Heard about this tactic at the last ISSA-COS meeting:
The first piece of ransomware to use a sophisticated encryption algorithm, Gpcode.ac, was detected in January 2006 and used the RSA algorithm to create a 56-bit key. Since then, the author of Gpcode has released several increasingly complex variants of the virus and in June released Gpcode.ag, which used a 660-bit key.
Front Page shows: “eno7 ownz your box”
“Lebanon-israel…STOP!”
What is this? Hacker’s for peace? Hackivism lives on.
This looks very cool. With first world governments becoming more intrusive on their citizens, this seems like an interesting tool.
“Hacktivismo, a division of Cult of the Dead Cow, unveiled their latest application, ScatterChat, this week at the sixth HOPE conference.
ScatterChat is a secure instant messenging program which supports all major chat networks, second generation onion routing for anonymization, as well as end-to-end encryption for both chat and file transfers.”
“New Web-based services don’t just store your data online — they keep it synchronized across your laptop, desktop, and mobile phone.” — digg
Every year I find my self dependent on more and more geographically seperated systems and devices, so I totally agree with the article. My question is, won’t this eventually turn into a major privacy/security issue? For privacy, I imagine that governments around the world (particularly the more capitalistic, democratic ones) will find a way to data mine the data on Internet hosts. In the U.S., the law is already set up to make this happen (U.S.A Patriot Act).
Security is a no brainer. Having massive centralized locations for data could expose personal data to disgruntled workers that have (had) access to those data silos.
I imagine the best thing to do is maintain a small footprint and a low profile by keeping the data on your own Internet accessible servers. Of course the drawback is the time and possibly extra money it would take to do it right. Everything has a price.