.

Estimates of the number of machines infected by Conficker vary, from barely over a million to 12 or even 15 million. More reliable estimated suggest that between 3-4 million compromised systems at any one time might be closer to the mark.

SRI reckons that Conficker-A has infected 4.7m Windows PC over its lifetime, while Conficker-B has hit 6.7m IP addresses. These figures, as with other estimates, come from an analysis of call-backs made to pre-programmed update sites. Infected hosts get identified and cleaned up all the time, as new machines are created. Factoring this factor into account the botnet controlled by Conficker-A and Conficker-B respectively is reckoned to be around 1m and 3m hosts, respectively, about a third of the raw estimate.

Estimates of how many machines are infected by the Conficker-C variant are even harder to come by.

But however you slice and dice the figure its clear that the zombie network created by Conficker dwarfs the undead army created by the infamous Storm worm, which reached a comparatively lowly 1 million at its peak in September 2007. Activation of this resource may not come next week or even next month but the zombie army established by the malware nonetheless hangs over internet security like a latter-day Sword of Damocles.

Some security watchers are sure it will get used eventually, if not on 1 April. Sam Masiello, a security analyst at MX Logic, said: "Why go through all of this effort to create such a huge botnet then not utilize it for something?"

UK & US IDs Exposed to World

A reported 22,000 card records have been exposed through cached copies of data stored on a defunct cybercrime server.

iTnews in Australia reports that 19,000 of the 22,000 exposed details referred to US and UK cards and that data came from Google cache records of a disused internet payment gateway, a line picked up by Slashdot.

However, a security expert told us the information was actually from either a dump or attack site used for credit card fraud. This cybercrime site, registered by someone in Vietnam, is no longer operational.

The data - viewable through Google cache - includes credit card numbers, expiry dates, names and addresses for accounts held with Visa, Mastercard, American Express, Solo and Delta. The information remains available at the time of writing for anyone with the wit to formulate the correct search term.

First spotted by an anonymous Australian, details were posted on a now deleted thread on whirlpool.net.au. Reg readers have since independently located the sensitive information in Google's cache.

"Google can sometimes be a victim of its own effectiveness, having indexed all available content from the criminal's dump server in Vietnam they inadvertently made thousands of UK credit card details available to the casual browser by serving them up from their own cache," explained Rik Ferguson, a security consultant at Trend Micro. "From the moment this content was made public Trend Micro have been working to help Google, over the course of the weekend, to identify and remove all the offending information," he added.

It's not the first time Google's spiders have indexed such sensitive data. In May 2008 net security firm Finjan reported a similar case, where banking login credentials and other data was stored on a crimeware server accessible though Google search queries.

A criminal gang selling UK credit card details stolen from Indian call centres has been exposed by an undercover BBC News investigation.

Reporters posing as fraudsters bought UK names, addresses and valid credit card details from a Delhi-based man.

The seller denied any wrongdoing and Symantec corporation, from whom three victims bought a product via a call centre, called the incident "isolated".

Card fraud totalled £609m during 2008, according to payments group Apacs.

Symantec said it requires rigorous security measures of any third-party call centre agents and it believed the breach had been limited to a single agent.

The BBC team went to India on a tip off after being put in touch with a man offering to sell stolen credit and debit card details.

Two undercover reporters met the broker in a Delhi coffee shop for an encounter that was filmed secretly.

Secret filming exposes frauster selling stolen credit card details
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/7952419.stm

He told the pair he could supply them with hundreds of credit and debit card details each week at a cost of $10 dollars a card.

After the reporters agreed to initially buy the details of 50 cards, the man handed over a list of 14. He said the remainder would be sent later by e-mail.

The man claimed some of the numbers had been obtained from call centres handling mobile phone sales, or payments for phone bills.

Back in the UK, the broker continued to supply card details to one of the undercover reporters by email.

Nearly all of the names, addresses and post codes sold to the BBC team were valid. But most of the numbers attached to them were invalid - often out by a single digit.

However, about one in seven of the numbers purchased were valid - active cards still in use by UK customers. Their owners could have been subjected to fraud if these cards had fallen into the hands of criminals.


The BBC team contacted the owners of these cards and warned them that their details were now being bought and sold in India.

Three of those customers had, within hours of each other, bought a computer software package by giving their credit card details to a call centre over the phone.

Within hours of making the purchase, their details were fraudulently sent on to the reporters.

One of the victims said he was "disturbed" at what had happened.

