Nils Gilman on Deviant Globalization
Here is the full video. It is a must watch if you want to understand the environment within which you and yours operate.
Botnet Cost
The study found that hourly botnet rental pricing started at $8.94 (£6.04), while the average price for a 24-hour rental — the sample mean of the highest and lowest advertised prices — was $67.20.
The services advertised a number of attack vectors, including ICMP, SYN, UDP, HTTP, HTTPS and Data. The botnet operators plied their wares via the same techniques as legitimate businesses, such as via forums and banner ads. One botnet operator offered a pricing structure for the takedown of sites that had anti-attack measures installed.
War By Junger
I want to read it. Didn’t read Perfect Storm, but I loved his take on Nigeria. Zen seems to like it. A friend of mine who spent a lot of time in Kapisa liked what he read too.
OSINT vs. Space Plane
With footage –
An American robotic shuttle known as the X-37B was launched from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station on April 22 under a shroud of secrecy. But Mr. Fetter and an ad-hoc team of international satellite watchers tracked it down – or up – when the 36-year-old recorded footage of the craft in orbit early last Thursday morning while working the nightshift at his job.
Mr. Molczan said the sky watchers associated with Heavens-Above have been tracking the plane’s route since Mr. Fetter’s discovery. It is about 410 kilometres up and circles the globe every 90 minutes. On route, it passes over Afghanistan, Pakistan, North Korea and Iraq.
They began searching for the plane after its launch, relying largely on data from Notice To Airmen, or NOTAMs, which are released to inform pilots and mariners about the possibility of falling space debris.
With that information, Mr. Molczan estimated that the X-37B would be orbiting at 33 degrees to the equator, and set his network into motion monitoring the sky at that co-ordinate. But a month ago, he received a mysterious e-mail telling him the orbit was actually 40 degrees, a tip that turned out to be accurate.
Danger of Driving By Wire Systems
Breaking systems by plugging into a standard diagnostic port. (Misnomer given it can calibrate system performance rather than just reveal health.)-
In a paper set to be presented at a security conference in Oakland, California, next week, the security researchers say that by connecting to a standard diagnostic computer port included in late-model cars, they were able to do some nasty things, such as turning off the brakes, changing the speedometer reading, blasting hot air or music on the radio, and locking passengers in the car.
In a late 2009 demonstration at a decommissioned airfield in Blaine Washington, they hacked into a test car’s electronic braking system and prevented a test driver from braking a moving car — no matter how hard he pressed on the brakes. In other tests, they were able to kill the engine, falsify the speedometer reading, and automatically lock the car’s brakes unevenly, a maneuver that could destabilize the car traveling high speeds. They ran their test by plugging a laptop into the car’s diagnostic system and then controlling that computer wirelessly, from a laptop in a vehicle riding next to the car.