'Anonymous' hackers target US security think tank

LONDON (AP) — The loose-knit hacking movement "Anonymous" claimed Sunday to have stolen thousands of credit card numbers and other personal information belonging to clients of U.S.-based security think tank Stratfor. One hacker said the goal was to pilfer funds from individuals' accounts to give away as Christmas donations, and some victims confirmed unauthorized transactions linked to their credit cards.

Anonymous boasted of stealing Stratfor's confidential client list, which includes entities ranging from Apple Inc. to the U.S. Air Force to the Miami Police Department, and mining it for more than 4,000 credit card numbers, passwords and home addresses.

Austin, Texas-based Stratfor provides political, economic and military analysis to help clients reduce risk, according to a description on its YouTube page. It charges subscribers for its reports and analysis, delivered through the web, emails and videos. The company's main website was down, with a banner saying the "site is currently undergoing maintenance."

Proprietary information about the companies and government agencies that subscribe to Stratfor's newsletters did not appear to be at any significant risk, however, with the main threat posed to individual employees who had subscribed.

"Not so private and secret anymore?" Anonymous taunted in a message on Twitter, promising that the attack on Stratfor was just the beginning of a Christmas-inspired assault on a long list of targets.

Anonymous said the client list it had already posted was a small slice of the 200 gigabytes worth of plunder it stole from Stratfor and promised more leaks. It said it was able to get the credit card details in part because Stratfor didn't bother encrypting them — an easy-to-avoid blunder which, if true, would be a major embarrassment for any security-related company.

Fred Burton, Stratfor's vice president of intelligence, said the company had reported the intrusion to law enforcement and was working with them on the investigation.

Stratfor has protections in place meant to prevent such attacks, he said.

"But I think the hackers live in this kind of world where once they fixate on you or try to attack you it's extraordinarily difficult to defend against," Burton said.

Hours after publishing what it claimed was Stratfor's client list, Anonymous tweeted a link to encrypted files online with names, phone numbers, emails, addresses and credit card account details.

"Not as many as you expected? Worry not, fellow pirates and robin hoods. These are just the 'A's," read a message posted online that encouraged readers to download a file of the hacked information.

The attack is "just another in a massive string of breaches we've seen this year and in years past," said Josh Shaul, chief technology officer of Application Security Inc., a New York-based provider of database security software.

Still, companies that shared secret information with Stratfor in order to obtain threat assessments might worry that the information is among the 200 gigabytes of data that Anonymous claims to have stolen, he said.

"If an attacker is walking away with that much email, there might be some very juicy bits of information that they have," Shaul said.

Lt. Col. John Dorrian, public affairs officer for the Air Force, said that "for obvious reasons" the Air Force doesn't discuss specific vulnerabilities, threats or responses to them.

"The Air Force will continue to monitor the situation and, as always, take appropriate action as necessary to protect Air Force networks and information," he said in an email.

Miami Police Department spokesman Sgt. Freddie Cruz Jr. said that he could not confirm that the agency was a client of Stratfor, and he said he had not received any information about a security breach involving the police department.

Anonymous also linked to images online that it suggested were receipts for charitable donations made by the group manipulating the credit card data it stole.

"Thank you! Defense Intelligence Agency," read the text above one image that appeared to show a transaction summary indicating that an agency employee's information was used to donate $250 to a non-profit.

One receipt — to the American Red Cross — had Allen Barr's name on it.

Barr, of Austin, Texas, recently retired from the Texas Department of Banking and said he discovered last Friday that a total of $700 had been spent from his account. Barr, who has spent more than a decade dealing with cybercrime at banks, said five transactions were made in total.

"It was all charities, the Red Cross, CARE, Save the Children. So when the credit card company called my wife she wasn't sure whether I was just donating," said Barr, who wasn't aware until a reporter with the AP called that his information had been compromised when Stratfor's computers were hacked.

"It made me feel terrible. It made my wife feel terrible. We had to close the account."

Wishing everyone a "Merry LulzXMas" — a nod to its spinoff hacking group Lulz Security — Anonymous also posted a link on Twitter to a site containing the email, phone number and credit number of a U.S. Homeland Security employee.

The employee, Cody Sultenfuss, said he had no warning before his details were posted.
"They took money I did not have," he told The Associated Press in a series of emails, which did not specify the amount taken. "I think 'Why me?' I am not rich."

But the breach doesn't necessarily pose a risk to owners of the credit cards. A card user who suspects fraudulent activity on his or her card can contact the credit card company to dispute the charge.

Stratfor said in an email to members, signed by Stratfor Chief Executive George Friedman and passed on to AP by subscribers, that it had hired a "leading identity theft protection and monitoring service" on behalf of the Stratfor members affected by the attack. The company said it will send another email on services for affected members by Wednesday.

