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700 Domains Seized as Part of Anti-Counterfeit Crackdown

Law enforcement agencies from three continents seized more than 700 domains on Tuesday for selling counterfeit goods. US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), Europol, and Hong Kong Customs worked together on the project, which was called “In Our Sites, Project Cyber Monday IV” in the US. The agencies were coordinated by the National Intellectual Property Rights Coordination Center.

The US government is now targeting PayPal accounts used by the websites for seizure, and $175,000 of criminal proceeds. eBay is cooperating with the investigation, and made a statement in support of the efforts of law enforcement to protect its customers and brand.

12/09/2013 · No Comments Continue Reading →

The Daunting Challenge of Secure E-mail

When users of Lavabit, an encrypted e-mail service, logged on to the site this past August, they found a bewildering letter on the site’s main page. Ladar Levison, the founder and sole employee of Lavabit, had shut down his business rather than “become complicit in crimes against the American people.” Lavabit subscribers would later discover that Levison had walked away because federal investigators had asked him to hand over his master decryption key, which would have granted them unfettered access to most of Lavabit’s data. Shortly afterward, the encryption provider Silent Circle followed suit, summarily deleting its users’ stored mail and mothballing its e-mail servers. In the wake of the Snowden revelations, which should have driven demand for their services, encrypted e-mail providers were, in the United States at least, rapidly becoming an endangered species. This leads to a question that has received relatively little attention: Why is encrypted e-mail so rare in the first place?

11/08/2013 · Comments Off Continue Reading →

India Flooding World with Tainted Drugs, and Getting Away with It

Each time we take medicine, we assume that the manufacturer did its best to produce a quality product. Evidence is mounting, however, that some pharmaceutical manufacturers in countries like India cut corners and send low-quality products to major, developed markets. Worse still, they may have separate production lines for drugs they sell in developing markets like Africa, where poor quality is more likely to go unnoticed.

In mid-2013, India’s largest drugmaker, Ranbaxy, pleaded guilty in a U.S. court to several criminal offenses relating to the fraudulent manufacture and sale of adulterated drugs. (The United States is the biggest importer of generic Indian drugs.) Among other revelations, Ranbaxy’s executives acknowledged that “more than 200 products in more than 40 countries” are affected by “elements of data that were fabricated to support [Ranbaxy’s] business needs.” In other words, Ranbaxy made up facts and figures to demonstrate product safety for myriad drugs, including critical HIV medicines paid for by U.S. tax dollars and destined for the poor in Africa. As a consequence, the company was fined $500 million.

10/04/2013 · No Comments Continue Reading →

Meet Abu Omar: Al Qaeda Busted Him Out of Abu Ghraib. Now He Fights in Syria

Waiting for the tram in the southern Turkish city of Gaziantep, Abu Omar is on his way to the mall. No groceries today, his shopping list includes a Turkish-made tablet computer and a small GPS navigation device loaded with digital maps of the Middle East.

“It’s nothing special,” says Abu Omar, an Iraqi national, as he puts the goods in his rucksack. “But this stuff might come in handy after I make it to Syria.”

Abu Omar, a handsome young man with long black hair, is not the only one making the trek to Syria. Hundreds of Iraqi prisoners, mostly suspected or convicted jihadists, were freed in July after al Qaeda-linked militants staged a deadly jailbreak at the notorious Abu Ghraib prison near Baghdad. At the time, Iraqi and Western authorities feared that some of those men would travel to Syria, helping to fuel the rise of extremist groups there. Those fears have now become a reality.

10/03/2013 · No Comments Continue Reading →

Shabaab Plot to Attack London Planned to be ‘Similar to…Mumbai’

A document found after Somali troops killed Fazul Abdullah Mohammed, al Qaeda’s former leader in East Africa and a senior Shabaab commander, details a plot to conduct multiple Mumbai-like attacks that target civilians in London. The plot highlights how al Qaeda and Shabaab seek to strike civilian targets outside Somalia, and foreshadowed Shabaab’s attack on the Eastgate Mall in Kenya this week.

The document and several others found in Fazul’s possession after he was killed by Somali troops at a checkpoint in Mogadishu in June 2011 were obtained by the Toronto Star. A copy of the document was also obtained by The Long War Journal. The Canadian newspaper reported that “dozens of documents, Internet frame grabs and media reports in English, Arabic, Somali and Swahili, along with more than 50 video clips” were also found in Fazul’s car.

