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TUESDAY, AUGUST 16, 2011
TECHNOLOGY
Hackers protest transit blocking of cellphones BART website hacked, customer information posted SAN FRANCISCO: San Francisco’s mass transit system prepared for renewed protests yesterday, a day after hackers angry over blocked cell phone service at some transit stations broke into a website and posted company contact information for more than 2,000 customers. The action by a hacker group known as Anonymous was the latest showdown between anarchists angry at perceived attempts to limit free speech and officials trying to control protests that grow out of social networking and have the potential to become violent.
WESTMINSTER: Chief Superintendent Simon Ovens, left, commander of the Westminster Burglary Squad, and another officer apprehend a suspect following a raid by police in an attempt to recover property stolen during the recent civil disturbances. —AP
Facial recognition in use after riots LONDON: Facial recognition technology being considered for London’s 2012 Games is getting a workout in the wake of Britain’s riots, a senior police chief told The Associated Press, with officers feeding photographs of suspects through Scotland Yard’s newly updated face-matching program. Chief Constable Andy Trotter of the British Transport Police said that the sophisticated software was being used to help find those suspected of being involved in the worst unrest London has seen in a generation. But he cautioned that facial recognition makes up only a fraction of the police force’s efforts, saying tips have mostly come from traditional sources, such as still images captured from closed circuit cameras, pictures gathered by officers, footage shot by police helicopters or images snapped by members of the public. One department was driving around a large video screen displaying images of suspects. “There’s a mass of evidence out there,” Trotter said in a telephone interview. “The public are so enraged that people who wouldn’t normally come forward are helping us - especially when they see their neighbors are coming back with brand new TVs.” Prime Minister David Cameron acknowledged that police were overwhelmed by rioting that began over the weekend in London and spread across the country over four days. Mobs of youths looted stores, set buildings aflame and attacked police officers and other people - a chaotic and humbling scene for a city a year away from hosting the Olympic Games. At an emergency session of Parliament summoned to discuss the riots, Cameron said authorities were considering new powers, including allowing police to order thugs to remove masks or hoods, evicting troublemakers from subsidized housing and temporarily disabling cell phone instant messaging services. He said the 16,000 police deployed on London’s streets to deter rioters and reassure residents would remain through the weekend. A press officer with Scotland Yard - who also spoke anonymously, in line with force policy confirmed that facial recognition technology was at the police’s disposal, although he gave few other details. He said that generally the technology would only be used to help identify those suspected of serious crimes, such as assault, and that in most cases disseminating photographs to the general public remains a far cheaper and more effective way of finding suspects. The facial-recognition technology used by police treats the human face like a grid, measuring the distance between a person’s nose, eyes, lips and other features. It has recently been upgraded, according to an article published last year in Scotland Yard’s bimonthly magazine, “The Job.” The March 2010 article said that the new program has been shown to
work far better than older versions of the technology, with one expert quoted as saying that it had shown promise in identifying people from high-quality, face-on shots taken off of surveillance photographs, mobile phones, passports or the Internet. A law enforcement official told the AP that to use the technology “you have to have a good picture of a suspect and it is only useful if you have something to match it against. In other words, the suspect already has to have a previous criminal record.” He spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to discuss ongoing investigations. In another effort to identify suspects, police have released two dozen photos and videos to the picture-sharing website Flickr, where they’ve already gathered more than 400,000 hits. Some of those photographs have also been published by Britain’s brash tabloid press. The Sun recently plastered them across its front page, along with a headline urging readers to report looters to the police. The photographs on Flickr are mainly grainy images pulled from cameras, which may not be of much use to face-matching software. But detectives are already scanning the Web for pictures of high-quality photographs of rioters’ faces, according to photojournalist Guilherme Zauith, who witnessed some of the disturbances in London and later posted images of clashes to the Internet. Zauith said he was recently contacted by a London detective “saying that they saw my photos online and if I could send it to them to help to identify the people.” “They were looking for all kind of photographs showing faces,” he said. Zauith, a 30-year-old Brazilian national, said he turned the photos over to the detective. The West Midlands police were trying another approach: driving a van equipped with a large screen displaying 50 images of suspects through Birmingham. Police said the “Digi-Van” will stop at key locations around the city to give shoppers and commuters a good look at the photographs in hopes they can help identify suspects. Facial recognition technology is already widely employed by free-touse websites such as Facebook and Google Inc.’s Picasa photo-sharing program. Such programs have been of increasing interest to authorities as well. A person with the Olympic planning committee, speaking to the AP on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of security preparations, said that facial recognition software was being considered for use as a security measure during the Olympic Games. Meanwhile, detectives are employing a host of other tactics to take aim at the rioters. Police departments across the country have made arrests linked to riot threats and boasts posted to social networking sites. —AP