Stratfor acknowledged that an "unauthorized party" had revealed personal information and credit card data of some of its members.

The company had sent another email to subscribers earlier in the day saying it had suspended its servers and email after learning that its website had been hacked.

One member of the hacking group, who uses the handle AnonymousAbu on Twitter, claimed that more than 90,000 credit cards from law enforcement, the intelligence community and journalists — "corporate/exec accounts of people like Fox" News — had been hacked and used to "steal a million dollars" and make donations.

It was impossible to verify where credit card details were used. Fox News was not on the excerpted list of Stratfor members posted online, but other media organizations including MSNBC and Al-Jazeera English appeared in the file.

Anonymous warned it has "enough targets lined up to extend the fun fun fun of LulzXmas through the entire next week."

The group has previously claimed responsibility for attacks on credit card companies Visa Inc. and MasterCard Inc., eBay Inc.'s PayPal, as well as other groups in the music industry and the Church of Scientology.

____________

Plushnick-Masti reported from Houston. Associated Press writers Jennifer Kay in Miami and Daniel Wagner in Washington, D.C. also contributed to this report.

_____________

Cassandra Vinograd can be reached at http://twitter.com/CassVinograd

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Facebook launches tool to report suicidal behavior

(Reuters) - Facebook launched a new suicide prevention tool on Tuesday, giving users a direct link to an online chat with counselors who can help, the company said.

Friends are able to report suicidal behavior by clicking a report option next to any piece of content on the site and choosing suicidal content under the harmful behavior option, Facebook spokesman Frederic Wolens said.

Facebook will then email the user in distress a direct link for a private online chat with a crisis representative from the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline as well as the group's phone number.

The new tool gives people who may not be comfortable picking up the phone a direct avenue to seek help.

"This was a natural progression from something we've been working on for a long time," Wolens said.

Users also have the ability to report suicidal behavior by going to the site's Help Center or search for suicide reporting forms. They can also use reporting links around the site.

Worried friends who reported the behavior will also receive a message to say it is being addressed, Wolens said.

Facebook, the most popular Web-based social networking site, has more than 800 million active users worldwide. The Palo Alto, California-based company was co-founded by Mark Zuckerberg in 2004.

The new suicide reporting tool will be made available to people who use Facebook in the United States and Canada.

Wolens said that all reporting on the site is done anonymously and so a distressed user will not know who reported the suicidal content.

Nearly 100 Americans die by suicide every day, according to the Surgeon General of the United States.

In the past year, more than 8 million Americans 18 or older had thought seriously about suicide, according to a blog post by the Surgeon General accompanying the release of the new Facebook tool.

(Reporting by Lauren Keiper; Editing by Peter Bohan and Richard Chang)

From : 

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News BlackBerry Curve 9380 hits the FCC, talking the T-Mobile talk

RIM's first all-screen Curve has sashayed over to the FCC. Two models of the BlackBerry Curve 9380, the REA70UW and REB70UW, are included in the latest filing, which goes into typical laborious detail on radio frequencies and the like. Thankfully, those myriad charts and graphs reveal support for WCDMA band IV, meaning that the phone plays nice with T-Mobile's 3G network. Let's just hope that, if given the chance to strut its stuff in the US market, it follows the Curve family tradition of arriving keenly priced. We'll have to wait and see if it hits our wallet's sweet spot, but for those more interested in the phone's internals, the source link beckons below.


Source from:
http://www.engadget.com/2011/11/24/blackberry-curve-9380-hits-the-fcc-talking-the-t-mobile-talk/

Does Hydraulic Fracturing Trigger Earthquakes?

Hydraulic fracturing, notorious for its environmental hazards all this while, has now come under the scanner for its alleged connection with increased seismic activity. Continue reading to see how fracking - that this practice is popularly known as, can trigger earthquakes, and how damaging these quakes can be.The 5.6 magnitude earthquake that rocked the state of Oklahoma on 5th November, 2011, has once again raised some serious questions about the increasing use of hydraulic fracturing to tap natural resources, i.e. oil and gas, from beneath the Earth's crust. Even though it has not yet been ascertained whether this quake was caused as a result of weakening of the Earth's crust as a result of fracking, most of the people believe so. The experts at the United States Geological Survey (USGS) though, are of the opinion that fracking cannot trigger an earthquake of this magnitude. According to them, it was the fault line existing in this region that triggered the Oklahoma earthquake - and not fracking.