Allan Little telephones the fraudster to confront him about what we found
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/7952423.stm

The software was made by Norton, which is part of the Symantec corporation.

Symantec, which launched an investigation after being informed of the the undercover probe, said the leak had come from a single source which has now been removed.

In a statement it said: "We are investigating how this incident happened and will take any appropriate steps to address any opportunities for improvement in our processes.

"We have engaged with the local law enforcement officials in India and will cooperate fully with that investigation. We are in the process of reviewing all possible options to manage this third party call centre, including moving away from it."

A spokeswoman stressed that "rigorous security measures" are put in place at call centres. For example, staff are not allowed to take electronic devices, memory sticks, pens or pencils to their desks. Internet and email access is also banned.

Wrongdoing denied

Saurabh Sachar, the seller, denied any wrongdoing or illegal activity.

When told that he had been filmed taking money from undercover reporters, he said they had borrowed that money from him and were paying it back.

He said the piece of paper handed over to undercover reporters contained "some directions" and a "kind of balance sheet".

And, when accused of providing credit card details he said they were "not correct". Mr Sachar also denied sending more details by e-mail.

Credit and debit card fraud cost the UK banking industry £609 million in 2008 - a rise of 14% on 2007.

Much of that fraud comes from transactions where the card is not physically present, such as telephone or internet sales.

The UK and the EU have stringent Data Protection laws. India has recently tightened up its rules governing the use of Information technology, but it has no data protection legislation.

"India is only paying lip service to data protection," the Data Protection lawyer Pavan Duggal told BBC News.


"We don't yet have a dedicated legislation on data protection. Until such times as India comes across with strong stringent provisions on data security we will have instances like this keep on happening."

The huge expansion in credit card use in recent years has produced a new kind of fraudster - one that will try to exploit any opportunity to reach into almost any credit or debit account that is used to make telephone purchases.

The office of the Indian Prime Minister has reportedly ditched Microsoft's Outlook for open-source email following a computer virus that caused a massive breakdown in communications.

The PMO has dumped Outlook Express for SquirrelMail, it has emerged, following an outage that saw emails go missing and unanswered during a three-month period last year.

Among the lost emails sent to India's PM were those of a retired air commodore.

In a hearing of the Indian Central Information Commission, the PMO's office admitted: "Many mails reportedly sent were not received in the Outlook Express and subsequently the Outlook Express was discontinued and the SquirrelMail was used."

SquirrelMail is a PHP program that renders in HTML 4.0 and supports IMAP and SMTP. Started in 1999, SquirrelMail is licensed under the GNU General Public License.

While the migration from Outlook Express to open-source is a black eye for Microsoft, it does beg the question why it took so long for the problem to be detected - unless, of course, the Indian PM isn't actually using email and the account is for show.

As one observer put it: "WTF and WTS (What the Satyam!). It took the Government techies so much time to realize that the email system of the most powerful man in India was not working properly for 3 months!"

Research Shows Economic Slump Prompting Surge In Online Criminality

Malware volumes grew by a huge 300 per cent during 2008, fuelled in part by continuing job uncertainty, according to new research from security-as-a-service provider ScanSafe.

The firm analysed more than 240 billion web requests in over 80 countries last year, and found a particular growth in exploits and iframe attacks, which rose 1,731 per cent, and data-theft Trojans, which increased by 1,559 per cent.

Mary Landesman, senior security researcher at ScanSafe, suggested that the rise in criminal activity could correspond to the decline in the global economy.

"We saw a continued acceleration of web-delivered malware in 2008, reaching significant peaks in October and November. The numbers are staggering," she said.

"It could be that the increasing job losses and uncertainty are fuelling the surge in criminal activity. It is also likely that cyber crime is a viable business opportunity in a climate where legitimate opportunities are becoming increasingly limited."

ScanSafe also warned that trusted sites are now statistically the most dangerous on the web, as they are frequently hacked using techniques such as SQL injection attacks. The firm recorded 780,000 malicious web pages in April alone as a result of a single SQL injection attack.

Reports Reveal Police Store Records on Protestors & Journalists

Just a day after the Information Commissioner raided a firm for possessing a covert database of construction workers’ personal information, it emerged that the police force is keeping a potentially illegal database listing the details of political activists and journalists.

In a Guardian newspaper investigation, the Metropolitan Police force, which is said to have pioneered surveillance techniques at demonstrations, was accused of storing details including names, photographs, political associations and video footage of protesters and reporters.

The information is stored on CrimInt, a centralised database used by all police to catalogue criminal intelligence, the report said.

