A 28-year-old hacker has been charged in what federal prosecutors are calling the largest case of identity theft ever seen. The man, Albert Gonzalez, worked with two unnamed Russian conspirators to run wild through the computer networks of a handful of prominent corporations, including 7-Eleven, the supermarket chain Hannaford Brothers, and the payment processor Heartland Payment Center. The size of the heist—130 million credit and debit card numbers, according to prosecutors—have many people wondering: How exactly is such a massive theft carried out?
The Justice Department’s indictment (pdf) describes how Gonzales (a.k.a. “segvec” and “soupnazi,” among other aliases) and his co-conspirators pulled it off. They began the job by scanning lists of Fortune 500 companies for likely targets, and then visited retail outlets to scope out the payment systems used at checkout counters and to look for vulnerabilities. Then they would write specific codes to corrupt their data systems and launch a virus from computers in the United States and Europe to pull hundreds and thousands of credit card numbers, and sort through them using a “sniffer,” which is basically a data analysis system that decodes big chunks of information [The Atlantic].
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The next big leap in computing power may come from a surprising source: the genetic code. Researchers at IBM have found a way to use DNA strands as the scaffolding on which to place carbon nanotubes, creating tiny microchips that could eventually be more efficient and cheaper to produce than today’s silicon chips. To keep pace with Moore’s Law, which postulates that the number of transistors on an integrated circuit will double every two years, chip makers have to squeeze an increasing number of transistors onto every chip [Wired.com]. The new process offers an entirely different route to miniaturization.
Microchips are used in computers, cell phones and other electronic devices…. Right now, the tinier the chip, the more expensive the equipment. [An IBM spokesman] said that if the DNA origami process scales to production-level, manufacturers could trade hundreds of millions of dollars in complex tools for less than a million dollars of polymers, DNA solutions, and heating implements [Reuters].
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The cyber-attack that temporarily disabled Twitter and compromised Facebook and LiveJournal was politically motivated and was directed at a pro-Georgian blogger called Cyxymu, says a representative from Facebook.
The attack, which paralyzed Twitter for two hours and “degraded” service on Facebook, was one known as a distributed denial of service attack. This technique uses a network of tens of thousands of compromised computers, known as a “botnet”, to flood a website’s servers with page view requests, leaving legitimate traffic unable to get through. This huge amount of connection requests can quickly overwhelm a server and, in some cases, cause an entire website to crash [Telegraph]. It seems Twitter, a relatively new service with a U.S.-based infrastructure, couldn’t handle the surge in traffic, while Facebook and Google, which have many key services located internationally, were better-prepared for it.
It has not been confirmed who perpetrated the attack, but the blogger says he believes it could have been an attempt by the Russian government to squelch his criticism of over Russia’s conduct in the war over the disputed South Ossetia region, which began a year ago today. “Maybe it was carried out by ordinary hackers but I’m certain the order came from the Russian government” [Guardian], the blogger said. Such a widespread attack, some believe, would only be possible if the coordinator of the attack had access to significant resources.
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Evaluating the happiness of an entire society is tricky–after all, the traditional survey-based method of collecting data doesn’t work for such a huge population. But now scientists say they have come up with a way to quantify the well-being of a society: by analyzing song lyrics and blog posts for emotionally charged words, according to a study published in the Journal of Happiness Studies. Among their findings, researchers determined that bloggers in their 50s and 60s are most content, and that popular music has become increasingly less happy since the 1960s.
To evaluate the overall happiness of the public, researchers pulled data from nearly two-and-a-half million blogs and 230,000 song lyrics. With the aid of their own computers, the researchers scanned the texts for more than 1000 emotionally charged words that a 1999 psychology study had ranked on a scale from 1 (miserable) to 9 (ecstatic). “Triumphant” and “love” topped the list with average scores greater than 8.7, whereas “disgusted” was one of the lowest at 2.45. The researchers then calculated an average happiness score for each text based on the words’ scores and frequencies [ScienceNOW Daily News]. They found that although certain days of the year always show fluctuations in the blog world (Christmas and Valentine’s Day show a spike in happiness, while September 11 shows a dip in well-being), overall happiness among the bloggers since 2005 has increased about 4 percent.
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Volunteers helping astronomers classify galaxies in an online project have identified an entirely new type of galaxy, which they dubbed “green pea” galaxies due to their resemblance to little green legumes floating in space. The citizen scientists who had noticed the oddities, and who came to call themselves the “Pea Corps” and the “Peas Brigade,” began to discuss the phenomena on an online forum, and soon enough professional astronomers with links to the project confirmed that the volunteers had found a never-before-seen type of galaxy.
Says astronomer Carolin Cardamone: “No one person could have done this on their own…. Even if we had managed to look through 10,000 of these images, we would have only come across a few Green Peas and wouldn’t have recognized them as a unique class of galaxies.” Of the one million galaxies that make up the image bank, the researchers found only 250 Green Peas [SPACE.com]. Cardamone and her colleagues wrote up the results, which will be published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.
