Cybersecurity & Privacy

Hacktivists are determined to shut down organizations who have been spreading lies and propaganda against the Syrian government and contributing to chaos and disharmony. In less than 24 hours after the Saudi Arabia Defense Ministry Mail System got compromised, the Syrian Electronic Army hijacked Europe's first daily web-based newspaper, The Daily Telegraph, a UK-based international news portal. Earlier today, the Syrian Electronic Army has compromised 8 Twitter accounts Telegraph news and Facebook account.

The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia is indeed experiencing 'synchronous and coordinated' cyberattacks. Just recovering from #OpSaudi this week, another one strikes them out of nowhere. The Syrian Electronic Army has tweeted they have compromised early this morning the Saudi Arabia's Ministry of Defence Mail system. The group became well known for managing to penetrate top organizations such as Mastercard Worldwide, Qatar Foundation, AFP, France24, BBC, Financial Times, The Onion, E! News, the Guardian, Haaretz, and more. An example of their work's impact is when the Syrian Electronic Army hacked the Associated Press saying that the White House was bombed and Barack Obama was injured. Major stocks dropped, but they recovered quickly after people realized that the tweet was fake.

Saudi authorities are investigating attacks that targeted several government websites this week. Saudi branch of Anonymous hacktivist operation called "#OpSaudi", hacked government sites that includes Saudi Arabia and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs(mofa.gov.sa), The Ministry of Finance(mof.gov.sa), General Intelligence Presidency(gip.gov.sa ), gosi.gov.sa, and Riyadh Region Traffic(www.rt.gov.sa), hrc.gov.sa. The Anonymous Saudi hacktivist also claimed they have gained access to the server of Qassim Region Traffic website (q-t.gov.sa/h.asp) and deleted the database. General Directorate of Education in Jeddah website also fell victim to the cyber attack. Hackers identified and exploited the SQL Injection vulnerability in feenakhair.jedu.gov.sa. Initial assessment shows that the attack came from hundred of IPs from different countries, the officials said.

There is a new Dorkbot malware variant infecting Facebook users worldwide. Spreading from one computer to another via Facebook, it is capable of spying on users' browsing activities and stealing personal data. It is circulating in the United States, India, Portugal, the UK, Germany, Turkey and Romania.

The president of Saudi Committee for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice, Sheikh Abdul Latif Abdul Aziz al-Sheikh, has condemned users of Twitter and said anyone using social media sites - and especially Twitter - "has lost this world and his afterlife".

The displacement, dispossession and dispersal of the Palestinian people is known to them as an-Nakba, meaning "catastrophe" or "disaster”. Nakba Day (Arabic: Yawm an-Nakba, meaning "Day of the Catastrophe") is generally commemorated on 15 May, the day after the Gregorian calendar date for Israeli Independence Day (Yom Ha'atzmaut). For the Palestinians it is an annual day of commemoration of the displacement that preceded and followed the Israeli Declaration of Independence in 1948. More than 760,000 Palestinians -- estimated today to number 4.8 million with their descendants -- were pushed into exile or driven out of their homes in the conflict surrounding Israel's creation in 1948. These refugees and their descendants number several million people today, divided between Jordan (2 million), Lebanon (427,057), Syria (477,700), the West Bank (788,108) and the Gaza Strip (1.1 million), with at least another quarter of a million internally displaced Palestinians in Israel. Around 160,000 Palestinians, who remained in Israel after 1948, now number around 1.36 million people, or 20 percent of the country's population. Facebook temporarily blocked a page overnight, run by Palestinian activitists, promoting Nakba commemoration events in Jaffa. According to the Palestinians, right-wing Israelis report violations on the group's page that results Facebook temporarily blocking the site down for several hours.

US has become one of the world’s top players in regards to wreaking havoc over the Internet. Computer researchers in the public and private sectors say the US government, acting mainly through defense contractors, has become the dominant player in fostering the shadowy but large-scale commercial market for tools known as exploits, which burrow into hidden computer vulnerabilities. In their most common use, exploits are critical but interchangeable components inside bigger programs. Those programs can steal financial account passwords, turn an iPhone into a listening device or, in the case of Stuxnet, sabotage a nuclear facility, like what they did to Iran's computers few months ago.

If CISPA were to become law it would grant businesses and the government an unprecedented ability to share data without the need to consider anti-trust or classification laws. Hacked businesses would be granted legal immunity if they acted in “good faith” to protect their networks, thanks to a part of the bill whose broad language has drawn the ire of consumer and privacy advocates. Google, Yahoo and Microsoft are among the tech companies that have supported the bill, but public backing has slowly eroded after Facebook revoked its support and a series of amendments in the House Intelligence Committee failed to sway the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). Thanks to U.S. Senate apathy it is in limbo, however, the Obama administration does not care nor need the law. They bypass all this thanks to everything that George W. Bush laid out through the Patriot Act and ushering the American Orwellian New World Order to which Americans willingly accepted, or should we say, manipulated to accept.

U.S. House of Representive Mike Rogers, the main person in Congress pushing for CISPA, has kept rather quiet about a very direct conflict of interest that calls into serious question the entire bill and for good reasons: His wife stands to benefit quite a lot from the passage of CISPA, and has helped in the push to get the bill passed. He has not been forthright about whether or not CISPA is about giving information to the NSA (hint: it is) and unashamedly manipulating the American public by insisting that the only opposition to CISPA came from 14-year-old kids, with insulting and ridiculing remarks of course, in their basement. When this cybersecurity bill has nothing to do with safety, but big money for defense contractors. No one has really covered this key part of the narrative in the mainstream media, but this is the Real U.S. Congress and the kind of activities going on behind the scenes that the American people seem to keep condoning by non-doing and non-expulsion of their elected leaders.

The "Despair of fascism" becomes more "evident" as the Twitter accounts of the Venezuela presidential hopeful Nicolas Maduro has been compromised on Sunday by the Lulz Security Peru hacktivist group according Venezuelan Vice President Jorge Arreaza's and minister of Communications & Information Ernesto Villegas's twitter accounts.

The American Civil Liberties Union has obtained internal IRS documents that say Americans enjoy "generally no privacy" in their e-mail messages, Facebook chats, and other electronic communications.

by Philippa Warr, Wired April 8, 2013 (TSR-Wired) - Facebook is trialling a pay-to-message feature that allows users to contact people they are not connected with -- for a fee. Several...