Link Between Hydraulic Fracturing and Earthquakes

While the presence of a fault line in this region of the United States can be an apt explanation for the 5.6 magnitude Oklahoma earthquake, what about the sudden rise in seismic activity here? Between 1972 to 2008, an average of 2-6 earthquakes were recorded in the state of Oklahoma every year. In 2009, the number of earthquakes recorded reached 50, and further increased to a whopping 1047 in 2010. One cannot ignore the fact that more than a thousand drilling wells and more than a hundred injection wells have cropped up in this region over the course of time. Back in August itself, the region experienced a series of tremors, all ranging between the magnitude of 1 and 2.5, and now the 5.6 magnitude quake. While environmentalists are citing the link between hydraulic fracturing and earthquakes to oppose such projects, those in this business refute these allegations as baseless.

Man-made Hydraulic Fracturing
Hydraulic fracturing is basically the process wherein a fluid - which is basically a mixture of water and some chemicals, is pumped underground at high pressure to develop cracks in the sediment layers which have the natural gas and oil trapped within. While breakdown of sediment layers due to the development of veins and dikes does occur, it is not as rampant as man-made hydraulic fracturing - a technology used to harness natural oil and gas trapped within the Earth's crust. Man-made hydraulic fracturing is more often referred to as 'fracking' or 'hydrofracking'. While many people tend to associate fracking with drilling, the fact is that the two are totally different concepts, and fracking is used only after the process of drilling is complete.


Even though there is abundance of natural gas and oil in shale, its characteristic low permeability can hamper the flow of these natural resources. In such circumstances, one convenient method of releasing these trapped resources is to make cracks in the rock bed - and this is exactly what is done in the process of hydraulic fracturing. After vertical drilling is complete, horizontal drilling is done in the targeted sediment layer, i.e. the hydrofrac zone or hydraulic fracturing zone, to make passage for the 'fracfluid'. When the fracfluid is released at high pressure, it causes the targeted layer to crack, and the gas which is released as a result of this makes its way to the surface through the bore-well. At times, hydraulic fracturing is also used to restore the cracks within the formation to ensure unabated flow of natural oil and gas in the existing wells.

Does Hydraulic Fracturing Trigger Earthquakes?
Until recently, hydraulic fracturing was opposed for its tendency to pollute ground water, but the series of earthquakes in the United States and the United Kingdom has once again brought it to the headlines. This time it is the sudden rise in seismic activity in Oklahoma and surrounding regions, followed by the 5.6 magnitude earthquake, that has brought the alleged link between fracking and earthquakes to the forefront. Environmentalists argue that the sudden rise in seismic activity and the rise in the number of injection wells in this region cannot be a coincidence, and there has to be some link between the two.

If the experts at the USGS are to be believed, it is not possible for such intense earthquakes to be caused as a result of human activities such as fracking. These experts further add that such intense earthquakes are usually attributed to plate tectonics. However, they don't deny the chances of human activities causing minor earthquakes. In fact, deep injection of fluid and nuclear detonations are the two prominent human activities with the ability to trigger tremors by the USGS. That being said, they do make it a point to add that the earthquakes caused as a result of these activities are not of such high magnitude.

Previously there have been cases of earthquakes being triggered by deep injection of wastewater and deep injection of water for the production of geothermal power. One prominent example is that of the Rocky Mountain Arsenal (RMA) deep injection well which was built by the RMA in 1961 for disposing liquid waste, but only used till 1966 as it was eventually revealed that the fluid injection was triggering earthquakes in this area. As the regions with abundance of natural oil and gas are usually located along the fault lines, it gives rise to the misconception that energy exploration and production makes us vulnerable to hazards such as earthquakes.

While that does rule out the chances of major earthquakes, like the one in Oklahoma, being triggered by hydraulic fracturing, it also suggests that less-intense seismic activity can be linked to the practice of harnessing natural gas and oil. However, one also has to note that major earthquakes can be triggered as a result of fluid injection when it is injected at the wrong place - an unknown fault for instance. In such circumstances, earthquakes with a magnitude of 5 or more cannot be ruled out.

By Abhijit Naik
Published: 11/24/2011

Lululemon names Facebook exec Emily White to board

NEW YORK (AP) — Lululemon Athletica Inc. named Facebook executive Emily White to its board, saying her social media and e-commerce experience complements the yoga-wear retailer's online efforts.

The Canadian company said Friday that White's addition expanded the board to 10 members.

White is senior director of local and mobile partnerships at Facebook, which she joined in 2010. Before that, she served in several e-commerce positions at Google from 2001 to 2010.

"Emily brings a wealth of knowledge regarding e-commerce and social media to our board in a time when our customers are utilizing these communication channels more than ever to both shop and enrich their lives," Lululemon Chairman Chip Wilson said.

Lululemon offers shopping on its site as well as videos and a blog about yoga, running and other topics.

It's been one of the hottest chains in retailing. The popularity of its high-priced yoga pants and tank tops — the pants run about $100 — has helped shares more than double in the past 12 months.

Shares rose $1.22, or 2.4 percent, to $51.54 in premarket trading.

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