LulzSec opens hack request line

15 June 2011 Last updated at 06:24 ET

The hacker group Lulz Security has opened a telephone request line so its fans can suggest potential targets.

It claims to have launched denial of service attacks on several websites as a result, although it did not detail which ones.

The unspecified hacks formed part of a wave of security breaches that the group called Titanic Takeover Tuesday.

LulzSec has risen to prominence in recent months by attacking Sony, Nintendo and several US broadcasters.

The group publicised the telephone hotline on its Twitter feed.

Callers to the US number are met with a recorded message, in a heavy French accent, by an individual calling themself Pierre Dubois.

While the 614 area code appears to relate to the state of Ohio, it is unlikely that this is its real location.

Lulz Security said it had used distributed denial of service attacks (DDoS) against eight sites suggested by callers.

It also claimed to have hit the websites of gaming magazine The Escapist, and multiplayer games EVE Online and League of Legends.

DDoS attacks typically involve crashing a website by inundating it with requests from computers under the attacker's control.

It is unclear, in this instance, if LulzSec went beyond overloading the sites and sought to gain access to information stored on their servers.

Protest groups

Little is known about Lulz Security, other than their apparent "hacktivist' motivation.

The organisations and companies that it targets are often portrayed as having acted against the interests of citizens or consumers.

Its high profile attack on SonyPictures.com exposed, Lulz claimed, the company's ongoing inability to secure users' personal data.

Along with Anonymous, LulzSec has raised the profile of hacker groups as a potential threat to online services.

Hacktivists see their role as staging valid protests in the most high profile way possible, according to Peter Wood, founder of security consultancy First Base.

"The things they are exploiting at the moment are the sort of mistakes that organisations seem to have been making ever since they connected to the internet.

"Finally there are some players out there who are using them as a means to protest. Whether everyone agrees with them is a different question."

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Google ramps up speed of search

15 June 2011 Last updated at 06:14 ET By Maggie Shiels Technology reporter, Silicon Valley

Google has made changes to its search engine as it strives to get consumers the information they want faster.

Its new Instant Pages system will shave between two to five seconds off the time it takes for a web page to load, the company said.

It is also planning to offer voice-activated and enhanced image searching.

Google, which processes one billion requests every day, said search remained its core focus.

The firm still dominates the market although Microsoft's Bing is slowly eating into its share.

Bing's US searches rose to 14 percent in May from 12 percent at the end of 2010. It also powers searching on Yahoo, which has 15.9 percent of the market while Google's share slipped to 66 percent from 67 percent, according to measurement firm comScore

Instant Pages works by pre-loading the page associated with the top search result in the background as a user decides what to click on.

Google relies on its relevance technology to confidently predict the number one result a user will pick.

That means when the top pre-rendered link is chosen, the web page opens instantaneously.

The search giant said it typically takes around five seconds for a web page to launch once someone clicks on it.

"We at Google will not be happy until we make the Web as easy to flip through as a magazine," Google fellow Amit Singhal said at the Inside Search event in San Francisco.

"We are obsessed with speed. We often say speed is still the killer app," he added.

During a demo at the event the Washington Post home page loaded immediately with Instant Pages, compared to 3.2 seconds without it.

Last year the Silicon Valley firm introduced Google Instant which gives users results to queries while queries are being typed into the search box.

Positive impact

"What we have observed is that every time we shave 15 milliseconds from the speed, users search more and more, said Mr Singhal.

Over the next couple of weeks Instant Pages will be made available to users of Google's Chrome web browser.

The company said it would open access to the software code so other browsers such as Firefox and Internet Explorer could also incorporate the feature.

"Making it ubiquitous will make people go wow, Google just made the web faster," said Matt Rosoff, west coast editor of Business Insider.

"As far as Google is concerned it is another thing that will continue to draw people to Google and make sure they don't leave for another competitor like Microsoft."

