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Ex-delegate gets Diebold voting code in mail
With all the recent blunders and whistleblower interviews about the Diebold electronic voting fiasco, it would have been easy to believe that it couldn't get any worse for Diebold Systems. That's probably what Cheryl C. Kagan, an ex-Democratic delegate and an outspoken critic of Maryland's election chief, thought before she received a parcel containing the code that ran Maryland's electronic voting machines in the 2004 election, along with a note calling for her to "alert the media." Although Diebold Election Systems claims that the code is old and does not infringe the security of the current up-to-date system, the fact that it was sent at all exposes a fundamental security flaw in Diebold System's supposed "glitch-free" setup. The only viable solution to all this -- which would make voters happy and give Diebold Systems *some* credibility -- is if the code is released in an open source form. Even though we'd like to believe that the current version of Diebold's voting code (4.6) is more secure that the leaked code (4.3.15c), the litany of security failures on Diebold's part gives us little reason to trust them.
Your Blackberry might get your company hacked
Would you believe something so innocently addictive as a BlackBerry could cause -- in addition to antisocial tendencies, BlackBerry thumb, cranial trauma (over and over), and government panic -- your poor employer to get hacked? Well believe it. At this year's DEFCON Jesse D'Aguanno of Praetorian Global demonstrated a program called BBProxy that can cause your RIM handheld to give malicious intruders access to your remote network by tunneling through your device's link to the mail server mothership. And, as anyone who's ever done any computer security stuff knows, rarely are companies' soft, warm intranet-underbellies well guarded against skilled internal attacks. What's worse, BBProxy can easily be delivered to your vulnerable virus-scanner free handheld via email. Or maybe it's not as bad as it all seems (well, we hope so anyway), but damned if we'd be opening any attachments on our BlackBerrys any time in the near future.
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Galileo GPS system hacked at Cornell
The insightful minds over at Cornell University's GPS Laboratory aren't messing around -- they only needed one week to hack the GIOVE-A (Galileo In-Orbit Validation Element-A, more commonly referred to as Galileo) and gain access to the European satellite system without those pesky PRN codes. If you're overwhelmed by acronyms, fear not, the jist is as follows: these guys at Cornell did the legwork in developing an algorithm to extract the pseudo random number codes that are used to give customers access to the Galileo GPS system, which unlike America's taxpayer-owned militarily-developed and free GPS setup, is funded by the European Union, European Space Agency, and private organizations (read: service comes at a cost). What those oh so hopeful profiteers obviously disregarded was the little known fact that, well, (right now) it's impossible to copyright physical data about the world, leaving them all but helpless here. So please, should you need access to another set of GPS sats, be our guest and snag all those previously unavailable and presumably costly PRN codes at your leisure.
Korean Apple online store defaced
Last Thursday Silicon.com found out that Apple's Korean online store was hacked. The hacking was done by a dude going by the name 'Dinam.' He claims to be Turkish, but there is no way to confirm that. It seems he gained administrative control over the webserver (which was running Apache) that serves up the Apple store (in Korea) and he went ahead and defaced the website.
Xbox 360 H4xx0rz admit their hackjob is useless
After previously boasting about a DVD firmware hack that made it possible to run a backup copy of Project Gotham Racing 3 on a modified Xbox 360, one of the hackers behind the mod has joined Microsoft in calling it "useless". Apparently the mod is useless to the general public due to its complexity (the mod "requires that the flash chip is removed from the drive circuit board and inserted into a special flash programming device") and the fact that it could easily destroy an Xbox 360 in the wrong hands.However we must agree with one of the other members of the mod team when he said "given the complexity of the software it seems unlikely that there's no [other] way in." Did you know: Microsoft also make a popular operating system called Windows, an OS notorious for its backdoor vulnerabilities.[Thanks, striegs]
