Blog Archive: March 2010

  In an exciting story pulled from the leaves of a crime thriller paperback, we have news from Las Vegas, by way of Macau. From the city that pioneered the casino, violent organized criminals strike again. This time hailing from the east.   Macau, an island off the cost of Hong Kong, is a vibrant city of industry and entertainment. Five men were convicted of crimes in a Hong Kong court last year stemming from a plot to punish, and kill, a dealer from the Sands Macau casino. The perpetrators...

In an interesting use of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA), China Petroleum & Chemical Corporation (Sinopec), a state run refinery group, claims that Daimler AG paid bribes to one of its staff. An interesting move for a company that could be potentially liable for soliciting bribes if charges were filed in the US.   As the article below notes, this was part of a wider investigation of bribery charges against Daimler by the United States Department of Justice. Potentially, US prose...

In a great article by Ben Bain at GCN, he stresses the need for an improved educational system to better prepare students for future cyber-security threats. Here is the article: "Strengthening education in science, technology, engineering and math is crucial to U.S. cybersecurity efforts, a senior Homeland Security Department official said today. Richard Marshall, director of global cybersecurity management in the Homeland Security Department’s National Cybersecurity Division, said improvi...

  The day after Google removed from China to Hong Kong, we already have confirmation that Hong Kong will not assist China in censoring Google's search results, even though the results will be available to Chinese users. Here is a synopsis from BusinessWeek:  "Hong Kong says it won’t help China censor Google Inc., after the search engine provider said it would route mainland users through its site in the city. Hong Kong respects freedom of information and its free flow, a spokesman for th...

Well Google is leaving China, sort of. Here's the story from Mercury News: "Google Inc. will shift its search engine for China off the mainland but won't shut it down altogether, and it will maintain other operations in the country. It's an attempt to balance its stance against censorship with its desire to profit from an explosively growing Internet market. On Monday afternoon, visitors to Google.cn were being redirected to Google's Chinese-language service based in Hong Kong. The page said...

In an interesting development to the Mariposa Botnet take-down I reported earlier on, a large batch of cell-phones were apparently shipped by Vodafone containing the trojan powering the Mariposa Botnet. Here is the story from the Register: "Vodafone Spain has accepted that 3,000 customers were potentially exposed to malware after Mariposa botnet agents strayed onto the HTC Magic smartphone. The admission to Spanish media on Thursday follows a meeting between the mobile phone giant's Iberian...

They may have been 99.9% certain they were going to pull out of China before, but now a date has been set for Google to leave China, at least according to one insider. This escalation has been in the works for the past few months (see my stories here, here, and here). The insider claims April 10th will be the day. Read this excerpt from CNET: "Google is expected to announce on Monday that it will withdraw from China on April 10, according to a report in a Beijing-based newspaper that cited ...

A new class of hackers has emerged: the Ponzi Hacker. Well maybe hackers perpetrating frauds isn't new, but assisting a billionaire to fool the Securities and Exchange Commission through clever coding as part of a much larger ponzi scheme is, well, novel. Yes, you guessed it, we're talking about good old Bernie Madoff. Here is a quote from the Register: "A federal grand jury has indicted two computer programmers on fraud and conspiracy charges for developing programs used by Bernard Madoff ...

  Lehman Brothers chapter 11 examiner's report has become available. Anton R. Valukas, chairman of the law firm Jenner & Block, performed the examination, and points the finger squarely at Lehman for culpability in the fall of the financial giant. Here are some quotes from the L.A. Times regarding the recent report:  "The uncompromising report should put to rest the self-serving claims by Lehman’s ex-Chairman Richard S. Fuld that the firm was destroyed by rumors, short selling, stoc...

  According to the Internet Crime Complaint Center's (iC3) 2009 Internet Crime Report, Washington D.C. is the Cybercrime capital of the U.S. with 116 cyber-criminals per 100,000. Here is an excerpt from a news story from WTOP summarizing the findings: "IC3, a joint effort of the National White Collar Crime Center and FBI, says Nevada and Washington hold the No. 2 and No. 3 spots.  Cyber-crimes are so common victims often neglect to report them. But the number of complaints to IC3 jumped mo...