:: NEWS COCKTAIL aka BlahBlahBlog ::
"Everything is being compressed into tiny tablets. You take a little pill of news every day - 23 minutes - and that's supposed to be enough." -Walter Cronkite, RE TV news. The Web has changed that for many, however, and here is an extra dose for your daily news cocktail. This prescription tends to include surveillance and now war-related links, along with the occasional pop culture junk and whatever else seizes my attention as I scan online news sites.:: 11.07.2005 ::
:: "Black Hat Organizer Unbowed" ::
From Wired News
By Kim Zetter
On Wednesday, Cisco Systems released a patch for what has become known as the Black Hat Bug: a serious vulnerability in the operating system running Cisco routers, which drive traffic through much of the internet and control critical infrastructure systems.
Cisco's move closes the book on a controversy that began last July, when Mike Lynn, a computer security researcher speaking at the Black Hat security conference in Las Vegas, demonstrated that an attacker could use the bug to crash Cisco routers or control them remotely. Before Lynn's talk concluded, the dark conference room was already lit with the glow of cell phones from audience members urging their IT departments to immediately patch their Cisco routers.
Lynn was lauded by much of the security community for disclosing the problem. But for his troubles, he and Black Hat organizers were slapped with legal injunctions. Lynn had been asked by his employer, Internet Security Systems, to reverse-engineer the Cisco router to find the flaw, and both Cisco and ISS initially sanctioned his Black Hat presentation. But two days before the talk, Cisco demanded that slides of the presentation be removed from the conference book and CD-ROM. And after the talk, the FBI began investigating Lynn for allegedly stealing trade secrets.
The legal wrangling finally ended this week, and the FBI case against Lynn has closed. Lynn spoke with Wired News in July to tell his side of the story. Now Black Hat founder Jeff Moss talks about what happened from his perspective and why companies continue to repeat the mistakes of their predecessors in trying to suppress the full disclosure of security bugs and punish security researchers.
Read the Moss interview here.
ALSO
from Wired News
FBI Pushing Patriot Act Powers
As the Patriot Act comes up for renewal, lawmakers react to a Washington Post report of the FBI's use -- and possible abuse -- of the law to gain access to private phone and financial records of ordinary citizens.
posted by me
:: 11:02:00 AM [+] ::
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