99% Legion is Awakening.

Feb 11

While Hacking #Alabama.gov’s site, #Anonymous ran into some Startling Information (yours) -

anonymissexpress:

By Anomaly, February 9, 2012

Several members of the collective activist group Anonymous have come forward with some extremely unnerving information which they would like the public to be aware of.  While targeting Alabama.gov’s website over the State’s new draconian measures, they ran into something very unexpected – sensitive data on everyone in the area – and it took just minutes of their time. Social security  numbers, license plates, criminal records, descriptions, etc are all within reach of anyone that wants to obtain them.

It would cost little to secure this information, yet the state of Alabama has left their residents’ data, there for the taking.

46,000 residents of Alabama were accessed within minutes — accidentally. Imagine, if an identity thief hacked into their system with it being so vulnerable. Surely, Alabama officials are privy to a more secure way to lock up this sensitive data.

Anonymous members @Anon_w0rmer,  CabinCr3w and @ItsKahuna want the public to be educated on how vulnerable their information is in Alabama and also want you to understand they have deleted it so as not to hurt any innocent people.  A few redactions on a small sample will be made, so as to prove their authenticity.

This is what the public should be aware of and I quote:

“They stored information on their criminal database with lack of security and unencrypted.”

Including peoples crimianl records and soical security numbers.”
46 thousand people

“license plates,home numbers, descriptions, ssn’s”
we feel attention needs to be drawn to their incompetence

“We want it known alabama neglects their people.”

“It’s blatant negligence”

We are going to release our internal protocol for handling data

Data such as this should never be so accessible. “If we were criminals, we’d dump this information or sell it” said one Anon, adding, “the police could have secured these peoples info with little cost.”

A fortune could have been generated if this collective group had chosen a criminal route but that’s not their style, nor is it their goal. They want you to realize how little the State of Alabama stresses over its population’s sensitive information.  Your identity can be stolen — within minutes. In Alabama, your information is there for anyone to access. To think, the aforementioned Anons came across this startling information accidentally, without actually trying to obtain it, leaves me to question how easily it could be obtained by a criminal who wants that particular data.

This all occurred due to Alabama’s new measures towards undocumented migrants, and this was the outcome. Yes, they did get into the government’s site, but never expected a trove of information on the residents of that State.

More article on FreakOutNation

The pastebin containing the redacted information

(via whymikashfights)

Feb 10

Black Cat Hacks: This is meant to be a list of free technologies aimed at empowering Internet users to gain better control over their... -

Haven’t looked over these yet. Thanks for the link, Teller.

blackcathacker:

(Source: blackcatds)

Great Infographic on Online Privacy -

Americans encounter an average of 1462 different privacy policies per year. If you were to read all of them in 8 hour shifts with no days off, it would take you more than a month!..

Social Intelligence is a background check service that automatically creates archives of every Facebook proofile and photo with privacy settings marked “Everyone.” The company saves everything for 7 years, even if you deleted it from Facebook…

Once Facebook goes public, Wall Street will surely demand more. That means the social network will almost certainly have to attract a lot more users or be more aggressive with its advertising, perhaps by mining personal data even more than it does…

Re: Anonymous just took down the CIA's website -

mrlinux:

No. Not at all. Anonymous did nothing of the sort. Some script kiddies in mommy’s basement DDoS’d the CIA’s website.

It is not down, merely unresponsive until the requests let up. This is no accomplishment, merely a minor annoyance for which I’m sure several of these faggots will get arrested.

99anon says: Well, yes, I haven’t read any details but it likely was a DDoS attack, and no, that’s not real hacking and doesn’t take any knowledge of hacking. The goal was likely a statement to the government, and if so, I’d say they accomplished that. Yep, dumb kids are probably going to be arrested for this. I posted the other day, though, that German courts have ruled DDoS a valid form of political protest, and I agree here. Some see protests of any sort merely a “minor annoyance”… but sometimes, protests accomplish things.

(Source: jonathan-cunningham, via mrlinux-archive)

Anonymous just took down the CIA's website -

(Source: jonathan-cunningham, via whymikashfights)

Email alternatives? Browser alternatives?

I’m looking to move from Google as much as possible due to privacy concerns- I’ve been with them a long time. What are the best email alternatives to Gmail in terms of privacy? (My favorite feature with them is probably the conversations view.) I’m not looking for temporary email accounts. Eventually, I will be willing to pay for offshore email, but can’t do that right now (but welcome suggestions there too). Ideally, when I delete an email, it actually gets deleted from their servers.

As fast as it is, I’m moving from Chrome, too. Firefox is okay, and what I’m planning to use, but it sure it a lot slower than Chrome. Are Safari and Opera my only other decent options?

What countries have the best internet privacy policies for things like email and web hosting? Currently thinking Seychelles and/or Panama? Yay or nay?

For the record, I’m also making the switch to the DuckDuckGo search engine, because their privacy policy is pretty sweet:

DuckDuckGo prevents search leakage by default. Instead, when you click on a link on our site, we route (redirect) that request in such a way so that it does not send your search terms to other sites. The other sites will still know that you visited them, but they will not know what search you entered beforehand…

Other search engines save your search history. Usually your searches are saved along with the date and time of the search, some information about your computer (e.g. your IP address, User agent and often a unique identifier stored in a browser cookie), and if you are logged in, your account information (e.g. name and email address).