Anonymous posted people’s names, phone numbers, and street and email addresses on its own website, while also calling for a disruption of the Bay Area Rapid Transit’s evening commute yesterday. BART officials said Sunday that they were working a strategy to try to block any efforts by protesters to try to disrupt the service. “We have been planning for the protests that are said to be shaping up for tomorrow,” BART spokesman Jim Allison said. He did not provide specifics, but said BART police will be staffing stations and trains and that the agency had already contacted San Francisco police. The transit agency disabled the effected website, myBART.org, Sunday night after it also had been altered by apparent hackers who posted images of the so-called Guy Fawkes masks that anarchists have previously worn when showing up to physical protests. The cyber attack came in response to the BART’s decision to block wireless service in several of its San Francisco stations Thursday night as the agency aimed to thwart a planned protest over a transit police shooting. Officials said the protest had been designed to disrupt the evening commute. “We are Anonymous, we are your citizens, we are the people, we do not tolerate oppression from any government agency,” the hackers wrote on their own website. “BART has proved multiple times that they have no problem exploiting and abusing the people.” Allison described myBART.org as a “satellite site” used for marketing purposes. It’s operated by an outside company and sends BART alerts and other information to customers, Allison said. The names and contact info published by Sunday came from a database of 55,000 subscribers, he said. He did not know if the group had obtained information from all the subscribers, he said, adding that
no bank account or credit card information was listed. The BART computer problem was the latest hack the loosely organized group claimed credit for this year. Last month, the FBI and British and Dutch officials made 21 arrests, many of them related to the group’s attacks on Internet payment provider PayPal Inc., which has been targeted over its refusal to process donations to WikiLeaks. The group also claims credit for disrupting the websites of Visa and MasterCard in
July 3 shooting death by BART police who said the 45-year-old victim was wielding a knife. Activists also remain upset by the 2009 death of Oscar Grant, an unarmed black passenger who was shot by a white officer on an Oakland train platform. The officer quit the force and was convicted of involuntary manslaughter after the shooting. Facing backlash from civil rights advocates and one of its own board members, BART has defended the decision to block cell phone use,
among those whose email and home phone number were published by the hackers Sunday. “I think what they (the hackers) did was illegal and wrong. I work in IT myself, and I think that this was not ethical hacking. I think this was completely unjustified,” Eichman said. She said she doesn’t blame BART and feels its action earlier in the week of blocking cell phone service was reasonable. “It doesn’t necessarily keep me from taking
December when the credit card companies stopped processing donations to WikiLeaks and its founder, Julian Assange. BART’s decision to shut down wireless access was criticized by many as heavy handed, and some raised questions about whether the move violated free speech. The problems began Thursday night when BART officials blocked wireless access to disrupt organization of a demonstration protesting the
with Allison saying the cell phone disruptions were legal because the agency owns the property and infrastructure. “I’m just shocked that they didn’t think about the implications of this. We really don’t have the right to be this type of censor,” Lynette Sweet, who serves on BART’s board of directors, said previously. “In my opinion, we’ve let the actions of a few people affect everybody. And that’s not fair.” Laura Eichman was
BART in the future but I will certainly have to review where I set up accounts and what kind of data I’m going to keep online,” Eichman said. Michael Beekman of San Francisco told the AP that he didn’t approve of BART’s move to cut cell phone service or the Anonymous posting. “I’m not paranoid but i feel like it was an invasion of privacy,” he said. “I thought I would never personally be involved in any of their (Anonymous’) shenanigans.” —AP
Hackers gather in Germany for computing ‘Woodstock’
HONG KONG: The Turanor PlanetSolar, the first solar-powered boat to travel around the world, arriving in Hong Kong yesterday. —AFP
World’s biggest solar boat docks in China HONG KONG: There is “huge potential” to use alternative energy in the shipping industry, the man behind the world’s biggest solar boat said yesterday as it arrived in Hong Kong as part of a global voyage. PlanetSolar, a 31 by 15-metre white catamaran, is equipped with more than 500 square meters of solar paneling and can reach a top speed of around 15 knots, equivalent to 25 kilometers per hour. “We see there is a huge potential for solar boats,” project founder Raphael Domjan said. “We have the technology to change and we are optimistic.”
