CommunityDNS News Bits, June 12, 2009.
Provided by CommunityDNS, the information in this post consists of news items in the security-based Internet community.
Belarus media sites under attack by zombies
Citing increased political tensions between Belarus and Russia, media websites in Belarus have been under a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack for several days.
Click here for more information.
International telecom hacker group busted
Three people were indicted in the US and five were arrested in Italy for scheme to steal access codes victim companies used to route phone calls through telecom systems. In the US alone access codes from 2,500 companies were stolen.
While the value of the stolen services was unclear, the thieves managed to route over $55 million dollars worth of telephone calls over US telecommunications networks.
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Buggy ‘smart meters’ open door to power-grid botnet
With the goal of making the power grid more efficient millions of smart meetings are being installed in major US cities. The smart meters provide two-way communications between electricity users and power plants.
The software is vulnerable to attacks. To validate the claim a security consultant has developed a self-propagating worm that spreads quickly. The newly infected smart meter can, upon command from the worm, switch off power to hundreds of thousands of home potentially at the same time.
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Analysis of the Green Dam Censorware System
Earlier this week it was reported that the software chosen by China to be installed on all PCs delivered to China starting July 1 is vulnerable to hacks. The information behind the below link also confirms speculation that the software filters out more than porn as originally described. Using multiple filter lists the software scans for key words not related specifically to porn. The software also uses black lists taken from the American-made filtering program, CyberSitter.
Click here for more information.
National broadband happy talk papers over net neutrality fight
Launching a campaign urging the US’ FCC to include net neutrality rules into the national broadband strategy, a group wishes for the FCC to implement the “nondiscrimination and network interconnection obligations” that was first outlined in the 2005 part of the broadband plan. Those on the other side of the debate feel ISPs, under such rules, will not be able to adequately manage their networks and maintain their service levels.
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Major UK ISP: video streaming’s “free ride” is over
Citing the need for securing a return on its investment for building out a high-speed network, BT will begin throttling back certain types of traffic during certain times of the day. Also added to the mix are maximum download rates to help curb excessive download or media streaming.
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