Say it

On mobile, Google is offering an alternative to the traditional keyword search with icons linked to common searches such as restaurants, coffee shops and bars.

It said that the move was prompted by a rise in searches involving nearby places.

The company is also preparing to introduce voice-activated search for personal computers. The feature already exists on mobile devices.

The tool, represented by a small microphone icon in the far right of the Google search box, will appear over the coming days.

In a demonstration, reporters were shown that the search engine understands the difference between Worcester, Massachusetts, and Wooster College - words that sound the same but are spelt differently.

"Arguably speaking is the most natural way we learn to express our needs. It remains to be seen what kinds of usage scenarios may be important when it comes to the desktop. As the data comes in we will learn (that) over time," said Mike Cohen, manager of speech technology at Google.

According to Google, voice search traffic has grown six-fold over the past year, and every day users speak about two years' worth of speech into the system.

The company also revealed during its presentation that as many as 230 billion words a day are entered into the language bank system, helping to improve the way it deals with accents, pronunciations and colloquialisms.

The speech recognition tool will only be available on Google's Chrome web browser for now but executives said they hope other software makers would eventually implement the technology.

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Facebook denies losing users

14 June 2011 Last updated at 07:39 ET

Facebook has denied that it is losing customers, saying it is "pleased" with growth.

Figures from Faceboook monitoring site Inside Facebook suggested that during May, Facebook lost six million users in the US and 100,000 in the UK.

But the social network, which does not usually comment on third party statistics, questioned how it arrived at this figure.

Other net measurement firms said they had seen growth over the same period.

"From time to time, we see stories about Facebook losing users in some regions. Some of these reports use data extracted from our advertising tool, which provides broad estimates on the reach of Facebook ads and isn't designed to be a source for tracking the overall growth of Facebook," the firm said in a statement.

"We are very pleased with our growth and with the way people are engaged with Facebook. More than 50% of our active users log on to Facebook in any given day," it added.

The figures from Inside Facebook claimed that 1.5 million Canadian users left the social network in May.

But overall it showed that Facebook was growing, to a total of 687 million users worldwide with many new customers coming from countries such as India, the Philippines and Indonesia.

Its figures on customer leakage do not appear to tally with those from net measurement firm comScore.

It told the BBC it had seen a 21% growth for US users on Facebook during May, while the UK gained 368,000 new recruits between February and May.

According to comScore, the average amount of time spent on the site was also up, from 21 minutes per day in December 2009 to 25 minutes per day by December 2010.

Measurement firm Nielsen said its figures also showed growth.

"There are months when figures dip but I'd be very cautious on calling a trend based on two months," said Nielsen spokesman Neil Beston.

The idea of Facebook fatigue, where users desert the social network after a certain period of time has long been talked about by experts but remains unproven.

"In developed countries such as the US and the UK Facebook penetration is hitting 50% and at that level it is inevitable that users will sign up who aren't frequent visitors," said Adrian Drury, lead analyst at research firm Ovum.

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Turkey arrests Anonymous members

14 June 2011 Last updated at 06:05 ET

Turkish police have arrested 32 people believed to be members of hacker collective Anonymous.

The group has been active in Turkey protesting against government plans to set up a national net filtering system.

Action against the group was started following a complaint from the Turkish directorate of telecommunications whose website was hit by Anonymous.

The arrests follow similar action by police in Spain who detained three members of the hacker group.

On 22 August, Turkey is planning to turn on a system that demands people sign up for one of four filtering packages designed for different types of users.

The Turkish government claims this system is needed to protect younger web users from net-borne dangers. Critics, including Anonymous, say the filtering system will be used to monitor web activity and suppress dissent.

Many Turkish people have mounted street demonstrations to protest against the introduction of the filters.

On 10 June, Anonymous took action in support of these protests by knocking several Turkish government websites offline. It used an attack tool known as the Low Orbit Ion Cannon (Loic) which bombards targets with so much data that they become overwhelmed.