Domjan acknowledged it was unlikely cargo and commercial ships would rely on solar power alone, but said it could be combined with other clean energy sources like wind. The boat, which can carry up to 50 passengers, arrived in Hong Kong from the Philippines after embarking on a world tour from Monaco last September. The 60-tonne Swissflagged vessel was built in Germany and cost 18 million euro. Merchant shipping accounts for 4.5 percent of the world’s total greenhouse gas emissions, according to United Nations figures. —AFP
FINOWFURT: With hammocks hanging from trees and the smell of marijuana lingering in the air, the summer camp organized by Germany’s Chaos Computer Club (CCC) almost felt like Woodstock. But instead of hippies it was computer hackers who had flooded this year’s summer camp. And instead of flower power the talk was of the latest controversies in cyberspace, especially the legality of hacking and the role of famed whistleblower site WikiLeaks. Organized by the CCC, which fights for freedom of information through hacking, the camp takes place every four years and is a venue for computer fans to meet, debate hacking issues and try out new technology. Hosted over four days last week at a former Soviet base in Finowfurt, north of Berlin, the camp attracted an estimated 3,500 hackers from 50 countries, up from 2,300 people in 2007, CCC spokesman Frank Rieger said. Mixing conferences with workshops with titles such as “Cyberpeace and datalove”, the camp attracted a young and mostly male crowd, united by the CCC slogan “Protect private data, exploit public data”. But beyond the “peace and love” atmosphere, the hacking community was split on several issues. “Hackers are very individualistic, they don’t like being put in boxes,” explained Rieger. One hot-button topic was Julian Assange’s controversial agenda, following the release of hacked US diplomatic cables this year which again divided opinion on the whistleblower site and its founder. Former WikiLeaks spokesman Daniel Domscheit-Berg, now a self-sworn enemy of Assange, used the Finowfurt event to announce the launch of his own platform, OpenLeaks, and challenged CCC members to hack it. “He wants to use us as a credibility voucher,” said the CCC’s Andy Mueller-Maguhn, a close friend of Assange who stands out from the hacking crowd with his pressed shirt and briefcase. “It’s very annoying. By definition, our movement is an open one,” he said, “but sometimes one has to set limits.” Another issue up for debate was the legality of hacking, where many agree the lines are blurred. Samuel Lesueur of the French hacker group Ecolab said he has always chosen “the legal route” but admits that “out of the boundaries of the association, everyone does as they please”. —AFP
IT Threat Evolution: Q2 2011 DUBAI: After analyzing vast numbers of IT threats during the second quarter of 2011, Kaspersky Lab’s experts identified a number of important trends. Navigating the web remains the riskiest activity on the Internet with malicious URLs that serve exploit kits, bots, ransomware Trojans, etc. being the most frequently detected objects (65.44%) online. Interestingly, 87% of the websites used to spread malicious programs were concentrated in just 10 countries. The first two places in this particular “top 10” were occupied by the US (28.53%) and Russia (15.99%). The Netherlands leads the way in reducing the
number of malicious hosting sites: compared to the previous quarter, its share has fallen by 4.3 percentage points to 7.57%. This is down primarily to the efforts of the Dutch police and includes the neutralizing of botnets such as Bredolab and Rustock. Online threats. Kaspersky Lab experts have divided countries into groups according to their local infection levels: l High-risk countries (41-60% unique users subject to web attacks). This group includes: Oman, Russia, Iraq, Azerbaijan, Armenia, Sudan, Saudi Arabia and Belarus. Newcomers to this group in Q2 were Sudan and Saudi Arabia, while Kazakhstan
dropped down a level. l Average risk group (21-41%). This group was made up of 94 countries, including: the US (40.2%), China (34.8%), the UK (34.6%), Brazil (29.6%), Peru (28.4%), Spain (27.4%), Italy (26.5%), France (26.1%), Sweden (25.3%) and the Netherlands (22.3%). It is particularly noteworthy that the US, at 40.2%, is very close to joining the high-risk group of countries due to the increase in the number of FakeAV detections. l Safe-surfing countries (11.4-21%). This group comprised 28 countries and included Switzerland (20.9%), Poland
(20.2%), Singapore (19.6%) and Germany (19.1%). In the second quarter of 2011, five countries left this group, including Finland which entered a higher risk group with 22.1% Local threats. India was among the top 10 countries in which users’ computers ran the highest risk of local infection. Every second computer in the country was at risk of local infection at least once in the past three months. “Over the last few years, India has been growing steadily more attrac tive to cybercriminals as the number of computers in the country increases steadily. Other factors that attract the cybercrimi-
nals include a low overall level of computer literacy and the prevalence of pirated software that is never updated,” explains Yury Namestnikov, Senior Virus Analyst at Kaspersky Lab. “Botnet controllers see India as a place with millions of unprotected and unpatched computers which can remain active on zombie networks for extended periods of time.” The five safest countries in terms of the level of local infections are: Japan (with 8.2% of unique users affected), Germany (9.4%), Denmark (9.7%), Luxembourg (10%) and Switzerland (10.3%).