09/28/2013 · No Comments Continue Reading →

Google’s Gmail Keyword Scanning Might Violate Wiretap Law, Judge Finds

A federal judge today found that Google may have breached federal and California wiretapping laws for machine-scanning Gmail messages as part of its business model to create user profiles and provide targeted advertising.

The decision by U.S. District Judge Lucy Koh was rendered in a proposed class-action alleging Google wiretaps Gmail as part of its business model. Google sought to have the federal case in California dismissed under a section of the Wiretap Act that authorizes email providers to intercept messages if the interception facilitated the message’s delivery or was incidental to the functioning of the service in general.

09/26/2013 · No Comments Continue Reading →

Google Begs Court to Reconsider Ruling That Wi-Fi Sniffing Is Wiretapping

Google is asking a federal appeals court to reconsider a recent ruling finding Google potentially liable for wiretapping when it secretly intercepted data on open Wi-Fi routers.

The Mountain View-based company said the September 10 decision by the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals will create “confusion” (.pdf) about which over-the-air signals are protected by the Wiretap Act, including broadcast television.

The case concerns nearly a dozen combined lawsuits seeking damages from Google for eavesdropping on open Wi-Fi networks from its Street View mapping cars. The vehicles, which rolled through neighborhoods around the world, were equipped with Wi-Fi–sniffing hardware to record the names and MAC addresses of routers to improve Google location-specific services. But the cars also gathered snippets of content.

The search giant petitioned the San Francisco-based appeals court to reconsider its decision that allowed the case to proceed at trial — a ruling that upended Google’s defense.

Google claimed it is was legal to intercept data from unencrypted, or non-password-protected Wi-Fi networks. Google said open Wi-Fi networks are “radio communications” like AM/FM radio, citizens’ band and police and fire bands, and are “readily accessible” to the general public and exempt from the Wiretap Act — a position the appeals court rejected.

09/25/2013 · No Comments Continue Reading →

Shabaab Threatens ‘Big Surprise’ As Siege at Kenyan Mall Continues

As Shabaab fighters continue to hold out inside the Westgate Mall in Kenya for the fourth day after assaulting the upscale shopping center on Saturday, the al Qaeda group’s media arm on Twitter threatened that a “big surprise” was in store for Kenyans. Shabaab released the following statement on Twitter just minutes ago:

The Kenyan govt and FM haven’t the faintest idea of what’s going on inside #Westgate mall. Rest assured, Kenyans are in for a big surprise!

The group did not detail the nature of the “big surprise” (or it wouldn’t be a surprise), but previous tweets over the past few hours indicate that the members of the assault team are holding their ground, despite claims from Kenyan officials last night that the mall has been secured, and the team still has hostages.

09/24/2013 · No Comments Continue Reading →

North Korea Likely Testing More Rocket Engines

North Korea more than likely tested a long-range rocket engine late last month, according to analysis of new satellite imagery over the site.

In the photos released by 38 North, a blog run by the School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University, indicators of a probable test are seen through the presence of a probable rocket stage, propellant tanks, as well as the appearance of burned vegetation around the launch stand.

The photos were taken between August 25 and 30.

“These are not in and of themselves indicators that there is going to be a rocket test six months from now,” Joel Wit, a former North Korea specialist at the State Department who is now with 38 North, told CNN about the photos.

It is not clear from the photos, Wit said, whether the test was for the second stage of the Unha-3 rocket, which North Korea used in a successful launch test last December, or whether it was a test for a stage of another larger rocket.

09/23/2013 · No Comments Continue Reading →

Al Qaeda Ramps Up Attacks in Iraq

As the world focuses on the Syrian civil war, the use of chemical weapons, and the rise of al Qaeda and Islamist groups, the resurgence of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, which is al Qaeda’s affiliate in Iraq, is going largely unnoticed. Violence in Iraq has spiked this year, with a wave of suicide bombings, car bombings, and armed attacks. As al Qaeda focuses energy on Syria, it certainly hasn’t left Iraq behind.

Al Qaeda clearly has the resources to carry out attacks such as today’s, in which five suicide bombers and a multitude of car bombs were used. One attack included a suicide assault team against a police special forces base in Bayji. The al Qaeda fighters entered the perimeter of the base before being gunned down. From Russia Today:

The first bomb exploded next to a tent full of mourners in the Shiite neighborhood. Shortly after, a suicide bomber detonated his device while driving a car near the funeral-goers. A third bomb exploded as police and ambulances arrived at the scene.
“Crowds of people were visiting the tent to offer their condolences when suddenly a powerful blast…threw me to ground,” said 35-year-old Basim Raheem.

09/21/2013 · No Comments Continue Reading →