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Two charged with data theft from June ’10s AT&T hack…
Reported today by infosecurity-us and others, the two men (Andrew Auernheimer, 25, of Fayetteville, Ark., and Daniel Spitler, 26, of San Francisco, California) who had fleeting fame after publishing insecurities in the AT&T iPad website in June 2010 have been arrested and charged with one count of conspiracy to access a computer without authorization, and one count of fraud in connection with personal information. Each count carries a maximum penalty of five years in prison and a fine of $250,000.
You can find the formal press release on the Justice.gov site.
The original hack involved farming the subscriber details off AT&Ts site by presenting it with random ID codes. Unfortunately, while demonstrating a weakness in a site is often not prosecuted, the pair went on to retrieve 120,000 subscriber details and then passed them on Gawker, who published a redacted list amongst much fanfare. This distribution of personal data will probably get them into a lot of hot water. Read more…
Excellent Blog on Security and Privacy Matters..
I just wanted to post a short note on the excellent Hogan Lovells blog – It’s not gripping reading in the manner of Steven King or Grisham, but if your job or interests revolve around data protection, information security and privacy, the articles posted are well worth your time to read.
Decrypting messages 147 years late…
Over the holiday break an interesting story broke re a US Civil War message being finally decrypted after 147 years. The message was in a bottle that had been stored in a Virginia museum since 1896, but had never been investigated. Finally in 2010 a curious collections manager, Catherine Wright asked retired CIA codebreaker David Gaddy to crack it and see what it said.
The story of the message is interesting in itself, but what I wanted to share with you is how obscure the craft of codebreaking can be. Let’s start with a picture of the message so you know what we are dealing with here… Read more…
Who?
 | EVP Cyber Product Innovation for Mastercard. Formally the Chief Technology Officer for Intel Secure Home Gateways, CTO for McAfee Enterprise Endpoint, CTO McAfee Innovation team, and Founder/CTO SafeBoot Corp. |
Simon Says - Musings of a Technology CTO 
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