Why Google Wants To Breakup With China?

Are you guys are as confused as me, over why Google wants to quit China? Is it only because of one attack, which compromised access to some of its email accounts?

Really?? Is that it? Is this a good enough reason to quit from a country like China?

Here is any interesting article that gives out some more details. Not surprisingly, this one comes from a Non-IT website:

Hindustan Times

Update: Hmmm... I guess there is more to this story. Attackers also took Gaia (which is Google's single sign on authentication system) with them. Well not literally, they stole the program's source code.

What that means, is best left to anyone and everyone's imagination. If the program is not secure enough, well hackers could break in now. Even worse, I hope the system did not have an actual backdoor, which gave Google's executives a direct entry into the system..!

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/20/technology/20google.html

COFEE vs DECAF

It cannot get any more hilarious than this:


Two developers have created "Detect and Eliminate Computer Assisted Forensics" (DECAF). The tool tries to stop Microsoft's Computer Online Forensic Evidence Extractor (COFEE), which helps law enforcement officials grab data from password protected or encrypted sources.

Orignal Source: arstechnica

Which Antivirus To Use?

This is one question, that all security professionals get asked a lot. Goes without saying, any one person’s opinion may not be the statistically correct answer. To make matters even worse, (un)fortunately, there are a number of reports out there which probably, only Einstein and Bill Gates can read, decipher and really understand.

Here is one simple, to the point, straight forward report that I think answers this question bang on: Battle of the anti-virus

Hotmail Compromised

I hope everyone out there is aware of this hack. I would recommend everyone to change their passwords asap.

ISC's Post

Cracking Encryption Keys

We all know we need to protect sensitive, confidential or customer related data, with strong encryption algorithms and lengthy keys.

But where does the buck stop? How much security is too much security, for something with absolutely no financial value - like for example a calculator’s Operating System?

Texas Instruments Signing Keys Broken

History of Hacking

An interesting time-line, for casual reading: History of Hacking

Using Twitter as a Botnet Command Channel

Just when you thought you knew everything there is to know about Twitter, here comes another surprise..!!

Brazilian ID thieves are using Twitter streams to send commands to their botnets. The bots are programmed to monitor RSS feeds from these Twitter accounts.

Sounds pretty innovative, right?