The arrests came only days after the attacks were mounted and Turkish police may have exploited failings with Loic that allow users of it to be traced. Arrests were made in 12 cities around Turkey and eight of those detained are believed to be minors.

On 10 June, the Spanish national police announced that it had arrested three people believed to be members of Anonymous. In retaliation, Anonymous took the national police service site offline for a few hours.

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Hackers break into US Senate site

13 June 2011 Last updated at 21:34 ET

US officials said they have ordered a security review after hackers managed to break into the Senate website at the weekend.

An official said the incident had been "inconvenient", but had not compromised the security of the staff.

The confirmation came after Lulz Security, a loosely aligned group of hackers, said it had carried out the attack for fun and posted files online.

Lulz has previously targeted Sony, Nintendo and Fox News.

Senate Deputy Sergeant-at-Arms Martina Bradford said the hacking had been noticed at the weekend, and that officials were now reviewing all the sites hosted on Senate.gov.

"Specifically, there is no individual user account information on the server supporting senate.gov that could have been compromised," she said in a statement.

Lulz Security posted files online which indicated they had been in the Senate network. However, none of the files appeared to be sensitive.

"We don't like the US government very much," Lulz Security said at the top of a release.

"This is a small, just-for-kicks release of some internal data from Senate.gov - is this an act of war, gentlemen? Problem?" it added.

The US recently said it would consider cyber attacks an "act of war", and reserved the right to respond to attacks with conventional means if they were found to have been orchestrated by a nation state.

Lulz is a reference to internet-speak for "laugh out loud".

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Facebook juror in court hearing

13 June 2011 Last updated at 22:09 ET

A juror who allegedly contacted a defendant via Facebook faces Contempt of Court proceedings in a legal first.

Joanne Fraill is accused of contacting Jamie Sewart, a defendant in a trial that subsequently collapsed.

The contact led the judge to discharge the jury in the massive 10-week drugs trial.

The pair face up to two years in prison if found guilty at the hearing at the High Court in London on Tuesday.

The case, brought by the Attorney General Dominic Grieve QC, is being heard by the Lord Chief Justice, Lord Judge.

Another man who was convicted and jailed in the case is appealing, claiming jury misconduct in the aborted trial that took place last year in Manchester.

Earlier this year, the attorney general sought permission at the High Court to bring the proceedings against Ms Frail, of Blackley, Manchester, and Ms Sewart, of Bolton.

The alleged contact occurred after Ms Sewart had already been acquitted but the jury had still to reach verdicts on other defendants.

Ms Fraill is also said to have conducted internet research on defendants, despite instructions from the judge to only decide the case on the evidence in court.

Angus McCullough QC, for the attorney general, told the High Court: "Ms Fraill contacted Ms Sewart via the internet and conducted an online conversation with her.

"The discussion took place at a time when the jury still had outstanding verdicts to return on the case.

"That contact and discussion were in direct breach of the judge's repeated directions to the jury that they should not discuss the case with anyone outside their number, and constituted a contempt of court.

"Ms Fraill also conducted internet searches on the defendants she was trying."

In a speech last year, the Lord Chief Justice warned that jurors could go to jail if they searched the internet for information on defendants. At the time of the speech, he said that he knew of one rape trial which had been stopped because of online research by jurors.

"It is at least arguable that for a juror to examine the internet for information relating to the case is a contempt of court, and a criminal contempt," he said.

"One consequence of the use, or rather misuse of modern technology in the course of the trial would be that they may be liable to a finding of contempt of court, and indeed a sentence."

Have you served on a jury and do you have concerns about how the internet and social media may be used by jurors in court cases and interfere with justice? What do you think courts can do to ensure a fair trial? Send us your comments using the form below.

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Government 'may have hacked IMF'

13 June 2011 Last updated at 10:31 ET

Hackers who broke into the International Monetary Fund's computer system may have been backed by a nation state, according to security experts.

