Hacking and Anonymous surfing

At least eleven 15-year-old children were discovered to be working last year in three factories which supply Apple. The company did not name the offending factories, or say where they were based, but the majority of its goods are assembled in China.

Apple also has factories working for it in Taiwan, Singapore, the Philippines, Malaysia, Thailand, the Czech Republic and the United States.

Apple said the child workers are now no longer being used, or are no longer underage. “In each of the three facilities, we required a review of all employment records for the year as well as a complete analysis of the hiring process to clarify how underage people had been able to gain employment,” Apple said, in an annual report on its suppliers.

“On the Internet,” one dog tells another in a classic New Yorker cartoon, “nobody knows you’re a dog.”

The internet is notorious for its digital dens of deception. But on Facebook, what you see tends to be what you get — at least in one study of tailless, two-legged young adults.

College-age users of Facebook in the United States and a similar social networking site in Germany typically present accurate versions of their personalities in online profiles, says psychologist Mitja Back of Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz, Germany. People use online social networking sites to express who they really are rather than idealized versions of themselves, Back and his colleagues conclude in an upcoming Psychological Science.

The BBC has enabled SWF Verification for its iPlayer streaming video service. This content protection mechanism has locked out users who consume the iPlayer video content with open source software.

Adobe has publicly documented the Real-Time Messaging Protocol (RTMP) that is used by Flash for streaming video, but the company has fiercely guarded RTMP content protection measures, making it impossible to create a fully compatible open source RTMP client. SWF Verification is one such security measure.

An RTMP streaming video server that has SWF Verification enabled will terminate connections from clients that fail to supply an authorization key. The purpose of this restriction is to ensure that the content is only accessible to specific SWF files, thus preventing third-party software from downloading the video.

Affinity Multimedia Design, the company which designed www.newbritainct.gov (the website for New Britain City), said that a virus attacked the site after infiltrating PCs at the main city hall.

Officials suspect that an attacker hacked into the key website of the city. Albeit the attacker hasn’t been spotted, the technicians managed to quarantine a dubious Internet Protocol address. In certain instances, it is reported that the computer worm has infected other computers on the network that accessed the websites which the server hosted.

Spokesman Pete Steele representing the office of the city mayor stated that experts detected the virus during the second week of February 2010, following which it was immediately isolated. While this was done to safeguard municipal computers, it was felt that the virus had loaded cookies onto PCs already compromised, he said. New Britain Herald published this on February 16, 2010.

Nasa has turned to Nexus Management, a London-listed technology group, to defend its against internet attacks. The deal, which Nexus is expected to announce t as early as tomorrow, will see a subsidiary, Resilience Technology provide firewalls to the US space agency as it takes on hackers and computer viruses.

The deal is one of several contracts that Resilience will detail this week. Market sources said that the other contracts will be with a major American telecoms company and a bank based in the Caribbean.

The deals justify Nexus’s acquisition of Resilience for $1.8m (£1.3m) in March. The Nexus board, led by its chief executive, Roger Richardson, said at the time that it hoped Resilience would boost its 2010 earnings.

The cyber criminals who hacked into Google’s systems may have attacked over 100 other companies, according to new information from security consultancy Isec partners.

In a blog posting in December last year, Google first announced that its systems had suffered a hacking attack eminating from China, at the time indicating that “at least twenty other large companies from a wide range of businesses–including the Internet, finance, technology, media and chemical sectors–have been similarly targeted”.

Other estimates put the figure at more like 30 companies, with Symantec, Adobe and Intel all named as potential victims. But having discovered that a larger number of command and control servers than at first thought were involved in the attack, Isec Partners is estimating the number of affected companies to be more than three times that originally thought.

International hotel group Wyndham Hotels and Resorts (WHR) has suffered yet another serious data breach after hackers broke into its computer systems, stealing customer names and payment card information. According to an open letter posted on the firm’s site, the luxury hotel group discovered the attack, which targeted one of its data centres, in late January.

“By going through the centralised network connections, the hacker was then able to access and download information from several, but not all, of the WHR hotels and remove payment card information of a small percentage of our WHR customers,” read the letter.

“In addition to ensuring that the hack was immediately terminated and disabled, we promptly retained a qualified investigator to assess the problem and ensure that we had isolated it, and then to help us implement the proper changes to strengthen and improve the security of our connections with each of our WHR branded properties.”

FRAUDSTERS stole the identity of a top Midland cop to bombard people with offers of porn and Viagra on social network site Twitter.

Internet conmen even tried to get users to reveal their own personal information by pretending to be Chief Inspector Mark Payne from West Midlands Police.

But the elaborate ruse, known as phishing, was quickly spotted by users of the popular social networking site who contacted the senior officer to alert him to his account being hacked into. Last night the former detective, who now heads up the force’s public relations team, laughed off the attempted scam.

Microsoft has several other botnets in its crosshairs, and believes it can use the same legal tactic against them that it deployed last week to strike at the Waledac botnet’s command-and-control centers.

But the company also admitted that it had not yet severed all communications between the controllers of Waledac and the thousands of compromised Windows computers used by hackers to pitch bogus security software and send a small amount of spam.

“This shows it can be done,” said Richard Boscovich, senior attorney with Microsoft’s Digital Crimes Unit. “Each botnet is different, of course, but this is another arrow in the quiver. This is not the last [effort]…. We have other operations on the drawing board.”

Microsoft has several other botnets in its crosshairs, and believes it can use the same legal tactic against them that it deployed last week to strike at the Waledac botnet’s command-and-control centers.

But the company also admitted that it had not yet severed all communications between the controllers of Waledac and the thousands of compromised Windows computers used by hackers to pitch bogus security software and send a small amount of spam.

“This shows it can be done,” said Richard Boscovich, senior attorney with Microsoft’s Digital Crimes Unit. “Each botnet is different, of course, but this is another arrow in the quiver. This is not the last [effort]…. We have other operations on the drawing board.”