Archive for the ‘Technology’ Category
Putting Armageddon on hold
How would our government react to a terrorist attack in the age of social networking? Mumbai and other atrocities have led to draconian plans, says Michael Cross
It’s July 2012, and despite all the precautions – including the most intrusive surveillance exercise ever mounted and the detention of hundreds of suspects under draconian emergency powers – London is under terrorist attack. Social networks are buzzing with rumours and video clips of military units clad in chemical warfare suits gathering outside the Bank of England, where hostages are being held.
In the Cobra emergency room under Whitehall, officials from the Cabinet Office, the Ministry of Defence and the Metropolitan Police ponder their options. Someone mentions Mumbai 2008, when Twitter became the uncontrolled but main source of news, flooding in at the rate of 12 Tweets a second. A decision is taken to seize control of the flow of information from anywhere near the scene of the attack.
Transmission ends
The UK government already has the legal power and technical ability to do it, and contingency plans for filling the information vacuum from official sources.
Step one is to shut down all unofficial mobile communications in the capital. The plan, drawn up by the Directorate of Civil Contingencies and drawing on the lessons of the 2004 Madrid bombings, as well as the July 7 2005 attacks in London, is for a carefully tiered approach, to avoid public panic and political flak.
Close to the hostage sites, the security forces have already deployed jammers to render the terrorists’ GSM and 3G phones – and other wireless devices – unusable. To extend control over the whole network, the Cabinet Office instructs licensed phone operators to restrict calls to numbers registered in advance. Under the telephone preference scheme, a condition of operating licences, this can be done at the flick of a switch. No public announcement is made; frustrated Londoners trapped behind security cordons and trying desperately to phone home assume that the network is simply overloaded.
Step two is to tackle “unhelpful” information on the web. With no time to issue legal takedown notices, the Cobra committee authorises GCHQ to begin denial-of-service attacks. The British public, suddenly bereft of its favourite channels of communication, reverts to the time-honoured technologies of broadcast radio and television – and newspapers.
This isn’t fantasy. Whitehall sources acknowledge that such plans to shut down Britain’s electronic information infrastructure exist, though no one is prepared to go in to details. However, one clue is the extent of measures being put in place to ensure that official communications operate separately from civilian networks.
The principal communications system, used by the military and security services as well as police, fire and ambulance crews, is the Airwave digital radio. The system, based on the Tetra standard (similar to GPRS), was sold as being secure and resilient. The network’s 3,500 transmission stations across the UK operate independently of civilian mobile networks, the operator says. For example, all have backup power batteries, and one third have on-site generators to keep them running for seven days. Likewise, the network switches (the number is secret) have duplicates on hot-standby, the operator says. And if the worst came to the worst and the whole network went down, handsets would still function as mobile radios, capable of talking to each other for as long as their batteries held out.
Network capacity
However, Airwave’s limited ability to handle data – while some police forces use it to transmit images, it is painfully slow – raises questions about its suitability as the sole operational carrier in a national emergency.
Last month, the Home Affairs Select Committee’s report Policing in the 21st century concluded: “The Airwave radio network can struggle to cope where a very large number of users are concentrated in the same area. We are concerned about the potential for the network to fail during the 2012 Olympic Games, given the number of officers who will be deployed. The Home Office should address this as a matter of urgency, including consideration of expanding the radio band assigned to Airwave.” The report quoted evidence by the Academy of Engineering that: “The amount of voice traffic is now reaching the limits of the current system’s spectrum resources in some areas (particularly in London). This suggests that the Airwave system will be inadequate for the future needs of the police forces, particularly in densely populated areas where information needs are likely to exceed the Tetra network’s capacity.”
Airwave executives agree with the need for more bandwidth, but vigorously deny that the network would fall over from excess demand. “We’ve never got anywhere near getting to such levels,” a senior executive said this week. If the network did become overloaded, it would automatically ration calls in a pre-programmed priority rather than shutting down, he said.
Contingency plans to fill the gap left by the blocking of non-official websites appear to be less well prepared. Under the scheme of website rationalisation, two central “supersites” have a role to play.
The main one is the central government site direct.gov.uk, which the Cabinet Office says will be “the place people turn to in a national emergency”. However, Whitehall sources say that the site’s operators, based at the Central Office of Information but reporting to the Department for Work and Pensions (which hosts the site), are still working on how the information feed from the government’s emergency response teams will work in practice.
