Category: Crime and Security

‘An Australian survey of 200 medium to large businesses and government organisations revealed that 97 per cent of respondents lacked sufficient security on their VoIP [Voice over Internet Protocol] systems. The survey, conducted in late 2005, found that nearly 60 per cent of organisations reported frequent breaches to the security of their data networks, more… Read more →

An interesting distributed computing project has reportedly cracked one of the Enigma cyphers used by the Germans during World War II. The M4 Message Breaking Project, founded in January by an amateur German cryptographer, harnesses the processing power of a wide network of computers in order to do in one months what the likes of… Read more →

Man attempts to make donation to tsunami relief fund, gets prosecuted for cybercrime violation. This is quite astonishing: “Last January, I got an email from a trusted source swearing that a good pal of his had been arrested while making a donation to an online tsunami relief fund because he’d been using a non-standard text-based… Read more →

Jennifer Kerr of the Associated Press writes, ‘Social Security cards, driver’s licenses, credit cards and other personal documents are literally floating around New Orleans, raising the prospect some hurricane survivors could be victimized again — this time by identity thieves. “This is probably not the most immediate concern that people have, but at a certain… Read more →

Orin Kerr offers this analysis of the circumstances in which the existence of an internet account will satisfy the ‘probable cause’ requirement to search a home for evidence: In [such] cases, the police know that an Internet account was used in a particular way potentially related to criminal activity. The police then use that knowledge… Read more →

Under new United States legislation, operators of the US electricity grid will be subject to greater regulation of their cybersecurity practices: A visit from the Slammer worm … may have been in part to blame for failures at a nuclear power plant in 2003, the report said. And in March, electric industry security consultants reported… Read more →

‘FAYETTE, Alabama (AP) — A 20-year-old whose lawyers claimed the video game Grand Theft Auto and childhood abuse caused him to kill three small-town police officers was convicted Tuesday of capital murder. Defense lawyers had partly blamed Moore’s actions on the hours he spent playing video games from the Grand Theft Auto series, in which… Read more →

Two American students are intent on making criminal history by spending their summer breaking as many US laws as possible. Starting in the liberal state of California, they hope to evade the attention of local police officers when they ride a bike in a swimming pool and curse on a crazy-golf course. In the far… Read more →

A US teenager has become the first person to be arrested on suspicion of sending unsolicited instant messages, or ‘spim’. Anthony Greco, 18, was lured from New York to Los Angeles under the pretence of a business meeting. He was arrested upon arrival at Los Angeles International Airport last Wednesday. Greco allegedly sent 1.5 million… Read more →

A man has denied attempting to hack into a website designed to raise funds for victims of the December tsunami, pleading not guilty to a charge of ‘causing a computer to perform a function which intended to secure unauthorised access to a program or data held in a computer’: Daniel Cuthbert, 28, made a tsnuami-relief… Read more →