Microsoft won’t say if Skype has a wiretap backdoor

Microsoft-Skype Snooping Accusations Push All the Paranoia Buttons*

from slashgear.com: No one likes to think their private conversations can be eavesdropped on by a third-party. The United States government and law enforcement agencies have been trying to force VoIP carriers such as Skype and other digital communications companies to include a backdoor that would allow police and government agencies to institute a wiretap on online communications. The surveillance laws have been proposed not only in the US but in other countries as well.

The proposed laws would force software companies to add backdoors to allow wiretapping in certain instances. Skype has historically resisted any attempt to get it to institute a backdoor for legal wiretapping. However, there is some indication from an unlikely source that things may have changed at Skype with regards to a backdoor. Hackers originally alleged that changes made to Skype’s architecture seemed to be able to make it easier for wiretapping by law enforcement agencies.

Microsoft won’t confirm or deny that it can intercept phone calls. A Microsoft spokesperson said that the VoIP service cooperates with law enforcement agencies as much as is legally and technically possible. However, we do know that Microsoft was granted a patent in June of 2011 for “legal intercept” technology designed to be used with VoIP services such as Skype. The patent documentation said that the technology would allow Skype to “silently copy communication transmitted via the communication session.”

NASA laptop theft lead in to Star Wars?

A Daily Galaxy entry titled, "NewsFlash: Star Wars? ---ISS Control Codes on Stolen NASA Laptop," leaves a reader to wonder about its intent?  Yes, laptops are lost almost routinely, but should it be public knowledge some aren't properly encrypted and may have sensitive codes? The entry informs, "...stolen from NASA last year contained command codes used to control the International Space Station, an internal investigation revealed. The laptop was among dozens of mobile devices lost or stolen in recent years that contained sensitive information, the space agency's inspector general told Congress today in testimony highlighting NASA's security challenges." Readers shouldn't take the information at face value. You read a little further down, Jet Propulsion Lab computers were also compromised from IP addresses located in China!  Is the intent to implicate China in a public manner?  Why now, it's suspected, cyber wars have been conducted for years? This entry should be noted and filed away for future reference.

vanity fair on stuxnet: a declaration of cyberwar

did US intel mastermind the stuxnet cyber-missile?
from vanity fair: Last summer, the world’s top software-security experts were panicked by the discovery of a drone-like computer virus, radically different from and far more sophisticated than any they’d seen. The race was on to figure out its payload, its purpose, and who was behind it. As the world now knows, the Stuxnet worm appears to have attacked Iran’s nuclear program. And, as Michael Joseph Gross reports, while its source remains something of a mystery, Stuxnet is the new face of 21st-century warfare: invisible, anonymous, and devastating.

2010: the year the internet went to war

from threat level: It was a year without parallel. Threat Level’s bread-and-butter themes of censorship, hacking, security, privacy, copyright and cyberwar were all represented in tug-of-war struggles with unprecedented outcomes.

Google defeated China’s censors, but caved to corporate censorship in the United States. The largest computer-crime case ever prosecuted ended in the nation’s longest prison term. A small-time Xbox modder who advertised his services online beat the federal rap. And a mysterious computer virus called Stuxnet finally put proof to decades of warnings that malware will eventually be used to kinetic effect in the real world.

A myriad of court decisions seemed to be a boon for online rights, while others clearly were a step backward. The year 2010 saw the rise of the newspaper copyright troll, and judges pushed back on absurd jury verdicts for music file sharing and outdated electronic spying rules.

And a secret-spilling website flirting with insolvency and dissolution suddenly burst onto the world stage. WikiLeaks was without a doubt the biggest 2010 development in Threat Level’s world.

related: cyber-warfare centre coming, germany says

blended threats: will it blend?

Billy Rios shows how to exploit bugs in applications such as Java, Flash, Adobe and create your own hybrid program, which eludes your computer's security to steal files! Rios, at his website, Thoughts on Security in an Uncivilized World, recaps how to make your own blended threat, which creates code to exploit these bugs and place them in a program to do as you wish. Rios asks Will It Blend?, a presentation he gave at security conferences and created a video to show you how quickly and easily you can assemble a blended threat!