Signing off
Meanwhile, in the event of an epidemic or chemical, biological or nuclear attack, the new NHS portal, nhs.uk, has plans to clear its home page to provide graphic-only information about what to do.
Finally, when all else shuts down, the government can fall back on the tried and tested radio – meaning conventional analogue broadcast. In the event of a major national catastrophe, we can assume that Radio 4 will be the last to go off air. According to Whitehall historian Peter Hennessey, captains of Trident missile submarines are instructed that if they lose all communication with the UK, and Radio 4’s Today programme is not broadcast for three days, they may assume the home country has been wiped out and open their instructions for Armageddon.
In which case, it probably won’t matter whether Twitter is working – or not.
Source: Guardian
Spam plummets as gang leaves net
The closure of a web hosting firm that is believed to have had spam gangs as clients has led to a drastic reduction in junk mail.
Two US internet service providers have pulled the plug on the firm McColo following an investigation by the Washington Post newspaper.
Anti-spam firm Ironport has seen junk mail levels drop by 70% since McColo was taken offline on 11 November.
But, it warned, it will be a temporary respite from the menace of spam.
“It is an unprecedented drop but will be a temporary outage as the networks move from North America to places where there is less scrutiny,” said Jason Steer, a spokesman for Ironport.
The Washington Post has been gathering data on McColo for the past four months and passed the information to its internet service providers, Global Crossing and Hurricane Electric.
Both decided to pull the plug on the firm on Tuesday.
It is believed that it hosted gangs running botnets – networks of computers that have been taken over by criminals to send malicious software and spam.
According to MessageLabs, botnets are responsible for over 90% of spam.
Increasingly the tech industry is fighting back.
“All the US internet peering companies are under much more scrutiny. The authorities and the internet community have woken up to the problem,” said Mr Steer.
But while it might make criminals think more carefully about what they do, it will not stop them, he thinks.
“Spam levels will come back to normal as we build up to Thanksgiving and Christmas,” he said.
A recent study by computer scientists from the University of California, Berkeley and UC, San Diego (UCSD) found that spammers manage to turn a profit despite only getting one response to every 12.5m emails they send.
Source: BBC News
The end of an era – Windows 3.x
Customer data ‘needs protection’
Companies and public bodies are not doing enough to protect customers’ data, the UK’s privacy watchdog and a major survey of security have said.
The Information Commissioner said that the 94 security breaches reported to him last year was an “alarming” number.
The survey of more than 1,000 firms suggested that almost 90% of them let staff leave offices with potentially confidential data stored on USB sticks.
Firms and public bodies were urged to make data protection a priority.
Information Commissioner Richard Thomas said of the 94 data breaches, two thirds were committed by government or other public sector bodies.
Data had been recovered in only three of the 94 cases, he said.
The material included personal details of UK citizens, including health records.
“The evidence shows that more must be done to eradicate inexcusable security breaches,” he said.
Mr Thomas’ findings and the separate Information Security Breaches Survey will be detailed at the InfoSec show in London, the world’s largest event of its kind.
The survey was carried out by Price Waterhouse Coopers on behalf of the Department for Business Enterprise and Regulatory Reform.
According to the survey, almost 80% of firms that had reported a stolen computer had not encrypted data on the hard drive.
Chris Potter, from PricewaterhouseCoopers, which compiled the survey, told BBC News that overall attitudes to security had improved in the last 12 months.
System failures
“Companies have focused on the areas which have caused them most damage in the past, such as viruses and system failures.
“These tend to have caused the greatest cost in terms of business interruption.”
But he said the “biggest concern is around the protection of customer data, which companies clearly want to be good at.
“Sometimes that’s not translating into real action.”
He said particular threats were around the lack of encryption of data on laptops, the use of USB memory sticks and newer technologies like Voice over Internet Protocol.
“In all these areas the controls are not as strong as they are over traditional threats,” he said.
Mr Potter’s comments were echoed by those of the Information Commissioner.
Mr Thomas said: “The government, banks and other organisations need to regain the public’s trust by being far more careful with people’s personal information.
“Once again I urge business and public sector leaders to make data protection a priority in their organisation.”
Of the total reported to the commissioner, 62 security breaches were in the public sector, 28 were in the private sector and four in the charity or third sector.
