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Archive for April, 2010

Facebook has said it had disabled an account on the social networking site under the name of Al-Qaida leader Osama Bin Laden, which posted extremist Islamic content and had generated over 1000 fans.

People often attempt to register fake accounts under the name of famous or infamous people and we have a number of technical measures designed to prevent this behavior. Facebook spokesman Andrew Noyes said on Sunday in an email.

Ever since Google disclosed in January 2010 that internet traders had stolen information from its computers the exact nature and extent of the theft has been a closely guarded company secret. But a person with direct knowledge of the investigation now says that the losses included one of  Googles crown jewels, a password system that controls access by million of users worldwide to almost all of the companies web services, including email and business applications.

The program, code named Gaia, was attacked in a lightning raid taking less than two days last December, the person said. Described publicly only once at a conference four years at, the software is intended to enable users and employees to sign in with their password just once to operate a range of services.

The intruders do not appear to have stolen passwords of Gmail users, and the firm quickly started making significant changes to the security of its networks. But the theft leaves open the possibility, however faint, that the intruders may find weaknesses that Google might not even be aware of, independent computer experts said. The new details seem likely to increase debate about security and privacy of cast computing systems like Google’s that now centralize the personal information of millions of individuals and business. As vast amounts of digital information are stored in a cluster of computers, referred to as “cloud” computing a single breach can lead to disastrous losses.

The attacks have been traced to computers at two campuses in China, but investigators acknowledge that the true origin may have been concealed, a quintessential problem of cyber attacks.

China has quietly formed a new bureau expected to help to police social networking sites and other user driven forums on the internet, which are providing harder for the government to monitor and control than ordinary new portals.

The new bureau marks the latest outgrowth to a morass of agencies tasked with regulating online business and communications in China. People informed of the expansion say the authorities are retooling their leverage the web, and regulators are jostling for the growing power and privilege at stake.

The new agency, officially called the Internet News Coordination Bureau, is part of theirs effort to better monitor the communications of Chinese web users who total nearly 400 million by official estimates. Chinese officials consider tools like social networking, microblogging and video sharing sites a major vulnerability. In the past year, they have been forced to block access in China of overseas video and networking giants over information they deem subversive.

While the scope of the latest data theft perpetrated by China- based hackers is alarming, the fact that it has occurred again is not particularly surpricing.From the exposure of Ghostnet in March-2009-a cyber operation that was found to have infiltrated important networks in 103 countries including India- to the hacking of Google servers that blew up into the China-Google fracas, cyber attacks traced to Chinese soil have become increasingly frequent over the past few years. What is more surprising is that despite having been burned last year, inadequate precautions seem to have been taken by the Indian government to guard against repeat occurrences. The scale of the data mining this time, as reported by a Canadian watchdog organization, is extensive. Highly classified information stolen from the defense ministry pertains to defense matters and Naxalism, among other issues. Computers in various Indian embassies around the world have also been compromised.

If cyber security is not moved up on the government’s list of properties, the next attack is likely to be worse. That cyber warfare will increasingly be part of a state’s suite of offensive and defensive mechanisms is indisputable. India’s booming IT industry and rapidly growing network infrastructure is both an advantage and vulnerability in this context.

Our legislative and security measures are struggling to keep pace. The Information Technology Act of 2000 is a catch-all legislation severely lacking in many respects.

Government agencies lag in cyber forensic capabilities. Similarly, our bureaucrats and diplomats seem to inadequately train in best practices, such as never transferring sensitive data from a secure net work to a personal or otherwise unsecured computer. Taken together, these paint a depressing picture of our ability; to defend against further cyber raids.

It is time to take our cue from other countries that have taken the initiative in this are. Not just defense and security but Indian commercial interests are at stake. The US, for example, has a robust approach to cyber security, setting up specialized cells in its intelligence agencies coupled with research. One way to beef up India’s cyber security infrastructure is to bring in the private sector in a big way, with adequate confidentiality clauses. Given the high profile and undoubted expertise of our IT sector to disregard such a resource would be wasteful in the extreme. And that, as we have just seen, is something we cannot afford.