Entire North Korea Suffers from Internet Outage!

UPDATE:

After more than nine hours and 30 minutes, Internet service has been restored in North Korea,according to technology news service Dyn Research. Access is only partial, Reuters reports, but the country's main news service and newspaper both are back online.

ORIGINAL:

North Korea's Internet is offline — days after President Obama pledged a "proportional response" to the communist country's alleged hacking of Sony Pictures, multiple news reports say.

Doug Madory, the director of Internet analysis at Dyn Research, told The New York Times and other news organizations that North Korea's Internet access became unstable late Friday. By Monday, it was offline, he said.

San Francisco-based CloudFlare, a network and security company that monitors global Web access, told The Times that North Korea's Internet access was "toast."

It's unclear what caused the outage, but State Department spokeswoman Marie Harf said today: "We aren't going to discuss publicly operational details about the possible response options or comment on those kind of reports in any way except to say that as we implement our responses, some will be seen, some may not be seen."

In an interview with NPR's Elise Hu, Matthew Prince, chief executive of CloudFlare, pointed to four possible scenarios: North Korea turned off its own Internet; China's upstream provider turned it off; the country's routers failed at an unfortunate time; or it was the result of a denial-of-service attack from either a hacking group or the U.S. Prince said he thinks it's unlikely the U.S. was behind the reported outage.

North Korea has one of the lowest Internet penetrations in the world — with access limited mostly to the country's elite. The U.S. has linked the recent hacking of Sony Pictures to North Korean hackers, though North Korea itself has denied it is responsible — even though it called the act righteous. (Some computer security experts have questioned whether Pyongyang is behind the hack.)

Threats against moviegoers and theaters attributed to the group that claimed responsibility for the hack were behind Sony's decision last week to cancel the planned Christmas Day release of The Interview, a comedy that centers on a plot to assassinate North Korean leader Kim Jong Un.

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By: fdfffs On 10:22

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Nearly 7 Million Dropbox Passwords Have Been Hacked, But Dropbox says it was never hacked!

Nearly 7 million Dropbox usernames and passwords have been hacked, apparently from third-party apps that users allowed to access their accounts.


The Next Web was the first to notice the leak on a site called Pastebin, where hackers have already leaked about 400 accounts. The hackers promise to release more accounts in return for Bitcoin donations. The hackers claim to have over 6.9 million email addresses and passwords belonging to Dropbox users.

In a statement to The Next Web, Dropbox denied it was hacked:

Dropbox has not been hacked. These usernames and passwords were unfortunately stolen from other services and used in attempts to log in to Dropbox accounts. We'd previously detected these attacks and the vast majority of the passwords posted have been expired for some time now. All other remaining passwords have expired as well.

It's a similar response to the one Snapchat had when hackers were able to obtain about 100,000 photos from the service through a third-party app. Snapchat claimed its servers weren't hacked, but the servers of a third-party app designed to save Snapchat photos.

The real problem in both cases appears to be the way popular services allow third-party apps to use their platform. Even though Dropbox's own servers weren't hacked, the service still allows third-parties access, which has become the target for hackers to obtain personal information.

Dropbox is sending affected users emails encouraging them to reset their passwords, The Next Web reports.

This is an alarming trend. Services like Dropbox, Snapchat, and Apple have pushed blame on users and other third parties following recent hacks when it's clear they're not doing enough to scrutinize the kinds of apps that have access to their platforms.

Courtesy: Business Insider

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By: fdfffs On 22:20

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Companies Join 'Reset The Net' To Fight NSA

Big name opponents of the National Security Agency's (NSA) mass surveillance techniques are joining forces for "Reset the Net," an Internet-wide protest against the U.S. spy agency to be held on June 5. The protest will include a large Thunderclap on Thursday, blanketing social media with an anti-surveillance message.

Among those supporting Reset the Net are Reddit, Greenpeace, ACLU, DuckDuckGo, and the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF). Together they will promote encryption tools, implement additional anti-NSA security options on Web sites and services, or simply spread the message. A similar campaign was used to successfully fight SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act), an anti-piracy bill that could have damaged the Internet.

Hurting The Internet

The basis for the Reset the Net campaign is that mass surveillance ultimately hurts the Internet, and therefore, it needs to be stopped or at least reformed. Many of the companies supporting the campaign have major stakes in the Internet's future, as Web sites like Reddit simply would not exist as they currently do with a more restricted Internet.

Thunderclap, a "crowdspeaking" platform, will be used by those involved with the campaign to increase the effect of their social media posts. Although individuals posting about the NSA won't have much of an effect but when millions of people post about the NSA, it is hard for their message to not be heard.

"Mass surveillance is toxic for the Internet," according to the EFF's blog post about Reset the Net. "The Internet is a powerful force that can promote democracy, innovation, and creativity, but it’s being subverted as a tool for government spying. That’s why EFF has joined with dozens of other organizations in calling for a day of action to Reset the Net."

Improving Security

Part of Reset the Net may be spreading the message about the NSA and its surveillance but that is not the only goal of the campaign. Those involved with Reset the Net are also trying to promote the use of more advanced encryption and security tools by informing people about them and getting "hundreds of sites & apps" to take advantage of the tools that are available.

On its Tumblr page, the campaign's organizers laid out a basic framework so that Web sites understand which security features they need to implement. "HTTPS, HSTS, and PFS (perfect forward secrecy) are powerful tools that make mass spying much more difficult," according to Reset the Net leaders. "Until Web sites use them, we’re sunk: agencies like the NSA can spy on everything. Once they’re ubiquitous, mass surveillance is much harder and more precarious -- even if you’re the NSA."

Reset the Net admitted that it is difficult to tell how beneficial the security technologies are because the NSA's capabilities are not fully known, but there are some noticeable benefits. With simple security features like HTTPS, Reset the Net said that Web sites can be protected from the vast majority of prying eyes.

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By: fdfffs On 22:36

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