“Hacktivists Starting Cyber Attack against Israel on 7th of
April,” Anonymous wrote on Twitter, calling on hackers around
the world to join up for a second ‘OpIsrael.’

Israeli government agencies are reportedly readying for the
attack: “It’s something being organized online over the past few
days. What distinguishes this plan when compared to previous
attacks is that it really seems to be organized by
Anonymous-affiliated groups from around the world in what looks
like a joining of forces,” Ofir Ben Avi, director of online
group Accessible Government told Haaretz.

The first ‘OpIsrael’ cyber-attacks were launched by the
hacktivist group during Israeli’s ‘Pillar of Defense’ assault on
Gaza in November 2012.

“We are Anonymous. We are legion. We will not forgive. We
will not forget. Israel, it is too late to expect us,” their
message to Israeli authorities read.

Some 700 Israeli website suffered repeated cyber-attacks, including
high-profile government systems such as the Foreign Ministry, and
the Israeli President’s official website. The Israeli Finance
Ministry reported an estimated 44 million unique attacks on government websites.

Following ‘OpIsrael,’ Anonymous posted the online personal data
of 5,000 Israeli officials, including names, ID numbers and
personal emails.

Anonymous was also involved in an attack in which the details of
some 600,000 users of the popular Israeli email service Walla were
exposed online.

—

Source:

rt.com

Dilbert – Software Requirement Analysis

“We are discontinuing support for our older apps: TweetDeck AIR, TweetDeck for Android and TweetDeck for iPhone. They will be removed from their respective app stores in early May and will stop functioning shortly thereafter. We’ll also discontinue support for our Facebook integration.”

Well, their blog post have said it all yesterday. Should start looking for better mobile apps , if any...

Here’s their yesterday’s post:

An update on TweetDeck

TweetDeck is the most powerful Twitter tool for tracking real-time conversations. Its flexibility and customizable layout let you keep up with what’s happening on Twitter, across multiple topics and accounts, in real time. To continue to offer a great product that addresses your unique needs, we’re going to focus our development efforts on our modern, web-based versions of TweetDeck. To that end, we are discontinuing support for our older apps: TweetDeck AIR, TweetDeck for Android and TweetDeck for iPhone. They will be removed from their respective app stores in early May and will stop functioning shortly thereafter. We’ll also discontinue support for our Facebook integration.

Over the past 18 months, we’ve been focused on building a fast and feature-rich web application for modern browsers, and a Chrome app, which offers some unique features like notifications. We’ve recently introduced many enhancements to these apps –– a new look and feel, tools like search term autocomplete and search filters to help you find what you’re looking for more quickly, and automatically-updating Tweet streams so you immediately see the most recent Tweets. Our weekly web releases have been possible because we’ve nearly doubled the size of the TweetDeck team over the past six months (and we’re still hiring).

In many ways, doubling down on the TweetDeck web experience and discontinuing our app support is a reflection of where our TweetDeck power-users are going. Over the past few years, we’ve seen a steady trend towards people using TweetDeck on their computers and Twitter on their mobile devices. This trend coincides with an increased investment in Twitter for iPhone and Twitter for Android –– adding photo filters and other editing capabilities, revamping user profiles and enhancing search. That said, we know this applies to most of our users –– not all of them. And for those of you who are inconvenienced by this shift, our sincere apologies.

Additionally, TweetDeck AIR, TweetDeck for Android and TweetDeck for iPhone rely on v1.0 of Twitter’s API, which we are retiring starting this month. Leading up to that retirement, Twitter’s platform team will be performing occasional tests that will affect applications that rely on API v1.0. Over the next two months users of TweetDeck AIR, TweetDeck for Android and TweetDeck for iPhone may experience some outages with those apps before they are removed from their respective app stores in early May.

We think these web and Chrome apps provide the best TweetDeck experience yet, and that they are the apps in which you’ll want to see us add new capabilities first, followed closely by our Mac and PC apps.

From the whole TweetDeck team, we’re excited about what the future holds. We hope you are too.

“It doesn’t matter how you get knocked down in life, ’cause that’s gonna happen. All that matters is you gotta get up.”

— Ben Affleck, receiving the 2013 Oscar Best Picture award for Argo.

Get Knocked Down in Life and Get Up

“If they knew that our entire office is a chat room on IRC, they wouldn’t believe it.”

– Fredrik Neij #TPBAFK

Our Entire Office is a Chat Room on IRC

“We don’t use the expression IRL (In Real Life). We say ‘away from keyboard’. We think the Internet is for real.”

– Peter Sunde (#TPBAFK)

AFK, Not IRL

And according to Lord, the attackers “were extremely sophisticated, and we believe other companies and organizations have also been recently similarly attacked.”

