Tuesday, November 29, 2011

United Nations agency 'hacked'

A group of hackers has posted more than 100 email addresses and login details which it claimed to have extracted from the United Nations.

Many of the emails involved appear to belong to members of the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP).

The group, which identifies itself as Teampoison, attacks the UN's behaviour and calls it a "fraud".

A spokeswoman for the UNDP said the agency believed "an old server which contains old data" had been targeted.

"UNDP is taking action to close any vulnerabilities on our website," said Sausan Ghosheh.

"Please note that UNDP.org was not compromised."

'Leak'

The details were posted on the website Pastebin under the Teampoison logo.

The message preceding the login details accused the UN of acting to "facilitate the introduction of a New World Order" and asked "United Nations, why didn't you expect us?"

Many of the email addresses given end in undp.org, but others appear to belong to members of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), the World Health Organisation (WHO) and the UK's Office for National Statistics (ONS).

The poster noted that several of the accounts had "no passwords".

The message ended with the taunt: "The question now is how? We will let the so called 'security experts' over at the UN figure that out... Have a Nice Day."

Credit card attacks

The security company Sophos noted that Teampoison hackers had previously attacked the maker of the Blackberry smartphone's website and had published private information about former UK Prime Minister Tony Blair.

"Teampoison recently announced they were joining forces with Anonymous on a new initiative dubbed 'Operation Robin Hood', targeting banks and financial institutions," the firm's senior technology consultant, Graham Cluley wrote on Sophos's blog.

The groups said at the time that their operation aimed to take money from credit cards and donate it to individuals and charities.

They said people would not be harmed as the banks had to refund fraudulent charges.

Teampoison added a "shoutout" to Anonymous in its UN attack posting, adding a link to a Youtube video with more information about its banking attack plan.

These latest moves serve as a reminder that so-called hacktivists are skilled and willing to collaborate to take down their targets, according to Professor Alan Woodward from the University of Surrey's department of computing.

"One of the big problems is that there is so much data around that people forget about their older systems that still have valuable data on them," he said.

"The lesson here is that anything that holds any data of any value must be protected."



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Osborne announces broadband money

Better broadband networks in 10 cities across the UK are being promised by the government.

In his autumn statement, Chancellor George Osborne announced �5bn of spending on infrastructure projects such as roads, railways and broadband networks.

�100m of that is set to boost broadband coverage in London, Belfast, Edinburgh and Cardiff.

A further six cities will be identified later.

"For the first time we are identifying over 500 infrastructure projects we want to see built over the next decade and beyond. Roads, railways, airport capacity, power stations, waste facilities, broadband networks," the chancellor told the House of Commons.

"It means creating new superfast digital networks for companies across our country. These do not exist today. See what countries like China or Brazil are building, and you'll also see why we risk falling behind the rest of the world," he said.

"Our great cities are at the heart of our regional economies. And we will help bring world leading, superfast broadband and wi-fi connections to 10 of them - including the capitals of all four nations.

The plan is to create a hub of super-fast cities with broadband speeds of between 80 to 100Mbps (megabits per second) and city-wide high-speed mobile connectivity.

The current average broadband speed in the UK is 6.8Mbps.

Firms including BT and Virgin will be able to bid for the money, which they can use to fill in urban notspots or increase wi-fi coverage, a spokesman for the Department of Culture, Media and Sport told the BBC.

BT welcomed the news.

"This is a positive initiative that will help ensure our major cities have the best available super-fast broadband. BT is already upgrading large parts of these cities under its commercial rollout plan and these funds could help us go further. We look forward to working closely with the selected cities to see what can be achieved," said a spokesman for the firm.

But critics said the money would have been better spent boosting rural broadband.

"�100m between ten cities is about �1.50 per person. If the government had put the money in rural project it would have boosted rural businesses. Broadband is already available in cities," said Andrew Ferguson, editor of broadband news site ThinkBroadband.

Public funding for new infrastructure projects will come in two chunks - �5bn in the period to 2014/15 and the remaining �5bn to cover longer-term projects over the five years from 2015/16.

The chancellor said that the government has also negotiated an agreement with two groups of British pension funds, to unlock an additional �20bn of private investment in modern infrastructure.

Rural broadband?

The government wants the UK to be the best place for broadband in Europe by 2015.

BT recently accelerated its superfast broadband rollout and now plans to offer fibre services to two-thirds of UK premises by the end of 2014.

Virgin Media has also turned up the speed dial on its services, which is available to half the homes in the UK.

Broadband rollouts in rural areas have been far slower with critics complaining that the �530m set aside by the government to encourage investment in these areas is insufficient.

Much of that money has been allocated to local councils identified as having broadband blackspots but few have yet got projects up and running.



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DIY search engine takes on Google

Google, Bing, Yahoo and other search sites have a new rival called YaCy.

Backed by free software activists, YaCy aims to literally put search into the hands of users by distributing its indexing engine around the net.

Anyone can download the YaCy software and help the search system improve and spread the load of queries.

Its creators also hope YaCy will be much harder to censor than existing systems that pipe queries through centralised servers.

Peer privacy

The YaCy search page was opened to the public on 28 November and currently has about 600 participants or peers that share the load of queries and the task of indexing information.

"Most of what we do on the internet involves search," said Michael Christen, YaCy's project leader in a statement. "It's the vital link between us and the information we're looking for."

"For such an essential function, we cannot rely on a few large companies, and compromise our privacy in the process," he said.

YaCy (pronounced "Ya See") is supported by the Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE) which campaigns on digital rights and tries to help people control their own digital destiny.

FSFE said YaCy helps privacy by encrypting all queries and by letting peer owners build up and manage their own search profile.

"We are moving away from the idea that services need to be centrally controlled," said Karsten Gerloff, president of the FSFE. "Instead, we are realising how important it is to be independent, and to create infrastructure that doesn't have a single point of failure."

YaCy software is available for Windows, Linux and MacOS and users are being encouraged to download and run it for themselves.

The first version of YaCy has been used and refined on intranets for the FSFE and the Sciencenet search site.

On its opening day, the YaCy demo page struggled to handle all the queries coming its way.

The prospects for YaCy's success are mixed as there have many other pretenders to Google's crown. One of the most notable was a search engine called Cuil that was set up by two former Google workers.

Cuil launched in 2008 and struggled to win over significant numbers of users. It shut down in late September, 2010.



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200-year old press papers online

Four million pages of newspapers from the 18th and 19th centuries have been made available online by the British Library.

The public will now be able to scan the content of 200 titles from around the UK and Ireland.

These will include historic events such as the wedding of Victoria and Albert and the rise of the railways.

Ed King, the British Library's head of newspapers, said it opened up the collection "as never before".

The archive is free to search, but there is a charge for accessing the pages themselves.

Other stories contained within the scanned pages include reporting on the Charge of the Light Brigade.

Mr King said: "Rather than having to view the items on site at the Library, turning each page, people across the UK and around the world will be able to explore for themselves the goldmine of stories and information contained in these pages.

"The ability to search across millions of articles will yield results for each user that might previously have been the work of weeks or months, in a matter of seconds and the click of a mouse."

Included in the project are pages from the Aberdeen Journal, Belfast Newsletter, Western Mail and Manchester Evening News.

A team has spent a year at the British Library's newspaper library at Colindale, north London, digitising up to 8,000 pages a day.

They expect to scan up to 40m pages over the next 10 years.

Ed Vaizey, the Minister for Culture, Communications and Creative Industries, said the archive was "a rich and hugely exciting resource".

He added: "I searched for my own constituency of Wantage and within seconds had 42,000 results - an indication of the breadth and variety of material featured."



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