Of those reported by public sector bodies, almost a third happened in central government and associated agencies, and a fifth in the NHS.
According to the PricewaterhouseCoopers report, fewer companies today are encrypting data on laptops than two years ago, despite a recent spate of high-profile instances of laptop losses with unencrypted information.
Mr Potter said: “We have seen in successive surveys that companies tend to be very good with preventing yesterday’s problems. Companies need to say on their toes to make sure they are addressing tomorrow’s problems.”
The report found that the number of attempts to hack into company networks had risen dramatically over the last two years.
“What is a really big concern is the proportion of large businesses that say hackers have got into their networks,” said Mr Potter.
Two years ago one percent of large businesses reported a hacker penetration compared to 13% in the current report.
The survey also said that figure was likely to be under-reported because many large firms did not admit to successful hacks on their networks.
Security breaches cost UK business roughly several billions pounds a year, said the report.
HSBC joins disc data disaster crowd
HSBC has become the latest organisation to lose hundreds of thousands of customer details on an unencrypted disc.
The disc contains the names, dates of birth and insurance cover details of 370,000 people who hold life assurance policies at the bank.
The disc went missing after being sent by Royal Mail courier to the bank’s insurance partner, Swiss Re in February.
Such information is normally sent over a secure internet connection, but it wasn’t working on the day
Amazingly, given the furore surrounding Customs losing 25m personal records in near identical circumstances last November, nobody at HMRC though it wise to encrypt the contents of the disc, relying instead on flimsy password protection.
“The data disc lost by HSBC contains no address or bank account details for any customer and would therefore be of very limited, if any, use to criminals,” HSBC claims in a statement.
HSBC has informed the Financial Services Authority (FSA) of the loss and says it will contact the affected customers.
Last year the FSA fined Norwich Union 1.26 million for exposing its customers to the risk of fraud, when it lost a laptop containing sensitive data.
Source: Pc Pro
ISPs vs BBC row
Relationships between the BBC and internet industry have plunged to an all-time low, after the BBC’s internet chief Ashley Highfield used a blog post yesterday to tell ISPs to get stuffed – and even threatened to name and shame them.
The cost of carrying iPlayer traffic has been a sore point for ISPs, who must absorb steeply rising traffic costs. Regulator OFCOM’s Market Impact Assessment estimated the P2P version of iPlayer would create up to £831m in extra costs for the internet industry. In the first month of the “low bandwidth” iPlayer, ISPs saw streaming costs rise 20 per cent.
But Highfield, Director of Future Media and Technology at the £4bn-a-year corporation, said the BBC won’t help them out.
“I would not suggest that ISPs start to try and charge content providers,” he scolds.
“They are already charging their customers for broadband to receive any content they want. If ISPs start charging content providers, the customer will not know which content will work well over their chosen ISP, and what content may have been throttled for non-payment of a levy.”
Highfield instead advises them to pass the increased costs onto their customers in the form of tiers of service (ie price increases).
And if ISPs didn’t follow his “advice”, and dared to traffic shape their networks to manage their bandwidth hogs, Highfield threatened that the BBC would name and shame them.
“Content providers, if they find their content being specifically squeezed, shaped, or capped, could start to indicate on their sites which ISPs their content worked best on (and which to avoid). I hope it doesn’t come to this, as I think we (the BBC and the ISPs) are currently working better together than ever.”
Being put on the BBC’s List of Shame could have serious commercial repercussions for internet providers.
(Highfield also raised eyebrows with his assertion that “The best technical solution is usually Moore’s law”. An oddly ignorant thing to say, since the capacity and price of copper and fibre connections have very little to do with the density of transistors on a semiconductor die. Earth to Ashley: Ceci n’est pas une pipe.)
It’s a lose-lose situation for the ISPs. If they refuse to carry iPlayer material, they lose customers and go out of business. If they do carry iPlayer material, and traffic shape their networks, the BBC will shame them, and they go out of business. Who’d be an ISP?
Highfield’s heavy-handed intervention may undo much of the conciliatory work undertaken by iPlayer boss Anthony Rose. As we reported recently, the BBC is exploring building its own Content Delivery Network (CDN) to ease the delivery costs for ISPs.
One executive at a major ISP stormed back at Highfield:
“Relying on the customer’s failure to read the small print is not the basis for a digital content strategy.”
