'Cyberwar' Term Stirs Controversy and Confusion

Is there really a "cyberwar" going on? Some officials and computer security companies say yes, arguing that armies of hackers are stealing online secrets and using the Internet to attack infrastructure such as power grids.

However, some security analysts said at a conference this week that "cyberwarfare" is such a broadly used term that it might be hurting efforts by countries to agree how to cooperate on Internet security.

For instance, last month the United Nations rejected a Russian proposal for a new treaty on cybercrime. That highlighted a schism with the U.S. and European countries, which support a 2001 treaty that Russia claims gives foreign governments too much leeway to electronically pursue criminals across borders.

"Lots of times, there's confusion in these treaty negotiations because of lack of clarity about which problems they're trying to solve," said Scott Charney, vice president of microsoft Corp.'s Trustworthy Computing Group, before a speech at the Worldwide Cybersecurity Summit.

The conference was sponsored by the EastWest Institute think tank and assembled about 400 security officials and industry executives from dozens of countries.

Cyberwar is a catchall phrase: It's often used to refer to everything from purely financial crimes to computer attacks that could kill people by blowing up an oil pipeline. Last year came revelations that spies had hacked into the U.S. electric grid and left behind computer programs that would let them disrupt service .

Bruce Schneier, chief security technology officer at British telecommunications operator BT and an influential security blogger, noted that attacks last summer that knocked out service to government Web sites in the United States and South Korea -- and were suspected but never proven to have originated in North Korea -- were also widely called acts of cyberwar, even though they were essentially harmless.

The White House's cybersecurity coordinator, Howard Schmidt, has called "cyberwar" an inaccurate metaphor, given that many computer attacks are criminal acts aimed at stealing money.

If the "war" metaphor is problematic, there could be an important consequence. It might shift responsibility onto the government, in the minds of some in private industry, for fighting the attacks. Instead, experts at the Dallas summit said, it should be a joint effort, particularly when it comes to control systems for critical infrastructure.

"As soon as you say `war,' people think, `That's a government problem,'" said James Isaak, president of the IEEE Computer Society. "And if that's not the nature of the problem we're dealing with, that's a disservice."

Charney, of Microsoft, believes cyber threats should be better differentiated. He proposes four categories: conventional computer crimes, military espionage, economic espionage and cyberwarfare. That approach, he argues, would make it easier to craft defenses and to discuss international solutions to each problem.

However, even in Charney's framework, "cyberwarfare" remains tricky to define and deal with. One reason is that the nature of the Internet makes it possible that "a nation-state might well find itself `at war' with a single individual," Charney wrote in a paper accompanying his talk.

As a result, he wrote, new rules for such combat have to be considered.

"If the concern is an electronic Pearl Harbor, perhaps part of the response is an electronic `Geneva Convention' that protects the rights of noncombatants."

Hackers Attack South Korea Government Web Site

South Korea said Thursday that a government Web site was the target of a hacking attack from computers in China and began an inquiry into the incident.

The four-hour attack Wednesday night was directed from about 120 Internet servers from China, the Ministry of Public Administration and Security said.

Widespread damage was avoided, but traffic on the Web site that contains information on government policy and services was severely slowed down, the ministry said.

The cyberraid was a so-called distributed denial of service attack, in which a large number of computers bombard a Web site with queries to overload and crash it.

The attacks came at a time when South Korea is worried about cyberattacks from North Korea in the wake of an international investigation that found a North Korean torpedo had sunk a South Korean warship in March. Seoul, which filed a complaint against its neighbor over the sinking with the UN Security Council, blamed Pyongyang for the attack, but North Korea denied involvement.

In July, days of hacking attacks brought government Web sites in South Korea and the United States to a standstill. South Korea's intelligence chief accused North Korea of carrying out those attacks from servers in China.

President Barack Obama and Britney Spears Twitter accounts hacked, Frenchman arrested

Captain Adeline Champagnat, a senior member of the police cyber crimes unit, said the 25-year-old man gained access to passwords of Twitter administrators and used them to try to break into the accounts of U.S. politicians and stars.