With only the timestamp and computer information, your searches can often be traced directly to you. With the additional account information, they are associated directly with you.

Also, note that with this information your searches can be tied together. This means someone can see everything you’ve been searching, not just one isolated search. You can usually find out a lot about a person from their search history…

[S]earch engines are not legally obligated to collect personal information in the first place. They do it on their own volition… For these reasons, DuckDuckGo takes the approach to not collect any personal information. The decisions of whether and how to comply with law enforcement requests, whether and how to anonymize data, and how to best protect your information from hackers are out of our hands. Your search history is safe with us because it cannot be tied to you in any way.

When you search at DuckDuckGo, we don’t know who you are and there is no way to tie your searches together.

When you access DuckDuckGo (or any Web site), your Web browser automatically sends information about your computer, e.g. your User agent and IP address.

Because this information could be used to link you to your searches, we do not log (store) it at all. This is a very unusual practice, but we feel it is an important step to protect your privacy… At DuckDuckGo, no cookies are used by default… We also save searches, but again, not in a personally identifiable way, as we do not store IP addresses or unique User agent strings. We use aggregate, non-personal search data to improve things like misspellings.

Looking into YaCy as well.

What's your tax rate? Zuckerberg's is 7%. -

Before we start talking about the Facebook Windfall and all the nice new tax dollars the company will pour into the state treasury, let me take a moment to put this in perspective. Before Jerry Brown’s finance director goes to Mark Zuckerberg’s house to wash his windows and mow his lawn (which wouldn’t work anyway; according to its SEC filings, Facebook pays for a home security service for its CEO), he should understand that Zuckerberg will be paying a disgracefully low amount of money on his great wealth.

If things go as planned, Zuckerberg will exercise $5 billion in Facebook options, and pay federal and state taxes of nearly $2 billion — making him the largest single taxpayer in history. Sounds like he’s a hell of a guy, doing his part to help the cash-strapped public sector.

But in reality, he’ll be paying an actual tax rate of about 7 percent — less than nearly all Americans.

Zuckerberg’s stock will be worth around $28 billion. But he won’t have to pay any tax at all on most of it. (more)

Four signs 'hacktivism' has gone mainstream -

The loose-knit group Anonymous and other so-called hacktivists with underground origins have entered mainstream political culture, buoyed by a year of successes and increasing availability of technologies that have made it easier to participate in online activism campaigns.

While hackers gained reputations as illegal pranksters in the 1990s, a new generation appears more focused on building technology and online campaigns aimed at keeping the internet unrestricted.

So far this year, Anonymous and groups linked to the collective recently launched cyberattacks on the Swedish government, hacked into a conference phone call between the FBI and Britain’s Scotland Yard, and broken into several law enforcement agencies around the world.

Meanwhile, even Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has felt the sting, after 14 private photos of him were downloaded from the social networking site in December and posted on the photo-sharing site Imgur to expose a flaw in Facebook’s security settings.

But the groups have also recently directed their online campaigns against hate groups and child pornography websites, suggesting its ranks believe the internet freedom they are fighting to protect must not be abused…

(And) Germany has already recognized in its court system that DDoS attacks can be a form of valid political protest…

Go Germany!

Feb 09

Block Sites from Using Your Facebook Login with Adblock Plus

Feb 08

AntiSec and Anonymous: Is Law Enforcement Barking up the Wrong Tree?

Following a series of high end hacks against US authorities, analysts have come to question whether law enforcement can ever really deal with the Anonymous collective.

The debate re-emerged on 3 January after Anonymous posted a link to an MP3 recording of a conference call between the FBI and Scotland Yard. 
The call chronicled a conversation between the FBI and British authorities discussing the two’s ongoing LulzSec and Anonymous investigations.
The fact that the majority of the call was spent with each agency sharing the information it had - not all of which was uniform in what it was saying - demonstrated the problem facing law enforcement agencies hunting for Anonymous members.

How Deep Does the Rabbit Warren Run?
Operating off an open IRC channel, the collective allows any user to join and become a member, or “Anon” as they tend to refer to themselves. Though the information is far from official, Anonymous reportedly picks its targets in a democratic way, with participants in the chat putting forward their chosen target and arguing their case to the other members as to why the proposed target deserves Anonymous’ attention.

The advantage of this is that, with the collective having no one leader and operating with fairly autonomous members across the globe, it is nigh impossible for law enforcement to ever fully arrest every Anon or target the collective as a whole.

As noted by Sophos analysts Graham Cluley: “A problem with Anonymous’s structure is that it has *no* structure and no real members. That has benefits for it, of course, when it comes to avoiding law enforcement…”

Moreover because of its lack of cohesion, even if every Anon - suspending disbelief - was arrested, it would be entirely plausible that Anonymous would continue to exist: “The Anonymous banner is used by many individuals. Anyone can claim to be acting under their flag. So it’s hard to imagine how Anonymous hacking activity could ever be entirely stamped out,” said Cluley to the International Business Times UK.

(more)