Source:The Register
2 Minute Hack for Mac
Leopard has been hacked in under two minutes using a flaw in Safari, while Vista and Ubuntu continue to stand firm.
The competition took place at the CanSecWest security conference in Vancouver, and pitted hackers against three laptops running Vista Ultimate SP1, Leopard OS X 10.5.2 and Ubuntu 7.10 to discover which was the most vulnerable.
A MacBook Air running a fully-patched version of Leopard succumbed in under two minutes, hacked by security researcher Charlie Miller who used a technique similar to a phishing attack, which involved clicking a link to a website containing malicious code, which allowed him to remotely access the machine.
Miller had been working on the exploit in the three weeks following the announcement of the challenge. He previously made a name for himself hacking the iPhone, though the Leopard exploit was far more lucrative bagging him a £5,000 prize from sponsor Tipping Point, who has notified Apple of the flaw.
At the time of writing both Vista and Ubuntu have yet to be compromised.
Source – PC Pro
The £10 device that could rescue your broadband connection
BT Wholesale is close to launching an inexpensive new device that could radically improve the speed of ADSL broadband connections.
The telecoms giant claims that electrical interference from household objects – including televisions, set-top boxes and even Christmas tree lights – can reduce a broadband connection to a crawl.
Faulty or leaky power supplies from the electrical equipment interferes with the “Bell Wire” running around the home, creating excessive noise on the line.
However, BT has been trialling a device called an Interstitial Plate – or iPlate – that will slot into the master telephone socket and largely eliminate the noise, providing a significant boost for broadband speeds.
BT Wholesale demonstrated the technology to journalists today at its Gatwick headquarters. It showed how an ADSL connection running at 3.8Mb/sec was reduced to just 700Kb/sec when a nearby fluorescent lamp with a faulty power supply was turned on. When the iPlate was fitted to the master socket, the connection returned to its normal speed.
BT says it’s been trialling the device with around 1,000 customers with connection problems and has been very pleased with the results. “We’ve seen huge increases in speed,” claimed Ashley Pickering from BT Wholesale’s broadband access solutions team. On average, it makes one and a half megs of difference.”
Pickering says he expects the device to be launched within the next few months, with a retail price of around £10. The device can be fitted without the services of an engineer, simply by unscrewing a plate in the master socket and slotting the iPlate in. BT says it expects ISPs to distribute the device freely to customers with connection problems, saving on the expense of support calls and engineer visits.
Source – PC Pro
Vista SP1 horror
Half of broadband subscribers unhappy with service
Half of all broadband customers are dissatisfied with their service, according to a new report.
The survey conducted by Uswitch ranked nine internet service providers and found that the gap between best and worst is widening, with a difference of almost 21% in customer satisfaction scores – an 8% increase on the year before.
Topping the list is PlusNet, which won the survey’s Best Overall Provider accolade by polling 86% in customer satisfaction. Resting at the foot of the list is Orange, with the survey claiming that over a third of its customers were unhappy with the service they were receiving.
Sky continued its ascent, clambering above arch rival Virgin Media in the rankings with an 81% customer satisfaction score. Virgin Media held steady with three quarters of its customers satisfied, but losing ground on value for money, customer and technical support.
Outside the big winners customer satisfaction scores slipped across the board, with the big losers being Pipex which slipped 9% to 45% and AOL dropping 6% to 59%.
No more excuses
“The ISPs used to put these problems down to teething problems, but it’s been seven years now,” says Uswitch spokesperson, Charlotte Nunes. “The technology’s bedded down and customers expect more than they did. Broadband is an essential part of people’s lives now, they depend on it and so when things go wrong they expect their ISP to sort it out.”
“Companies like TalkTalk have invested a lot of money in their customer service, it’s better now but it’s still got a way to go. But some companies like Orange are still charging premium rates for technical support and that’s a big part of why people are dissatisfied. We’d certainly like to see Orange making the same sorts of promises on technical support we’ve seen from TalkTalk.”
However, Orange says it’s on the right track.
“Our own customer satisfaction research, along with independent testing of our service, has revealed extremely positive findings,” claims an Orange spokesperson.
“This has come as a direct result of us having recently taken steps to improve our network capacity and customer services, which included investing heavily in our teams and we will continue to do so.
“Our focus is on getting things right for our customers and we shall continue working to improve the levels of service we provide as well as to offer clear, value for money propositions.”
Source – PC Pro
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