Friday, February 15th: Facebook announced it was hacked. According to the Security Team’s note (Protecting People On Facebook), a handful of employees visited a compromised website hosting a Java “exploit which then allowed malware to be installed on these employee laptops.”

So, disable Java’s browser plugin by default, and only enable it when you really need to do so. But we already knew that, didn’t we?

And while everybody else is bashing Oracle, we have a more interesting question: what malware on what type of laptop?

Why? Because Macs are the type of laptop we almost aways see in Facebook’s employee photos.

Here’s Facebook’s Security Team’s Cover Photo:

Image — Facebook Security: “Own Your Space”

As we’ve already speculated on February 4th, an exploit opens the door — what walked through that door and onto the hip young Silicon Valley developer’s MacBook?

Well, interestingly enough, last Friday evening, we received (via a mailing list) new Mac malware samples to analyze. Samples that were uploaded to VirusTotal on January 31st, one day before Twitter’s announcement.

One type of sample are custom compiled SSH daemons which we suspect are very likely dropped by an exploit. The others aren’t actually “samples” insofar as they aren’t binaries, they’re one line of program (Perl) which runs at startup and opens a reverse shell.

The URLs used include: a misspelling of “Apple Corp”; something that sounds like a digital consulting company; and something that pretends to be a cloud storage service.

Okay, so there’s a Mac threat out there and most Mac users are completely unaware of it. They have a false sense of security. That’s bad, right? But that’s not even the worst of it when you really consider all of the details. What was the compromised website which hosted the Java exploit? According to Facebook’s note, it was a mobile developer website!

Get it? A “watering hole” attack targeting mobile application developers.

As in… can’t hack mobile devices? Okay then, go up stream and hack mobile application developers. At which point you can inject whatever you want into the developer’s source code.

Twitter and Facebook obviously have dedicated security teams on the lookout for trouble. (They’re big targets.) Unfortunately, other smaller Silicon Valley startups (with big user bases) don’t have the same resources. At this point, we really hope somebody has been in touch with the folks at WhatsApp, which according to Google Play, has at least 100 million installations.

There are hundreds of thousands if not millions of mobile apps in the world. How many of the apps’ developers do you think have visited a mobile developer website recently? With a Mac… and a very false sense of security?

We’ll all be very lucky if this watering hole was only really trying to target big players such as Twitter and Facebook. On the other hand, if the campaign had a broader goal of hacking as many developers as possible — it really calls into question current bring your own device policies. BYOD = Bring your own destruction?

Advice

SSH daemon compromised systems will have one of the following:

•  com.apple.cupsd.plist
•  com.apple.cups.plist

Perl compromised systems will have one of the following:

•  com.apple.cocoa.plist
•  com.apple.env.plist

Any developer who has Java enabled in his browser, has visited mobile developer websites in the last couple of months, and finds evidence his computer is compromised — probably should use his source code versioning system to check recent commits.

And if you don’t use a source code version system (such as SVN or Git), have fun re-reading your entire code base.

Edited to add: And it should almost go without saying that developers using Windows should practice the same vigilance.

—

Source:
www.f-secure.com/weblog

The video above is one documentary clip elaborating the history of the well-known Internet. It is a 2009 animation created and directed by Melih Bilgil.

There are some choices of subtitles in several languages that you can pick, including English.

Source:
www.lonja.de/the-history-of-the-internet

—

[Versi Bahasa Indonesia]

Professor Wiesenfeld? I took your Physics 2121 class? I flunked it? I wonder if there’s anything I can do to improve my grade?

I got a D in your class. Is there any way you can change it to ‘Incomplete’?I’m shy about coming in to talk to you, but I’m not shy about asking for a better grade. Anyway, it’s worth a try.

If my grade isn’t raised to a D, I’ll lose my scholarship.

If you don’t give me a C, I’ll flunk out.

If I don’t pass, my life is over.

They are likely to come out from students –at least Dr. Wiesenfeld’s— in the end of the semester. Check out what he thinks about it.

Some students wheedle for a better grade, as if it were a freebie T-shirt

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By Kurt Wiesenfeld

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It was a rookie error. After 10 years I should have known better, but I went to my office the day after final grades were posted. There was a tentative knock on the door. “Professor Wiesenfeld? I took your Physics 2121 class? I flunked it? I wonder if there’s anything I can do to improve my grade?”

I thought: “Why are you asking me? Isn’t it too late to worry about it? Do you dislike making declarative statements?”

After the student gave his tale of woe and left, the phone rang. “I got a D in your class. Is there any way you can change it to ‘Incomplete’?” Then the e-mail assault began: “I’m shy about coming in to talk to you, but I’m not shy about asking for a better grade. Anyway, it’s worth a try.” The next day I had three phone messages from students asking me to call them. I didn’t.