They point to the sophisticated nature of the attack and the resources needed to develop it.

Malicious software, designed to steal confidential files, was installed on at least one IMF computer.

Although government involvement is widely suspected, the IMF has not released enough details to be sure.

Digital insider

Based on the limited information made public, it appears that the attack came from a specific PC that had been deliberately infected.

Hacker software was likely to have been installed on it in what is known as a spear-phishing attack, which sees highly targeted scam e-mails sent to specific victims.

A memo circulated internally at the IMF reported that "suspicious file transfers" had been detected.

Tom Kellerman, a security expert who has worked for the IMF and now sits on the board of the International Cyber Security Protection Alliance told Reuters news agency that it was "a targeted attack" with code written specifically to give a nation state a "digital insider presence" on the IMF network.

Graham Titherington, a security analyst with research firm Ovum agreed with the nation state theory.

"Any attack that shows money, time and resources went on it points to a state attack. States and their intelligence agencies have far more resources than criminal gangs," he said.

The information held by the IMF would be clearly be most valuable to a country, he added.

"It has masses of economic information from the performance of countries to the state of their balance sheets. For countries deciding where to invest it is invaluable," he said.

State-sponsored hacking has gained prominence in recent months.

"Google shifted the debate by going public on a hack attack believed to be by China," said Mr Titherington.

The Chinese government has denied involvement in the recent attack on Google's e-mail accounts.

The incident compromised the personal Gmail accounts of hundreds of top US officials, military personnel and journalists.

Google said that the campaign to obtain passwords originated in the Chinese city of Jinan and was aimed at monitoring e-mail.

According to Mark Darvill, director of security firm AEP Networks, many countries are involved in cyber espionage but China remained at the "forefront".

"China has recently set up a cyber terrorism unit which is very likely to be looking at opportunities rather than to stop attacks," he said.

Convenient excuse

Not everyone is convinced that state-sponsored attacks or Advanced Persistent Threat (APTs) are the cause of the IMF hack.

Tal Be'ery, a web Research Team Leader at the Application Defense Center (ADC) said it could be a "convenient excuse".

"It is easier for organisations to hide under this excuse when really it is something lacking in their defences.

"We don't have enough credible information about the IMF attack. It needs to provide good evidence that it was a APT. It is just as likely to be a lone hacker acting out of curiosity," he said.

The most high profile state-sponsored attack to date remains the Stuxnet worm, which targeted Iran's nuclear facilities.

Experts believe the complex malicious code originated from either the Israeli or US governments.

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Spanish police hit by Anonymous

13 June 2011 Last updated at 06:50 ET

The website of Spain's national police force has been briefly knocked offline by hacker collective Anonymous.

The attack on the site was carried out in retaliation for the arrest of three Spanish men the police claimed were 'core' members of the group.

The hackers managed to keep www.policia.es offline for about an hour from 2130 GMT on 12 June.

Spanish authorities would not confirm that Anonymous was behind the attack, saying only that the site was offline.

However, a statement was posted on a website linked to Anonymous, claimed responsibility for the hack, which it called #OpPolicia.

The group said it had used a distributed denial of service attack (DDoS) which bombards a target website with so much data that it becomes overwhelmed.

A spokesman for the Spanish police said the cause of the outage had not yet been established.

"A website can collapse if too many people try to access it at once. I cannot confirm the link with the Anonymous group," said the spokesman.

In its statement, Anonymous said the DDoS attack was a "direct response to the Friday arrests of three individuals alleged to be associated with acts of cyber civil disobedience attributed to Anonymous."

The group said DDoS attacks were a legitimate form of peaceful protest. Some of its members are thought to have carried out similar attacks on Turkish government websites to protest against net censorship.

Anonymous also denied that the men arrested were part of the "core" of Spanish members of the group.

"They did not arrest any core group, because we don't have a core group," said Anonymous in its statement.

