Loss of Privacy

If the United Kingdom was serious about stopping the swine flu, they should have installed screening measures three months ago when it was first detected in Mexico.  Instead, they’ve let everyone come and go, allowing the swing flu to spread across the country.

health workers and immigration officials at Heathrow and other port authorities have been told to look out for passengers with possible signs of swine flu infection;

Exactly how will this help the situation?  On the off chance that you find someone coming off a plane with swine flu, they’ve already infected the rest of the plane!

Now, however, they also believe that the NHS will, somehow, become overwhelmed with swine flu and the system won’t be able to handle it.  The regular flu causes nearly four times the number of infections per year, yet the NHS never complains then and, the WHO has confirmed that the mortality rate for swine flu is the same as that for other types of flu.  So, why are we all up in a frenzy about this?

If the UK really wants to be taken seriously, they will screen people leaving the country as well in addition to quarantining the entire island until no one has swine flu.

A massive data breach at Network Solutions lasted three months, but its customers were just informed yesterday, after the close of business.

Susan Wade, Director of Public Relations for Network Solutions, spoke to The Tech Herald and explained some of the finer points to the DSA issued on Friday. Currently there is an investigation underway, and notices are going out to the 4,343 customers via email and postal notifications.

Wade explained that the malicious code was discovered during routine operations on a subset of servers that house the E-Commerce platform offered to Network Solutions customers.

E-Commerce customers are on a set of servers that are segmented from the Network Solutions infrastructure. The subset of servers where the malicious code was discovered hosted the 4,343 merchant sites that were attacked. Another point of interest is that the malicious code was discovered on only a fraction of the sites hosted for E-Commerce operations, where there are more than 10,000 sites overall.

The code may have captured transaction data from 573,928 cardholders during its run this spring. Network Solutions said that the merchants’ customers were exposed from March 12, 2009 until June 8, 2009. The level of exposure could vary depending on transaction volume, but transactions made after June 8, 2009 were not exposed to attack, as the hijacked sites were cleaned by then.

There is no information on how the code was planted on the sites. While examination of the code shows that it had the ability to ship data off to a third party, and Network Solutions believes that it did just that, the exact code is not available for public review. There is also no public information as to where the data believed to be stolen was sent.

So, three months on and they still have no clue how the breach occurred, if the information has been used for malicious purposes or who is responsible.  Considering the fact that Network Solutions retains a large amount of personal account details for many online businesses, one would think that they would have better security measures in place.  Apparently, they don’t.

Most people don’t like CCTV and the idea that their every move is recorded.  3VR has a new system that will continue to “think of the children” while blurring out regular folks.

The technology uses 3VR’s recently patented face-recognition algorithms to home in on known faces in crowds. An image-scrambling algorithm then blurs the faces and bodies of those who are not of interest and encrypts the blur pattern so that no one but the operator of the technology can unscramble it

“This allows you to search for people on watch lists, for instance, but without capturing massive databases of innocent people,” says Stephen Russell, 3VR’s chairman. The company aims to supply the equipment to banks and retail chains so they can analyse CCTV footage for known suspects who install card skimmers on ATMs, for example.

I suspect multi-colored outfits are going to be the new hoodies in crime.

According to Wikileaks, big brother is coming soon to Switzerland.

These confidential documents detail information on an official program for centralized, real-time, interception of Internet traffic in Switzerland.

You can download the file from here [zip file], or one of the other many mirrors listed in the article.

Recently, a malicious file has been making the rounds via email.

The name of the file was Novel H1N1 Flu Situation Update.exe and the icon made it look like a Word document file.

It contains a backdoor and an elaborate keylogger.  The clever thing is that, when opened, it even looks like a word file.

This is exactly why “Hide file extensions for known file types” should never be checked.  It forces the user to rely on the computer to tell them that the file is okay, when it clearly isn’t.  Without this checked, the file would look like a word file, however, the .exe would let everyone know that something is fishy.

You can go to FileInfo.com to learn how to show these extensions.