Time was, when you received a grade, that was it. You might groan and moan, but you accepted it as the outcome of your efforts or lack thereof (and, yes, sometimes a tough grader). In the last few years, however, some students have developed a disgruntled-consumer approach. If they don’t like their grade, they go to the “return” counter to trade it in for something better.

Gimme a Break

What alarms me is their indifference toward grades as an indication of personal effort and performance. Many, when pressed about why they think they deserve a better grade, admit they don’t deserve one but would like one anyway. Having been raised on gold stars for effort and smiley faces for self-esteem, they’ve learned that they can get by without hard work and real talent if they can talk the professor into giving them a break. This attitude is beyond cynicism. There’s a weird innocence to the assumption that one expects (even deserves) a better grade by begging for it. With that outlook, I guess I shouldn’t be as flabbergasted as I was that 12 students asked me to change their grades after final grades were posted.

That’s 10 percent of my class who let three months of midterms, quizzes and lab reports slide until long past remedy. My graduate student calls it hyperrational thinking: if effort and intelligence don’t matter, why should deadlines? What matters is getting a better grade through an unearned bonus, the academic equivalent of a freebie T-shirt or toaster giveaway. Rewards are disconnected from the quality of one’s work. An act and its consequences are unrelated, random events.

Their arguments for wheedling better grades often ignore academic performance. Perhaps they feel it’s not relevant. “If my grade isn’t raised to a D, I’ll lose my scholarship.” “If you don’t give me a C, I’ll flunk out.” One sincerely overwrought student pleaded, “If I don’t pass, my life is over.”

Grades Broker

This is tough stuff to deal with. Apparently, I’m responsible for someone’s losing a scholarship, flunking out or deciding whether life has meaning. Perhaps these students see me as a commodities broker with something they want–a grade. Though intrinsically worthless, grades, if properly manipulated, can be traded for what has value: a degree, which means a job, which means money. The one thing college actually offers–a chance to learn–is considered irrelevant, less than worthless, because of the long hours and hard work required.

In a society saturated with surface values, love of knowledge for its own sake does sound eccentric. The benefits of fame and wealth are more obvious. So is it right to blame students for the superficial values saturating our society?

Yes, of course it’s right. These guys had better take themselves seriously now, because our country will be forced to take them seriously later, when the stakes are much higher. They must recognize that their attitude is not only self-destructive, but socially destructive. The erosion of quality control–giving appropriate grades for actual accomplishments–is a major concern in my department. One colleague noted that a physics major could obtain a degree without ever answering a written exam question completely. How? By pulling in enough partial credit and extra credit. And by getting breaks on grades.

But what happens once she or he graduates and gets a job? That’s when the misfortunes of eroding academic standards multiply. We lament that schoolchildren get “kicked upstairs” until they graduate from high school despite being illiterate and mathematically inept, but we seem unconcerned with college graduates whose less blatant deficiencies are far more harmful, if their accreditation exceeds their qualifications.

Partial Successes

Most of my students are science and engineering majors. If they’re good at getting partial credit but not at getting the answer right, then the new bridge breaks or the new drug doesn’t work. One finds examples here in Atlanta. Last year a light tower in the Olympic Stadium collapsed, killing a worker. It collapsed because an engineer miscalculated how much weight it could hold. A new 12-story dormitory could develop dangerous cracks due to a foundation that’s uneven by more than six inches. The error resulted from incorrect data being fed into a computer. I drive past that dorm daily on my way to work, wondering if a foundation crushed under kilotons of weight is repairable or if this structure will have to be demolished. Two 10,000-pound steel beams at the new Aquatic Center collapsed in March, crashing into the Student Athletic Complex. (Should we give partial credit since no one was hurt?) Those are real-world consequences of errors and lack of expertise.

But the lesson is lost on the grade-grousing 10 percent. Say that you won’t (not can’t, but won’t) change the grade they deserve to what they want, and they’re frequently bewildered or angry. They don’t think it’s fair that they’re judged according to their performance, not their desires or “potential.” They don’t think it’s fair that they should jeopardize their scholarships or be in danger of flunking out simply because they could not or did not do their work. But it’s more than fair; it’s necessary to help preserve a minimum standard of quality that our society needs to maintain safety and integrity. I don’t know if the 13th-hour students will learn that lesson, but I’ve learned mine. From now on, after final grades are posted, I’ll lie low until the next quarter starts.

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Dr. Kurt A. Wiesenfeld is an associate professor in the School of Physics. This article originally appeared in the June 17 (1996) issue of Newsweek magazine.