botnets
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White House announces anti-botnet initiative
The White House has been drumming up momentum for tighter internet privacy laws for a while now, and today it's furthering that online safety agenda with a new initiative for combating botnets. Washington just announced a pilot program for fighting viruses, citing a whopping five million PCs infected worldwide this year. The program will use principles outlined by the Industry Botnet Group, with the main goal being to educate internet users on the dangers of cyberspace while preventing botnets from spreading by sharing data about infected computers. The White House is working with the Information Sharing and Analysis Center to develop and implement the "botnet pilot," presumably to enact those anti-virus principles.
Scientists build WiFi hunter-killer drone and call it SkyNET... Viene Tormenta!
You'd think scientists would proscribe certain names for their inventions -- you wouldn't be taken seriously if your supercomputer was called HAL 9000, WOPR or Proteus IV would you? Well, a team from the Stevens Institute of Technology isn't listening, because it's developing an aerial drone and calling it SkyNET. A Linux box, strapped to a Parrot A.R. Drone, can fly within range of your home wireless network and electronically attack it from the air. Whilst internet-only attacks are traceable to some extent, drone attacks are difficult to detect until it's too late -- you'd have to catch it in the act and chase it off with a long-handled pitchfork, or something. The team is working on refining the technology to make it cheaper than the $600 it currently costs and advise that people toughen up their domestic wireless security. We advise they stop pushing us ever closer towards the Robopocalypse.
"Solid one-two punch": Trion responds to account hacks
The saga of RIFT's account security woes continues, as Trion World's Scott Hartsman responded to the hacker attempts, reassuring fans curious about what steps were being taken to secure their accounts. Citing "constant attacks" since the launch of RIFT that have impacted 1% of accounts, Hartsman said that the team is blocking hackers and botnets as quickly as they are identified, but that this will also be an ongoing process. "Both the login fix and the Coin Lock addition have been doing their part in signficantly reducing overall incidents over the last 18 hours," Hartsman wrote. "Neither one is a silver bullet, but so far it is looking to be a solid one-two punch for the weekend." According to his post, Trion will be hiring additional staff to tackle the problem, and is working on a "two-factor authentication" process for the future. Hartsman also praised the efforts of the player who brought a serious log-in vulnerability to the team's attention. ZAM tracked down the player for an interview, who himself had his account hacked in early March. The player is an "ethical hacker" who owns a security software company and realized that these hacks were not the fault of the player, but an exploit that had been discovered.
