Twitter – new terrorists’ favourite tool?

Posted by Martin

The U.S. intelligence community is concerned that terrorists might use micro-blogging tool Twitter to coordinate attacks, according to a purported draft Army intelligence report posted on the Web. The report–present by the 304th Military Intelligence Battalion and posted to the Federation of American Scientists Web site–examines the possible ways terrorists could use mobile and Web technologies such as the Global Positioning System, digital maps, and Twitter mashups to plan and execute terrorist attacks. The report (PDF), which appears to have been first presented earlier this month, was reported Friday by Wired magazine’s Noah Shachtman.

A chapter titled “Potential for Terrorist Use of Twitter,” presents general, introductory information on Twitter and how it works, and describes how the service was used to report details of a recent earthquake in Los Angeles and by activists at the Republican National Convention. “Twitter has also become a social activism tool for socialists, human rights groups, communists, vegetarians, anarchists, religious communities, atheists, political enthusiasts, hacktivists and others to communicate with each other and to send messages to broader audiences,” the report said. The report describes hacktivists as politically motivated hackers. However, the overview notes that the research used to generate the report was gathered from open source intelligence and not compared with information in classified venues.

Hacker faces 10 years for taking down Scientology

Posted by Martin

An 18-year-old New Jersey man will plead guilty to the January online attacks that took down the Church of Scientology’s Web site, federal prosecutors said Friday. Dmitriy Guzner of Verona, New Jersey, was part of an underground hacking group called Anonymous that has made the church a target of several attacks. He was charged Friday but has agreed to plead guilty sometime in the next few weeks, the U.S. Department of Justice said in a statement. He faces 10 years in prison on computer hacking charges.

The attacks began Jan. 19 and managed to knock the Scientology.org Web site offline by hitting it with several bursts of unwanted Internet traffic. The attack, known as a distributed denial of service (DDOS) attack, flooded the site with as much as 220M bps of traffic, according to computer security firm Arbor Networks. That’s considered to be a decent-sized DDOS attack and was enough to disable the Web site temporarily. Anonymous quickly followed its attacks with a series of YouTube videos, claiming its actions were a response to what it said were efforts by the Church to suppress a video of movie star Tom Cruise professing his admiration for the religion.

Hackers withdraw from Sarkozy’s bank account

It’s emerged thieves have been making fraudulent withdrawals from French president Nicolas Sarkozy’s private bank account. The news was confirmed in the French weekly “Le Journal du Dimanche”, which says Sarkozy’s office has confirmed that the president filed an official complaint last month. The thefts apparently concern sums of less than 200 euros a time. It appears the thieves managed to get hold of Sarkozy’s account details. Such crime is not uncommon – all that is needed are the bank details, name, and expiry date on the credit card in order to make fraudulent transactions over the internet.

Thieves then carry out purchases for relatively small amounts, in the hope that the owner of the card will realise the fraud as late as possible. There was outcry last year when the French parliament decided to award their head of state a 100% payrise. The swindlers may have had access to his £13,243 (approx $26,000) a month salary. Criminal and financial fraud squads and a prosecutor in the Paris suburb of Nanterre were investigating the case.