The information was obtained by the paper via Freedom of Information requests, court testimony, an interview with a senior Met officer and police surveillance footage.

According to reports, the data is held by the police for up to seven years, and reviewed each year, so it is unclear whether the ICO will decide to investigate possible breaches of the Data Protection Act.

However, the storage of details belonging to people who have not been convicted or accused of a crime could contravene the Human Rights Act.

The news comes as the ICO seeks to harden its stance on organisations believed to be breaking the Data Protection Act. Last week it began proceedings against a Droitwich firm it accused of holding the details of over 3,000 building site workers without their knowledge.

Public confidence in the state’s policies on data handling is at an all time low after a string of high profile public sector data breach incidents, and widely criticised proposals for a centralised database of communications data.

The police and Home Office also came in for recent criticism after the police were given new powers to hack into individuals’ PCs without a warrant.

Source: vnunet

BT has dismissed the significance of supposed vulnerabilities on its systems detailed by infamous hacker Unu on Tuesday.

The Romanian hacker posted screenshots illustrating what he claimed highlighted SQL injections in a posting at Hackersploit.org.

"A faulty parameter, improperly sanitized opens the vault to the pretious (sic) databases. One can gain access to such ordinary things as personal data, login data, and the like," Unu writes. A subsequent post explains that the issue involved blind SQL Injection vulnerabilities involving the site www.comparebroadband.bt.com.

But an investigation by BT concluded that the flaws (such as they are) involved only test systems.

A statement by the telecoms giant explains that its production systems and customer data remain safe.

BT has carried out a thorough investigation of this alleged breach. We have found that access was gained to a test database and therefore no customer details were revealed at any time.

When sites are under test they do not contain live data and are often not included within our secure network until they become operational. BT has developed rigorous, world-leading protection against unauthorised computer access in order to protect customer details and commercial interests. Where a suspected intrusion has occurred BT will act swiftly to ensure our customer data is not at risk.

Our operational systems have not been affected in any way by this attempt to break through our security.

Romanian hacker Unu came to prominence a month ago when he poked the websites of security vendors, such as Kaspersky Lab and BitDefender, discovering some problems in the process. More recently he's moved onto scouring the websites of large UK businesses, such as those run by Camelot and the Daily Telegraph and now BT, scouring for database flaws. In all of the three latest cases the firms involved have said that Unu's postings suggest a more severe problem than was actually the case.

Unu's results are genuine but his analysis fails to explain that partner or test sites, rather than the main sites of the Daily Telegraph and BT, for example, have flaws.

Security Update Arrives Weeks After Notice Issued

Adobe has released a security update to address a flaw the company first warned users of in February.

The company said that the update should patch a flaw in Reader 9 and Acrobat 9 which could allow an attacker to use a specially-crafted PDF file for cause a crash and take control of a targeted system.

The security fix will update both the Mac and Windows versions of Adobe Reader and Acrobat to version 9.1. The company is planning to release fixes for the Unix version of the software as well as earlier versions of both applications later in the month.

Along with Adobe, security experts from the US Computer Emergency Response Team and Sans are recommending that users update to the 9.1 versions of the software if at all possible.

The update comes more than two weeks after Adobe first warned of the threat, which has been actively exploited in the wild. At the time, the company estimated that the first patches for the flaw would not be out until March and users were advised to disable Javascript code within PDF files.

However, just days after Adobe released its advisory on the attacks and a timeline for a fix, an independent researcher constructed a home-made patch for Windows systems.

Computer hackers suspected of working from Russia successfully penetrated Pentagon computer systems in one of the most severe cyber attacks on US military networks.

The electronic attack was so serious that Adm Michael Mullen, the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, briefed President George W Bush and Robert Gates, the defence secretary.

Defence officials told the Los Angeles Times that the attack struck computers within the US Central Command, which oversees Iraq and Afghanistan, and involved malicious software - known as "malware" - that permeates a network.

"This one was significant, this one got our attention," said an official, speaking anonymously.

Officials did not disclose the extent of the damage and would not elaborate on the reasons for believing the assault originated in Russia.

The Pentagon and other US government departments face repeated cyber attacks, especially from Russia and China, either from individuals or indirectly from those countries' governments.

Within the past 18 months Russia has been accused of orchestrating major electronic attacks on neighbours Estonia and Georgia.

Source: telegraph.co.uk

Careers website Monster.com and USAJobs.gov, the official job site of the US Federal Government, have published security alerts to their customers warning of a serious hacking attack.