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A French hacker broke into the email accounts of Twitter executives and employees, and now the cyber snoop is leaking business and personal info about company leaders to TechCrunch, an American blog, and Korben, a French blog. The hacker reportedly guessed passwords and gained access to several Gmail accounts, as well as accounts with Google Docs, PayPal, and other services.
TechCrunch received a compressed zip file of 310 confidential documents, including a complete Twitter employee list and salary information; food preferences of Twitter employees; confidential contracts with companies such as Nokia, Samsung, Dell, AOL, Microsoft, and others; a contact list of notable Web and entertainment personalities; meeting reports; [and] applicant resumes [PC World]. Now it’s up to the site to decide what information to publish. Thus far, TechCrunch has decided not to release anything that is personally embarrassing. Still, under the philosophy “News is what somebody somewhere wants to suppress; all the rest is advertising,” the site will release documents it considers relevant to the company. These include notes from executive meetings, the original pitch for a Twitter TV show, and certain company financial information.
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The first permanent node of the “interplanetary internet” has been installed and tested out aboard the International Space Station, in what NASA officials say is the first step to a communication system that could one day span the solar system. The interplanetary internet got its first deep space tryout last fall, when a spacecraft called EPOXI that’s on its way to a comet rendezvous used the system to send images back to its controllers on Earth. Now, researchers are ready to test it out in regular communications with the space station.
There’s a fringe benefit: In just a few months, astronauts will be able to tweet live from the international space station. “NASA is trying to leverage the popularity of Twitter to get its message out,” said [researcher] Kevin Gifford…. “To tweet from space will have a lot of glitz value” [Denver Post]. Currently, astronauts on the space station have to schedule times to send or receive data from mission control below; that’s why the first astronaut to make use of Twitter on a space shuttle flight, Mike Massimino, aka @Astro_Mike, had to send his tweets to Houston and have a NASA employee post them to his profile.
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Were you born after 1988 in a small state? If so, researchers would have a particularly good chance of figuring out your Social Security number. In a new study, researchers used publicly available data, including an individual’s place and date of birth, to guess the Social Security number that would have been assigned to that person. And the study’s authors say that cyber-crooks could use similar techniques for identity theft. “We live in a precarious time, where knowledge of a Social Security number, along with other information about one’s name and date of birth, is sometimes sufficient to impersonate another individual,” said Alessandro Acquisti, the study’s lead author [Bloomberg].
Acquisti’s team shared their results with the federal government, but the Social Security office is downplaying the findings; spokesman Mark Lassiter said there is still no “foolproof” method for predicting Social Security numbers. “The suggestion that Mr. Acquisti has cracked a code for predicting an SSN is a dramatic exaggeration,” Lassiter said via e-mail. However, he added: “For reasons unrelated to this report, the agency has been developing a system to randomly assign SSNs. This system will be in place next year” [AP].
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Computers powered by frickin’ laser beams just came a step closer. Light-based, or photonic, computers would theoretically be much faster and smaller than the electronic computers we use today, but researchers have had a hard time putting theory into action. Now, a new study has shown that two laser beams can be harnassed to turn a single molecule into a transistor. However, the specialized conditions necessary for the trick to work mean that computer stores won’t have photonic sections anytime soon.
Conventional computers are based on transistors, which allow one electrode to control the current moving through the device and are combined to form logic gates and processors. The new component achieves the same thing, but for laser beams, not electric currents. A green laser beam is used to control the power of an orange laser beam passing through the device [New Scientist]. In the study, published in Nature, the green beam could make the orange beam either weak or strong, which is analagous to an electronic transistor turning a current on or off.
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In a rare victory for freedom of information in China, the government has abruptly reversed course on its mandate that Internet filtering software be installed on every computer sold in China after July 1.
Yesterday, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology announced that mandatory installation of the software, called Green Dam Youth Escort, would be delayed indefinitely. The software caused a torrent of protests from both Chinese computer users and global computer makers…. China has said the software is designed to filter out pornography and violence to protect minors, but many experts say it can also block any other content that the authorities deem subversive [The New York Times].
While some experts suggested that the Chinese government might be delaying the program’s roll-out simply to give computer makers more time to test the software and comply with the policy, others believe that the government was forced to bow to the pressure from outraged citizens. “This shows that social pressure can’t be ignored,” said Zhou Ze, a Beijing lawyer who challenged the legality of the plan. “They tried to control public opinion to back the plan by creating a fuss about pornography, but that failed, and they will have learnt to be more careful next time” [Reuters]. Analyst Edward Yu of Beijing says that while protests from foreign computer companies probably influenced the government’s decision, “we think public opinion played an even more important role” [AP].
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The street protests in Iran will be not be televised–how passé. Instead, they are being tweeted.