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Single cell is first living laser

12 June 2011 Last updated at 20:42 ET By Jason Palmer Science and technology reporter, BBC News

A single living cell has been coaxed into producing laser light, researchers report in Nature Photonics.

The technique starts by engineering a cell that can produce a light-emitting protein that was first obtained from glowing jellyfish.

Flooding the resulting cells with weak blue light causes them to emit directed, green laser light.

The work may have applications in improved microscope imaging and light-based therapies.

Laser light differs from normal light in that it is of a narrow band of colours, with the light waves all oscillating together in synchrony.

Most modern forms use carefully engineered solid materials to produce lasers in everything from supermarket scanners to DVD players to industrial robots.

The new work, by Malte Gather and Seok Hyun Yun at the Wellman Center for Photomedicine at Massachusetts General Hospital in the US, marks the first time the phenomenon has been seen in a living system.

The pair used green fluorescent protein (GFP) as the laser's "gain medium", where light amplification takes place.

GFP is a well-studied molecule, first isolated from jellyfish, that has revolutionised biology by acting as a custom-made "torch" that can light up living systems on command.

In the new work, cells derived from human kidney cells were genetically engineered to produce GFP.

Bathed in light

The cells were then placed one at a time between two tiny mirrors, just 20 millionths of a metre across, which acted as the "laser cavity" in which light could bounce many times through the cell.

Upon bathing the cell with blue light, it could be seen to emit directed and intense green laser light.

The cells remained alive throughout and after the process. The authors note in an accompanying interview in the journal that the living system is a "self-healing" laser; if the light-emitting proteins are destroyed in the process, the cell will simply produce more.

"In cellular sensing, we may be able to detect intracellular processes with unprecedented sensitivity," they said.

"For light-based therapeutics, diagnosis and imaging, people think about how to deliver emission from an external laser source deep into tissue. Now we can approach this problem in another way: by amplifying light in the tissue (itself)."

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IMF hit by 'major' cyber attack

11 June 2011 Last updated at 21:25 ET

The International Monetary Fund (IMF) says it has been targeted by a sophisticated cyber attack.

Officials at the fund gave few details but said the attack earlier this year had been "a very major breach" of its systems, the New York Times reports.

Cyber security officials said the hack was designed to install software to create a "digital insider presence".

The IMF, which holds sensitive economic data about many countries, said its operations were fully functional.

The cyber attack took place over several months, and happened before former IMF chief Dominique Strauss-Kahn was arrested over sexual assault charges.

"I can confirm that we are investigating an incident," said spokesman David Hawley.

"I am not in a position to elaborate further on the extent of the cyber security incident."

The New York Times said IMF staff had been told of the intrusion on Wednesday by e-mail, but that the Fund had not made a public announcement.

The e-mail warned that "suspicious file transfers" had been detected and that an investigation had shown a desktop at the Fund had been "compromised and used to access some Fund systems".

There was "no reason to believe that any personal information was sought for fraud purposes," it said.

High profile breaches

A cyber security expert told Reuters the infiltration had been a targeted attack, which installed software designed to give a nation state a "digital insider presence" at the IMF.

"The code was developed and released for this purpose," said Tom Kellerman, who has worked for the Fund.

Bloomberg quoted an unnamed security expert as saying the hackers were connected to a foreign government - however such attacks are very difficult to trace.

The World Bank said it briefly cut its network connection with the Fund out "an abundance of caution".

"The World Bank Group, like any other large organisation, is increasingly aware of potential threats to the security of our information system and we are constantly working to improve our defences," said spokesman Rich Mills.

The incident is the latest in a string of high profile cyber security breaches.

In April, the Sony Playstation network was shut down after hackers stole the personal data of about 100 million accounts and in May, US defence firm Lockheed Martin said it had come under a significant cyber-attack.

CIA Director Leon Panetta told the US Congress earlier this week that a large-scale cyber attack while would cripples power, finance, security and governmental systems was "a real possibility in today's world".

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