Feeling a sense of deja vu? Well, you should be as this has happened before.

It appears that Monster.com's database and USAJobs.gov's database were compromised and contact and account information was stolen. Data stolen included users' login names, passwords, email addresses, names, phone numbers and some demographic data.

Here is a short video I have made, explaining the possible impact of this security breach - and explaining why you should take this opportunity to think long and hard about whether you are acting securely with your website passwords:


What the Monster.com security breach teaches us about passwords from Sophos Labs on Vimeo.

Monster has published a warning for its users, advising them to change their passwords. A similar alert has appeared on the USAJobs.gov website, whose database is run by Monster.



Although the warnings are keen to emphasis what information has not been breached during the attack (for instance, social security numbers), it is important to understand the serious risks that Monster and USAJobs customers may be placed in because of this incident.

One very real risk is that hackers will use the email addresses and personal information they have received to mount a realistic phishing campaign, attempting to gather more sensitive information about victims. Phishing emails which attempt to look more legitimate by using the recipient's real name and other personal information (such as user id, phone number or location) are always more successful at social engineering further details that could be used for indentity theft out of people.

There is even more potential for danger, however, because passwords have been stolen. We know that too many people use the same password for every website that they access.

That means that if hackers have managed to extract your Monster.com or USAJobs.gov password in this attack, they might be able to use it to break into your email accounts, or the likes of eBay, PayPal, Amazon, and indeed any other website that you have used the same password for.

So, if you use Monster.com or USAJobs.gov you should change your password now. Choose a sensible password that is not a dictionary word and that is hard to guess. And *then* change your passwords at any other site where you might be using the same password. Make sure, of course, that it's not the same password as the one you are using at Monster - you don't want to make that mistake again.

Worryingly, this isn't the first time that Monster and USAJobs have been targeted by hackers who have stolen data about their users. 18 months ago, as this 2007 report from Reuters reveals, hackers used the Monstres Trojan horse to steal details of jobseekers via recruiter accounts. That hack was unsurprisingly followed up by a widespread phishing email campaign.

Hundreds of Twitter users have been hit by another attack on the popular micro-blogging site, with messages being sent from compromised accounts trying to drive traffic to a pornographic website.

The messages which say

hey! 23/Female. Come chat with me on my webcam thingy here www.chatwebcamfree.com

are being spammed out as Tweets.



However, the index page of that website serves up obfuscated JavaScript that loads a variety of pornographic adverts and contains a web form directed to a site called eroticgateway.com.



Clearly, if a hacker has managed to ascertain your Twitter password there is a chance that they may have also compromised your system in other ways too.

Any Twitter users who find that they have unwittingly posted the message would be wise to change their Twitter password immediately. Furthermore, if you use that password on any other non-Twitter account then you must also change those passwords too (please *don't* make it the same as your new Twitter password.

As we don't yet know how the hackers compromised accounts, it wouldn't do any harm to scan your computer with an up-to-date anti-virus product either.

Twitter has confirmed that approximately 750 accounts were hijacked by criminals during the course of this attack, and says that they have reset the passwords of all compromised accounts. That should stop the tidalwave of spam messages advertising adult webcam websites for now.

But there is still a lack of clarity of how the accounts were compromised in the first place.

Finally, one extra thing to throw into the mix. Last month, Facebook users reported seeing a very similar message.



You don't have to be Albert Einstein to put two and two together, and deduce that these attacks must be related.

We're seeing more and more attacks from spammers, phishers, malware authors, scammers and identity thieves against the users of social networks like Twitter and Facebook. These aren't just proof-of-concept attacks in controlled conditions - they're full-blooded assaults seen in the wild every day, making money out of real people.

Source: Sophos.com

A company worth billions of dollars which is supposed to have the best programmers, the kind of company that won’t leave any security wholes in the system. Yahoo! system that is!

XSS bugs are already yesterday’s news when we talk about Yahoo! They are all over the place on the *.yahoo.com subdomains.But we are not talking here about minor XSS bugs. We mean serious business. We are talking about the kind of security which exposes the privacy of millions of users of the “trustable” Yahoo! services.

We are talking about SQL Injection. One of the worst kinds of security breach.

Here you have one of the pages vulnerable to SQL Injection:

http://in.jagran.yahoo.com/article/index.php?choice=homepage_getnews&state=1&city=87%20union%20all%20select%201,concat_ws(0x203a20,version(),user()),3,4,
5,6,7,8,9,10,11,12,13,14,15,16,17,18

What do we find here? Information about the SQL server, its version and the current user SQL user:



A list with SQL users and passwords:


And of course, much more information available at the hand of an attacker.