The microblog service Twitter has become a critical way to get out information about the tumult in Iran’s capital, Tehran, where people have poured into the street to protest the disputed results of last Friday’s presidential election. And the whole world is watching. The U.S. State Department has confirmed that over the weekend officials reached out to Twitter and asked them to delay a network upgrade that was scheduled for Monday night. The reason? To protect the interests of Iranians using the service [Time].
The vast majority of Twitter messages support the leading opposition candidate, Mir Hussein Moussavi, and argue that he was the true winner of the presidential election. Twitter users are posting messages, known as tweets, with the term #IranElection, which allows users to search for all tweets on the subject. On Monday evening, Twitter was registering about 30 new posts a minute with that tag. One read, “We have no national press coverage in Iran, everyone should help spread Moussavi’s message. One Person = One Broadcaster. #IranElection” [The New York Times]. Since then, the Iranian government has restricted the movements of foreign journalists and has cracked down on blogs and Web sites within the country, but the flow of information on Twitter has only increased.
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A new optical storage technique that records in five dimensions could hold up to 10,000 times what a standard DVD can store. The new technology could see a whopping 1.6 terabytes of information fit on a DVD-sized disc [BBC], whereas a DVD now can hold only 8.5 gigabytes and a Blu-ray disc up to 50.
Discs started out storing information in two dimensions and more recently have been stepped up to three. By using gold nanorods [the researchers] were able to add two additional dimensions, one based on the colour spectrum, and the other on polarisation [PhysOrg]. The key for his team was to find a material for the disk that could store this extra information…. That ideal material contains gold, rod-shaped nanoparticles of different sizes and orientations [Nature].
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A new online tool is expected to debut this week to answer questions like these: How far away from Earth is the planet Neptune at this point in its orbit? And how has the unemployment rate in Iowa’s Scott County changed over the past decade? WolframAlpha, a powerful new service that can answer a broad range of queries, has become one of the most anticipated Web products of the year. But its creator, Stephen Wolfram, wants to make something clear: Despite the online chatter comparing it to Google, his service is not intended to dethrone the king of search engines. “I am not keen on the hype,” said Mr. Wolfram [The New York Times].
Google’s mission, after all, is “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.” In contrast, WolframAlpha doesn’t present users with an organized list of information; it sorts through data sets, performs calculations, and presents an answer. Type in a query for a statistic, a profile of a country or company, the average airspeed of a sparrow ― and instead of a series of results that may or may not provide the answer you’re looking for, you get a mini dossier on the subject compiled in real time that, ideally, nails the exact thing you want to know. It’s like having a squad of Cambridge mathematicians and CIA analysts inside your browser [Wired].
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In a masterful work of “DNA origami,” researchers have created a nanoscale DNA “box” which can be opened with DNA “keys”. One day, such structures could be filled with drugs, injected into the blood, and then unlocked when and where the drugs are required [New Scientist]. Researchers say the boxes could also be used as minuscule environmental sensors that open or close in response to a stimulus, or as the logic gates of a DNA-based computer.
To accomplish this feat, described in a paper in Nature, researchers exploited the fact that complementary DNA bases–the fundamental building blocks of DNA’s double helix–attach to each other. To design the box, the researchers developed a computer program to generate a continuous single-stranded DNA sequence that, along with smaller DNA fragments that act as staples, would self-assemble into the desired shape. The sequence was devised with many complementary regions so that it would automatically fold into six roughly square accordion-like sheets–the sides of the box–based on DNA’s natural tendency to pair into double strands. The DNA staples, also driven by the pairing of complementary sequences, stitched the sheets’ edges together to form a hollow cube with a hinged lid [Technology Review]. The final product was a box that measured 42 by 36 by 36 nanometers, and had a cavity big enough to hold enzymes or virus particles.
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Objections are increasing to Google Book Search, Google’s massive effort to scan millions of books and present their contents online. The company reached an agreement last year with the Authors Guild and Association of American Publishers to pursue the project. It is awaiting a judge’s approval…. The settlement is unusual is that it essentially structures the digitized book search market while that market is in its infancy, said Bert Foer, president of the American Antitrust Institute [Reuters]. But Google is facing new obstacles in winning that judicial approval, as concerns continue to mount over how much power will be concentrated in the company’s hands.
The settlement would establish a revenue-sharing system and would allow Google to present the partial contents of books in the public domain, books that that are still under copyright but are out of print, and current books whose publishers have negotiated agreements with Google. But critics worry that Google is building a new kind of monopoly based on access to information, and that the company could therefore set prices as high as it wanted. In a new legal filing by library groups, critics of the settlement wrote that “the cost of creating such a library and Google’s significant lead-time advantage suggest that no other entity will create a competing digital library for the foreseeable future” [CNET]. The Justice Department’s antitrust division is also reportedly investigating the deal.
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