"He didn't get as far as their personal accounts. But he had gained control of Twitter," she told Reuters Television in an interview.

She said the FBI had tipped off the French police in July last year that one or more people were trying to get access to Twitter and had gained control of the social network.

That enabled them to create and delete accounts and steal confidential information.

The hacker, who went by the online name of HackerCroll, is under arrest in the central French town of Clermont Ferrand.

He was known to have carried out minor internet fraud but in this case was driven by the thrill of the challenge and appeared to be more interested in the private life of his victims than on obtaining sensitive data, Champagnat said.

"His aim wasn't to make money. It was simply to show that he was able to access accounts of Twitter members. And the best proof of that is that he did screen grabs of certain confidential data which he tried to post on blogs that are reserved for pirates or hackers," she said.

She said several FBI agents were currently in France to help their French counterparts carry out searches.

"The collaboration was very good with the FBI and it's always very good with the FBI, because there's a real exchange of information. It's good cooperation to arrest the offender," she said.

Linux kernel worth? 1 billon

Researchers at the University of Oviedo in Spain have estimated that the cost of replicating the development embodied in the Linux kernel at over €1bn. The two academics, Jesús García-García and Isabel Alonso de Magdaleno, estimated the cost of replacing the kernel at current European prices using the Constructive Cost Model 81 algorithm, often used to estimate the cost of traditional commercial software projects.

According to their calculations, it would take almost 1,000 developers approximately 14 years to recreate the open source operating system, at an average salary of just over €31,000. Interestingly, the cost of development has risen sharply in recent years, growing from around €100m in 2005 to €225m in 2008. This reflects both the growing complexity of kernel development, and the general rise in software development costs throughout the Eurozone.

The researchers end with the claim that the thought experiment is not intended to determine the actual value of the software, but to give policymakers a greater appreciation of the potential benefits of community-based collaboration.

IHC@Madurai

Its happy to say that the motto of IHC is being spread at various places in TN colleges.
We need to embed and also imbibe basic qualities of both technical and also non technical information mainly through informal meetings or discussions.
I wish a good luck to IHC chennai and its team members, being the first innovative centre established at D.G.Vaishnav college. I request you to share all knowledge that u have to others and get as much as info from all, and again for sharing. With your friendship, we like to grow and make you too grow. So lets join or hands to build a good society.

from,
IHC team,
Madurai

Google Executives Convicted in Italy

An Italian court has convicted three Google executives for privacy violations on Wednesday. The three, which included Google's senior vice president David Drummond, former chief financial officer George Reyes and global privacy counsel Peter Fleischer, were convicted for allowing a video of an autistic boy being abused to be posted on Google's YouTube video service. The three convicted individuals received a suspended six-month sentence.

While Google has said that this trial is a threat to Internet freedom because it would make it necessary to "screen" each and every video posted on YouTube - a task which is virtually impossible - the prosecutors counter that the trial was not about imposing censorship - but about balancing freedom of expression with the rights of an individual.

All the three officials continue to assert that they had no role in the production or uploading of the video and that it was the complete responsibility of the uploaders. The prosecutors, however, said that Google could have removed it as it was in no time, a very popular video and was in the "most watched" list as well - a thing that cannot be easily missed. The charges against Google were sought by Vivi Down, an advocacy group for people with Down syndrome.

Google, on its part, claims that it had taken the video offline as soon as the contents were revealed and it started receiving complaints. The perpetrators of the crime too very then caught and convicted - using the same video footage.

Notion Ink

This is an awesome product on paper. As an Indian, I am also thrilled to cherish the moment it comes to market.

As the global tech media waits for Notion Ink to unveil the Adam at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, we decided to hop across to Hyderabad and catch them before they caught the flight to MWC! It’s finally time to put an end to all the ’spec speculation’ around the Adam. We still don’t know what the Adam’s price will be, though we have been told that it will be competitively priced.

We also have some exclusive pics of the Adam , from our shoot yesterday at the BVRIT Innovation Center in Hyderabad. The pictures show the final dimensions the Adam, which has changed since the prototype was first shown at CES.