Moreover, this SQL Injection can be used as an XSS, especially for session hijacking:



The sad part is that Yahoo! didn’t adopt any policy whatsoever regarding this kind of problems. They dont admit they have a problem, nor do they give any credits to those who find them.

Following in the footsteps of other sites, Yahoo! could learn to gain from this. Vast majority of those who find bugs don’t disclose them anymore precisely for the fact that Yahoo! is in total denial. By coming out clean, Yahoo! would also reduce the amount of hacked/stolen accounts and other shameful security breaches like the one we present here.

Google confessed to a serious bug in its Docs sharing system over the weekend, but downplayed the security cockup by claiming only a tiny number of users had been affected.

The internet search kingpin said that less than 0.05 per cent of Google Docs accounts were hit by a privacy breach after documents were shared “inadvertently” with other users.

Mountain View said in a blog post, penned by Docs product manager Jennifer Mazzon, that the security lapse was “limited to people with whom the document owner, or a collaborator with sharing rights, had previously shared a document.”

She claimed that very “few users” would have been affected by the bug “because it only could have occurred for a very small percentage of documents, and for those documents only when a specific sequence of user actions took place.”

Google said the error was limited to its Docs system within Google Apps and did not affect its spreadsheet system, though some presentations were also hit by the error.

The company fixed the bug by using what it described as an “automated process to remove collaborators and viewers from the documents” that had been exposed to the security glitch.

In other words it stripped all sharing privileges from the documents affected by the bug and then informed affected users that they would have to manually re-share their documents.



“We're sorry for the trouble this has caused. We understand our users' concerns (in fact, we were affected by this bug ourselves) and we're treating this very seriously,” said Mazzon.

Google has recently been attempting to woo businesses away from desktop-based Office suites in favour of adopting the company's cloud-based Apps system.

In January Google confirmed it had inked deals with IT resellers to sell its online applications to biz customers. From the end of this month authorised resellers will be able to flog, customise and support premium versions of Google Apps.

However, this latest bug could lead some businesses to conclude that pushing their personal information up into the clouds simply poses too big a security risk.

Source: The Register

More people visit social networking sites or blogs than use web-based email, according to a new study by Nielsen Online.

The media bean counter claims over two-thirds of the world's population frequent what it calls "member communities," which includes both social network and blogging sites. Member communities make up the fourth most popular category, overtaking email as the world's most common online activity after search, general interest portals, and PC software applications.

Nielsen said that between December 2007 and December 2008, social networking and blogging sites combined reached 66.8 per cent of the world's online population. These sites account for one in every 11 minutes spent online worldwide, according to the firm's research.



In the UK, social sites account for one in every six minutes the average internet user spends online. Nielsen also found that UK users have the highest tendency to visit a social networking site on a mobile handset, trailed by US and French audiences. The number of UK mobile social networkers is up more than three-fold over Nielsen's count last year.

Conspicuously absent from the list of online activities: pornography. As usual, Nielsen doesn't share how it arrives at its numbers, so we're left to guess whether porn is actually less popular than web email, or perhaps folks just don't view porn when being tracked by Nielsen.

Facebook takes the Crown

Facebook is the most popular of the social networking sites globally, dominating the segment in the UK, Italy, Australia, France, Spain and Switzerland.

Facebook's greatest reach is in the UK, with 47 per cent of Britons online using the site, the study claims. Facebook's stake of users is also greater in both Italy (44 per cent) and Australia (38 per cent) than in its native US (33 per cent.)

Interestingly, the fastest growing demographic of Facebook users are those aged 35 to 49 years old (more than 24.1 million users). The site also has almost twice as many visitors between 50 to 64 years old (+13.6 million) compared to those under 18 years old (+7.3 million).

With age, apparently comes a greater attention span. Of the social segment, Nielsen says that Facebook has the highest average time viewing per person than any other site (three hours 10 minutes).

Source: www.nielsen.com

Content yanksploitation against royalty collectors

YouTube is blocking most of its music videos from UK viewers after negotiations with British royalty collectors turned sour.

The Performing Rights Society (PRS) for Music, a group representing artists and publishers, and YouTube both blame each other entirely for the impasse, of course.

Patrick Walker, YouTube's top pact-maker in Europe said in a blog post today that the site will block all "premium" music videos in the UK until it can strike up a new contract with PRS that is "economically sustainable."

