Inside Dark Networks

California Assembly Bill 2415 ( by Speaker Fabian Núñez ) passed today and now goes to the Governor. What does it actually do?
http://democrats.assembly.ca.gov/members/a46/press/a462006116.htm
http://www.mercurynews.com/mld/mercurynews/15397371.htm
Hopefully it means more secure wireless networks. In the Bay Area almost 50% of consumer wireless access points have no encryption turned on. Many of these devices have their passwords still set to [...]

Today Google finally opened their free GoogleWifi to all residents of Mountain View California. Tempted though I am to ditch my current provider and migrate to Google, I must question….How am I sure it is Google I am connecting to?
It could be an ‘Evil Twin’ access point masquerading as a legitimate Google Wifi Access point. [...]

So within the last two days, I have received three new spam/phishing atttempts. What is so bizarre about these? They all pretend to have links either with Ireland or at least use an Irish persons name, here’s two of the most interesting:
 
 
 
Return-Path:
Received: from galadriel.portugalmail.pt (galadriel.portugalmail.pt [195.245.179.73])
     by XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX with ESMTP id k7AETcrP030275
     for XXXX@.xxx.com Thu, 10 Aug [...]

WPA is slowly replacing WEP in the home. A quick wardrive around my suburban area of Silicon Valley produced some interesting results. On average, using a simple Netgear WG511T card (without external antenna), there were 8 wireless networks within reach. Of these approximately 60% were using WEP for encryption, 30% were unencrypted and 10% were [...]

For many years Foundstone has been teaching the dark side of Google in its Ultimate Hacking courses, and its “Hacking Exposed” series. Google is the number one search tool for hackers. It allows you to carry out full reconnaissance on your target. It is a goldmine of information for those interested in data theft, exploits, [...]

Privacy on the internet is eroding…and eroding quickly.
A few months ago we had the Google search warrant debacle. Now we have the AOL release of very sensitive information on its subscribers.
 
Some of it is quite illuminating.
We have AOL User 2281868: Looking For Gay Black Superman With An Overbite
http://consumerist.com/consumer/aol/aol-user-2281868-looking-for-gay-black-superman-with-an-overbite-193001.php
More scary stuff at http://aohellsearches.ytmnd.com/
User 927 searches range [...]

Today is not a good day for security patches, and it’s not even Microsoft’s patch Tuesday.
One of the top two consumer security vendors has been in the news for not-so-positive reasons, but a patch for the affected products should be out after intensive testing. But those of us using wordpress, it is time to upgrade to version 2.04 as [...]