It seems like Russia wants to keep a tight reign on things, anything with Wifi capability must be licenses! That includes your phone…imagine having to apply for a permit to have a wireless AP at home?

Rather ridiculous no?

Business travellers to Russia might want to keep their laptops and iPhones well-concealed – not from muggers, necessarily, but from the country’s recently formed regulatory super-agency, Rossvyazokhrankultura (short for the Russian Mass Media, Communications and Cultural Protection Service).

In the UK, Ofcom made deregulation one of its first priorities upon coming into existence, but the Russian equivalent is doing just the reverse, including an ominous-sounding policy of requiring registration for every Wi-Fi device and hotspot, according to a report this week from news agency Fontanka.

Deregulation? In Russia? It seems like that really is a joke. Privates registration are supposed to take 10 days..for hotspots? Bundles of paperwork and red-tape, everywhere else in the World is embracing free and easy Wifi, whole cities are countries are being covered in Wifi and it seems like Russia is trying to kill it off.

Rossvyazokhrankultura’s interpretation of current law holds that users must register any electronics that use the frequency involved in Wi-Fi communications, said Vladimir Karpov, the deputy director of the agency’s communications monitoring division, according to an English commentary provided by website The Other Russia.

Aside from public hotspots, the registration requirement also applies to home networks, laptops, smart phones and Wi-Fi-enabled PDAs, Karpov reportedly said. Registration only permits use by the owner.

So that pretty much covers absolutely anything that can emit or receive a Wifi signal…and only to be used by the owner?

I wonder does that mean if we are sitting together and I let you use my phone to surf using Wifi we are breaking the law?

Source: Computer World

Well this is a harsh turn of events, a while back an ‘ethics expert’ said Wifi Jacking is OK, now this poor guy has got pretty harshly screwed for using an open wireless connection from a nearby coffeeshop.

A Michigan man has been fined $400 and given 40 hours of community service for accessing an open wireless Internet connection outside a coffee shop.

Under a little known state law against computer hackers, Sam Peterson II, of Cedar Springs, Mich., faced a felony charge after cops found him on March 27 sitting in front of the Re-Union street Café in Sparta, Mich., surfing the Web from his brand-new laptop.

Last week, Peterson chose to pay the fine instead as part of a jail-diversion program.

$400 bucks and 40 hours of community service, that’s not exactly a light sentence. I think they are trying to send out a pretty strong message.

A lot of people don’t seem to see how this is illegal and I think it is a pretty spurious interpretation of the laws myself.

Someone from a nearby barbershop had called cops after seeing Peterson’s car pull up every day and sit in front of the coffee shop without anybody getting out.

“I just curiously asked him, ‘Where are you getting the Internet connection?’, you know,” Sparta Police Chief Andrew Milanowski said. “And he said, ‘From the café.’”

Milanowski ruled out Peterson as a possible stalker of the attractive local hairdresser, but still felt that a law might have been broken.

“We came back and we looked up the laws and we figured if we found one and thought, ‘Well, let’s run it by the prosecutor’s office and see what they want to do,’” Milanowski said.

A few weeks later Peterson said he received a letter from the Kent County prosecutor’s office saying that he faced a felony charge of fraudulent access to computer networks and that a request had been made for an arrest warrant.

After reading the article it just seems like a case of bad luck, the cops wanted to nail him for something, in fact ANYTHING, so they dug up this old law and bent it into shape.

Poor guy.

“All over the TV, all the commercials and whatnot you see, they’re all trying to get you to buy all these laptops and things that are wireless,” he said. “They’re trying to get you to buy this wireless stuff because you can go anywhere and still be connected.

“Well, they don’t happen to tell you that it’s illegal,” he continued. “And I guess obviously you’re just supposed to know that.”

So true.

This raises some interesting ethical issues.

Source: Fox News

It turns out yesterday one of the planned speakers at HOPE Number 6 was arrested on Saturday and is being charged by the FBI.

Security Fix obtained a copy of the complaint against “Steven Rambam” the private investigator arrested Saturday at the Hope Number Six hacker conference in New York City. The government document says Rambam is an alias, and that his real name is Steven Rombom, so that is how he’ll be referred to here henceforth.

The complaint, available here as a PDF, charges Rombom with obstruction of justice and with witness tampering, alleging that in April 2006 Rombom impersonated a federal investigator at the request of a client who had hired him to locate a government informant who was central to the client’s money-laundering indictment in 2003.

Seems like it’s not unjust though, he is getting what he deserves. He was taking things a little bit too far.

The government claims that in April Rombom located and visited the California home of the informant’s in-laws, and introduced himself as an FBI agent, flashing what the informant’s mother-in-law described as “a laminated card with an official government gold seal or badge.”

The complaint says “ROMBOM told [the mother-in-law] that he was investigating the [informant], and that her son-in-law was a very bad and dangerous person, and that there were many things about the [informant] that the in-laws probably didn’t know,” such as that the informant had been in jail many times. Rombom also told the mother-in-law that her daughter was in danger because of the informant and that he was afraid for the safety of their daughter, the government says.

1 less speaker for HOPE next time then I guess?

Source: Security Fix

Good I say, nothing worse than a spammer.

A bulk e-mailer who looted more than a billion records with personal information from a data warehouse has been sentenced to eight years in prison, federal prosecutors said Wednesday.

Scott Levine, 46, was sentenced by a federal judge in Little Rock, Ark., after being found guilty of breaking into Acxiom’s servers and downloading gigabytes of data in what the U.S. Justice Department calls one of the largest data heists to date. Acxiom, based in Little Rock, says it operates the world’s largest repository of consumer data, and counts major banks, credit card companies and the U.S. government among its customers.

In August 2005, a jury convicted Levine, a native of Boca Raton, Fla., and former chief executive of a bulk e-mail company called Snipermail.com, of 120 counts of unauthorized access to a computer connected to the Internet. The U.S. government says, however, there was no evidence that Levine used the data for identity fraud.

Looks like for some reason the FTP had access to the SAM file, or a copy of it, and this ‘hacker’ downloaded it then brute forced the hashes.

I wonder if he used RainbowCrack and Rainbow Tables?

If he read this site he might have done ;)

According to court documents, Levine and others broke into an Acxiom server used for file transfers and downloaded an encrypted password file called ftpsam.txt in early 2003. Then they ran a cracking utility on the ftpsam.txt file, prosecutors said, discovered 40 percent of the passwords, and used those accounts to download even more sensitive information.

Source: News.com