Monday, February 23, 2015

Chicago Police Department Pays $600 Cryptoware Ransom to Cybercriminals

Cyber criminals have started targeting government enforcement of the Ransomware in an attempt to extort money.

Recently, the police department of the Midlothian Village in Illinois has paid a ransom of over $600 in Bitcoins to an unknown hacker after being hit by a popular ransomware attack.

The popular Ransomware, dubbed Cryptoware, disabled a police computer in Midlothian — located south of Chicago — by making it inaccessible through its file-encryption capabilities and forced them to pay a ransom in order to restore access to the important police records.

The Chicago Tribune reported that the department first encountered Cryptoware in January, when someone in the department opened a spear-phishing email that pointed to the malicious software.

Once opened, the email carrying the Cryptoware ransomware immediately encrypts the files on the computer and, in typical ransomware style, displays a message demanding money in exchange for a decrypt code that could free the device from Cryptoware.

Midlothian Police Chief Harold Kaufman confirmed the police department had been hacked, but declined further comment. Local IT professionals assured that the hacker didn’t get access to files in the police department’s database, rather the Cryptoware program only made certain documents inaccessible.

[Read more…]

The progressive ideas behind the lack of free speech on campus

Is an academic discussion of free speech potentially traumatic? A recent panel for Smith College alumnae aimed at “challenging the ideological echo chamber” elicited this ominous “trigger/content warning” when a transcript appeared in the campus newspaper: “Racism/racial slurs, ableist slurs, antisemitic language, anti-Muslim/Islamophobic language, anti-immigrant language, sexist/misogynistic slurs, references to race-based violence, references to antisemitic violence.”

No one on this panel, in which I participated, trafficked in slurs. So what prompted the warning?

Smith President Kathleen McCartney had joked, “We’re just wild and crazy, aren’t we?” In the transcript, “crazy” was replaced by the notation: “[ableist slur].”

One of my fellow panelists mentioned that the State Department had for a time banned the words “jihad,” “Islamist” and “caliphate” — which the transcript flagged as “anti-Muslim/Islamophobic language.”

I described the case of a Brandeis professor disciplined for saying “wetback” while explaining its use as a pejorative. The word was replaced in the transcript by “[anti-Latin@/anti-immigrant slur].” Discussing the teaching of “Huckleberry Finn,” I questioned the use of euphemisms such as “the n-word” and, in doing so, uttered that forbidden word. I described what I thought was the obvious difference between quoting a word in the context of discussing language, literature or prejudice and hurling it as an epithet.

Two of the panelists challenged me. The audience of 300 to 400 people listened to our spirited, friendly debate — and didn’t appear angry or shocked. But back on campus, I was quickly branded a racist, and I was charged in the Huffington Post with committing “an explicit act of racial violence.” McCartney subsequently apologized that “some students and faculty were hurt” and made to “feel unsafe” by my remarks.

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RAND PAUL: FEDERAL GOVERNMENT HAS BECOME ‘ENORMOUS MONSTER WITH TENTACLES INTO EVERY ASPECT OF YOUR LIFE’

MONTGOMERY, Alabama — Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY), a likely 2016 Republican presidential candidate, fired up a nearly two-thousand-strong crowd with a keynote speech to the Alabama Republican Party’s Winter Dinner on Friday night, right before the White House hopeful makes a swing through South Florida.

Paul was met with several standing ovations throughout the speech, including at the end, in an address filled with many of the major themes he’s likely to pursue assuming he makes a bid for the White House.

“I have good news and bad news: The good news is your government is open,” Paul said. “The bad news is your government is open. You remember there was this shutdown about a year ago and in Washington everyone was clamoring, everyone was worried. I went home to Kentucky and you know what they said: ‘Why in the hell did you open it back up?’”

Paul shifted into discussing how different Washington is from the rest of America.

“When I was first elected, I proposed that we cut $500 billion in spending, and everybody in Washington said ‘Oh my goodness, this guy is crazy—he wants to really cut spending, he wants to really balance the budget,’” Paul said. “I got home back in Kentucky, and you know what they said? They said that’s a good start. They said now what are you going to do about the $18 trillion in debt? They’re not even concerned just with the deficit. In the real world, the people want us to balance the budget every year and actually do something about the $18 trillion debt.”

Paul noted the difference in culture is largely due to the liberal media on Capitol Hill and throughout D.C.

“The thing is is that the media, the liberal media, the people who call us flyover country America, know nothing about us,” Paul said. “They don’t represent us. They don’t have our values. And the thing is is that somehow Washington gets distracted into thinking this is what America is really about. Raise your hand if you’ve spent more than you bring in chronically for the last 10, 20 or 30 years.”

No hands went up in the entire audience.

“Nobody does that,” Paul said. “Everyone balances their family budget. They think we’re extremists. Somebody said ‘oh this is extreme.’ And I said, ‘to balance the budget, to only spend what comes in, is extreme?’”

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Friday, February 20, 2015

Colorado’s Health Exchange Is Millions of Dollars Over Budget

Unexpectedly high call center costs for Colorado’s health exchange are pushing the state’s Obamacare portal way over budget. “Complex sign-up problems” have led the exchange’s administrators to requirst an additional $3 million to cover the costs, according to Health News Colorado. Board members instead looked ready to approve a $2 million expansion, but only with the proviso that service improve dramatically this year.

Call center costs were originally budgeted at $13.7 million, HCN reports. Additional emergency funding bumped that figure up to $14.9 million. But the total price tag for the state exchange’s call center operations is not expected to hit $18.1 million.

The problem is that the technology driving the state’s sign-up system is a mess:

Workers at the centers are facing angry customers who desperately need help. Last year, about 4,000 people a month needed help with “life-change events” that they can’t report online. Last fall, thousands of customers who could have automatically renewed plans instead called for help when they found their plans were costing significantly more because their tax subsidies had declined. Then a new sign-up system that Colorado Medicaid officials built that was supposed to be simpler instead caused problems for thousands of customers. In recent weeks, yet another snafu has emerged as exchange managers discovered that another 3,600 people who were supposed to have their plans renewed instead lost their coverage.

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Thursday, February 19, 2015

The NSA hides surveillance software in hard drives

It’s been known for a while that the NSA will intercept and bug equipment to spy on its soon-to-be owners, but the intellgency agency’s techniques are apparently more clever than first thought. Security researchers at Kaspersky Lab have discovered apparently state-created spyware buried in the firmware of hard drives from big names like Seagate, Toshiba and Western Digital. When present, the code lets snoops collect data and map networks that would otherwise be inaccessible — all they need to retrieve info is for an unwitting user to insert infected storage (such as a CD or USB drive) into an internet-connected PC. The malware also isn’t sitting in regular storage, so you can’t easily get rid of it or even detect it.

Kaspersky isn’t explicitly naming the culprits, but it also isn’t shy about pointing a finger in the US government’s direction. The company notes that the developers had access to unpatched exploits before they showed up in American cyberwarfare viruses like Stuxnet, and in some cases directly borrowed code modules. Also, most of the infections have occurred in countries that are frequently US spying targets, such as China, Iran, Pakistan and Russia. Reuters sources back this up with claims that the NSA has developed espionage techniques on this level.

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