Is it still Cyberwar if the battles are between a government and its own citizens? Would it be Civil Cyberwar or Cyber Civilwar?
The EFF “calls for immediate action to defend activists”. Tunisian authorities are reported to have blocked HTTPS access to Facebook, Google and Yahoo! in order to attack or track down dissenters and compromise their on-line identities.
…last week the Tunisian government turned up the heat on bloggers, activists, and dissidents by launching a JavaScript injection attack that siphoned off the usernames and passwords of Tunsians logging in to Google, Yahoo, and Facebook. The Tunisian government has used these stolen credentials to log in to Tunisians’ email and Facebook accounts, presumably downloading their messages, emails, and social graphs for further analysis, and then deleting the accounts entirely.
The EFF gives the following recommendations, which are a good idea all the time and not just when in Tunisia:
* If HTTPS is available, use HTTPS to login to Facebook, Google, and Yahoo. If you are using Firefox, EFF’s HTTPS Everywhere plug-in will do this for you automatically.
* EFF has received reports that the Tunisian government is periodically blocking HTTPS access to Facebook, Google, and Yahoo. If that is the case and you must login over HTTP, install the following Greasemonkey script to strip out the JavaScript which the Tunisian government has inserted to steal your login credentials.
* If you have logged in to Facebook, Google, or Yahoo recently over HTTP, login using HTTPS and change your password.
At the table she used to sew at,
he uses his brass desk scissors
to cut up his shirt.
Not that the shirt
was that far gone: one ragged cuff,
one elbow through;
but here he is,
cutting away the collar
she long since turned.
What gets to him finally,
using his scissors like a bright claw,
is prying buttons off:
after they've leapt,
spinning the floor, he bends
to retrieve both sizes:
he intends to
save them in some small box; he knows
he has reason to save; if only he knew
where a small box
used to be kept.
In terms of security, [Michael Battle, the US ambassador to the AU] confirmed America’s dedication to working with the AU and the US Africa Command (AFRICOM) to militarise the continent’s coastlines. While he claimed that the goals of this mission include responding to increased maritime piracy and breaking cartels that traffic illegally in drugs and humans, he made it clear that the primary military objective is to protect US oil interests in the Gulf of Guinea, suppress local resistance movements like MEND in Nigeria, and secure a favourable climate for returns on investment for American corporations. When pressed, Battle justified his call for militarisation by invoking the vague and poorly substantiated spectre of ‘terrorism’.
A mum has received an apology from police after officers swooped on her Bradford home, wrongly suspecting she had turned her garage into a cannabis farm.
The officers, who had obtained a search warrant, went away empty-handed after finding nothing more sinister than an electric heater to keep Pam Hardcastle’s two pet guinea pigs warm.
Police forced entry and brought in a helicopter, yet they found only pigs.
Tempting, but I’ll skip the puns. Their search warrant was from evidence of melting snow on the roof. Heat has become a sure sign, as I have mentioned before, of something nefarious. The British obviously are not expected to use heat to keep themselves warm, at least not enough to melt snow.
Drug growers might be tempted to take a lesson and try adopting their own pigs as a precaution (couldn’t resist) and so the security race continues. When police see a sudden up-tick in guinea pig orders, they might bring cause for another warrant. The good news is that they now might think to question a local pet shop or vet before calling in air-support.
a blog about the poetry of information security, since 1995