US

The official newspaper of the Communist Party of China has rejected claims the country was involved in hacking U.S. news agencies The New York Times (NYT) and Wall Street Journal (WSJ).

"Even those with little understanding of the Internet know that hacking attacks are trans-national and concealable," said People's Daily on its front page, according to AFP's report Monday. It added the Internet protocol (IP) addresses were not sufficient to confirm the origin of the hackers.

There's a war going on, and it's raging here at home -- not in the streets or the fields, but on the Internet. You can think of it as a war on the digital homeland. If you work for a power company, bank, defense contractor, transportation provider, or other critical infrastructure type of operation, your organization might be in the direct line of fire. And everyone can become collateral damage.

The Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998 has been the source of both controversy and consternation since it became law 15 years ago. Because of the DMCA, it became illegal to defeat the encryption on a DVD you purchased so you could watch a movie on your Linux computer.

It became illegal to make a binary copy of a movie so you could watch it on your iPad. Now, because the Librarian of Congress has decided it to be this way, it’s now illegal to unlock phones purchased on or after January 26.

An Ontario judge has refused a US request for unfettered access to the data on Megaupload servers hosted in Canada. The ruling is another sign that overseas courts are not giving US officials the degree of deference they've grown accustomed to in this case under US law.

 Lie about your identity on Facebook or delete files from your work laptop before you quit and you could run afoul of a 29-year-old US computer security law that some experts say has been changed so often it no longer makes sense.

The US Computer Fraud and Abuse Act has come under renewed criticism after last week's suicide of internet activist Aaron Swartz, who could have faced prison time for alleged hacking to download millions of academic articles from a private database through a network at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

A security audit of a US critical infrastructure company last year revealed that its star developer had outsourced his own job to a Chinese subcontractor and was spending all his work time playing around on the internet.

The firm's telecommunications supplier Verizon was called in after the company set up a basic VPN system with two-factor authentication so staff could work at home. The VPN traffic logs showed a regular series of logins to the company's main server from Shenyang, China, using the credentials of the firm's top programmer, "Bob".

The U.S. Department of Justice did not mislead a court and attempt to entrap file storage site Megaupload on copyright infringement charges, the agency said in a new filing in the case.

A leading U.S. nuclear weapons laboratory recently discovered its computer systems contained some Chinese-made network switches and replaced at least two components because of national security concerns, a document shows.

A hacker that goes by the name of Hannibal, previously known for leaking the Facebook accounts of one million Arabs, claims to have published the details of one million Americans in response to Anonymous’ OpIsrael.

“Lately, Anonymous Group attacked for no reason Israeli websites and stuff. Do you want to play with me, Anonymous Group? Do you have forgotten that Israel stands alongside the world’s best hacker – Hannibal??? Who the hell you think you are?” he said in a statement obtained by CWN.

The French news magazine L'Express has reported that in May computers in the offices of France's then-president Nicolas Sarkozy were attacked by Flame, the malware jointly developed by the US and Israel to collect information on the Iranian nuclear program, and that staff at the Elysee Palace covered up the attack. "Hackers have not only managed to get to the heart of French political power," L'Express reported, "but they were able to search the computers of close advisers of Nicolas Sarkozy."