"But PRS is now asking us to pay many, many times more for our license than before," he wrote. "The costs are simply prohibitive for us - under PRS's proposed terms we would lose significant amounts of money with every playback."

He also claims PRS is unwilling to even tell the video streaming site what songs are included in the licensing renewal being negotiated. Walker claims the deal is "like asking a consumer to buy an unmarked CD without knowing what musicians are on it."

PRS appears to have been taken off guard by YouTube's sudden yanking of content. Shortly after the site said it's pulling UK music videos, PRS chief Steve Porter announced he was "shocked and disappointed" to receive a call late in the afternoon informing him of YouTube's drastic action.

The music group claims YouTube wants to pay "significantly less than at present to the writers of the music on which their service relies, despite the massive increase in YouTube viewing."

PRS said YouTube's decision to block music videos in the UK was done in the middle of licensing negotiations, and urged the site to reconsider "as a matter of urgency." As a jab — apparently to show that YouTube should have plenty of money to spend on fees — PRS noted the site's parent company Google made $5.7bn in revenues in the last quarter of 2008.

The situation draws obvious parallels to how the automated streaming music service Pandora decided to block UK listeners in early 2008 because it couldn't afford a license with PRS and music labels. Pandora had attempted to work with copyright holders from the outset, as opposed to YouTube, which only more recently has been scoring licensing deals in an effort to generate more revenue.

But YouTube is the most popular online video streaming site out there — so it certainly begs the question of who can earn enough money in the biz if YouTube can't?

Yanking content off streaming sites appears to be an increasingly common negotiating ploy for both sides of the table. In December 2008, Warner Music Group began removing its videos from YouTube after claiming it wasn't getting enough cut of the profit. Apparently companies are betting customer outrage will spur the other side to bend to their demands. But when customers can get their content elsewhere easier (and often illegally, where nobody gets paid) the licensing e-tantrum can certainly backfire on both.

Waiting in Wings of Pirate Bay Trial

Swedish police raided a location near Stockholm last month where computer equipment containing a huge bounty of alleged pirated material was seized by authorities.

The raid was carried out on 9 February, but private copyright advocacy outfit Antpiratbyrån only revealed that the bust had taken place late on Friday.

A server said to belong to a Nordic file-sharing ring known as Sunnydale was seized from a location in the Brandbergen neighbourhood, south of Stockholm, according to the anti-piracy agency.

It’s understood the server contained data equivalent to 16,000 movies.

"The well-organised pirates on the scene seem to have an inflated sense of their own ability to conceal themselves, but this raid shows that we can get to them,” said anti-piracy lawyer Henrik Pontén in a statement.

“Copyright applies to the internet too and we will continue to prioritise efforts to counteract these well-organised groups."

He claimed the Sunnydale ring, which consists of ten servers that contain some 65 terabytes of copyrighted material, had collapsed following the raid.

Pontén also claimed that the Sunnydale operation was the source of all pirated material found on The Pirate Bay.

However, The Pirate Bay co-founder, Peter Sunde dismissed some of the lawyer’s claims.

"More than 800,000 people have uploaded to The Pirate Bay, so I don't believe it's the source of everything. But it is possible that it's a major source," he told Swedish newspaper Svenska Dagbladet.

Sunde was the main spokesman during the now infamous entertainment industry versus The Pirate Bay trial that drew to a close last week. A judgment isn't expected until 17 April.

Source: TheRegister

“BT is one of the world’s leading providers of communications solutions and services operating in 170 countries. Its principal activities include networked IT services, local, national and international telecommunications services, and higher-value broadband and internet products and services. BT consists principally of four lines of business: BT Global Services, Openreach, BT Retail and BT Wholesale.”

“The most complete UK broadband, phone lines and mobile products, digital TV, web hosting, online security and networked IT services for home”

The description says it all. One of the giants in IT, mobile, TV and internet services. A Giant Company with a huge database. You don’t need to be an internet whiz, not even a computer literate to understand the tremendous implications that result from such a database beeing vulnerable.

A faulty parameter, improperly sanitized opens the vault to the pretious databases. One can gain access to such ordinary things as personal data, login data, and the like. In the first syntax I concatenated the table names as well as the version and the user of the database.



Lets see some of the user login data for different data bases (among which, of course, the admins of the respective sections).



As well as the login data and personal data (email, active, lastloggedin, firstname, surname, address, town, postcode, level, randomkey, password) for some of the registered users.