Saturday, July 9, 2011

Atlantic International Partnership Headlines: LulzSec Takes Hit, Keeps On Hacking

http://atlanticinternationalpartnershipreviews.com/category/business/

Slideshow: 10 Massive Security Breaches
The hacking group known as LulzSec shows no signs of slowing down. Early on Wednesday, the group announced that it had taken offline Brazil’s official government website, as well as the Brazilian president’s website. As of Wednesday afternoon, both sites still appeared to be unreachable.LulzSec’s activities and taunts come despite the arrest of a 19-year-old hacking suspect on Tuesday, outside London, who was reportedly involved in the group. “Seems the glorious leader of LulzSec got arrested, it’s all over now… wait… we’re all still here! Which poor bastard did they take down?” said LulzSec via Twitter.

We spoke with Chris Sather, Product Management for Network Defense at McAfee about McAfee’s next generation firewalls that analyze relationships and not protocols.
LulzSec said the person arrested by British police, named by authorities on Wednesday as Ryan Cleary, ran a server on which one of LulzSec’s many chat rooms had been hosted. “Clearly the UK police are so desperate to catch us that they’ve gone and arrested someone who is, at best, mildly associated with us. Lame,” said the group via Twitter.
On Wednesday, British police charged Cleary on multiple counts, including an October 2010 distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack against the British Phonographic Industry website, and Monday’s botnet-driven DDoS attack against the UK’s Serious Organized Crime Agency (SOCA) website. That attack occurred under the #AntiSec banner, which is a LulzSec’s joint operation with Anonymous.

Atlantic International Partnership Headlines: The Day the Internet Shut Down. LOL.

http://atlanticinternationalpartnershipnews.com/Sports/madrid-news/

Lulz, of course, is the plural form of LOL, and typically gets translated as “just for kicks.” As in, “Hey, we just took down the CIA website. We did it for the lulz.” Or, “I just threw a pie in your face and slashed your car’s tires. Epic lulz.” While Anonymous takes on political and moral issues – like the arrest of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange or the situation in Iran – with hacktivist-style interventions, LulzSec is more content to pull Ashton Kutcher-style Internet pranks and laugh about it with 180,000 of their closest Twitter followers. Decide for yourself: the unofficial symbol of Anonymous is the V for Vendetta mask, while the unofficial symbol of LulzSec looks like that cartoon Proust guy from Vanity Fair. (Or maybe it’s the Pringles guy? LOL.)
So what does it mean for the future of the Internet that LulzSec has been systematically pranking some of the world’s largest corporations and governments? Is it a “bad new world” for the Internet (as Sony CEO Howard Stringer put it) — a fateful sign that the Internet Kill Switch might be a lot easier to access than any of us ever thought? Or just some harmless pranks by a bunch of script kiddies with really powerful computers, looking for a few laughs and some attention from the world?
If you check out the LulzSec website, they announce their mission statement: to bring high-quality fun back to the Internet (at your expense, of course. LOL). Turn up the volume: there’s the theme from The Love Boat playing, and a painfully rudimentary-looking website. Seriously, governments are supposed to be afraid of these people? Are you laughing? Maybe, umm, that is, as long as your credit card data hasn’t been swiped, your email account info wasn’t made public, or your Sony PlayStation videogame wasn’t taken offline for days at a time.

Atlantic International Partnership Headlines: Elders Offer Help at Japan’s Crippled Reactor

http://atlanticinternationalpartnership-headlines.com/“It would benefit society if the older generation took the job because we will get less damage from working there,” said Yasuteru Yamada.
Seemingly against logic, Yasuteru Yamada, 72, is eager for the chance to take part. After seeing hundreds of younger men on television struggle to control the damage at the Daiichi power plant, Mr. Yamada struck on an idea: Recruit other older engineers and other specialists to help tame the rogue reactors.
Not only do they have some of the skills needed, but because of their advanced age, they are at less risk of getting cancer and other diseases that develop slowly as a result of exposure to high levels of radiation. Their volunteering would spare younger Japanese from dangers that could leave them childless, or worse.
“We have to contain this accident, and for that, someone should do the work,” said Mr. Yamada, a retired plant engineer who had worked for Sumitomo Metal Industries. “It would benefit society if the older generation took the job because we will get less damage from working there.”
Weeks after the devastating earthquake and tsunami struck, he and Nobuhiro Shiotani, a childhood friend who is also an engineer, formed the Skilled Veterans Corps in early April. They sent out thousands of e-mails and letters, and even set up a Twitter account. On his blog, bouhatsusoshi.jp/english, Mr. Yamada called on people over age 60 who have “the physical strength and experience to bear the burden of this front-line work.”