criminalwisdom:

Krebs On Security : Would You Have Spotted the Fraud?
“Pictured here is what’s known as a skimmer, or a device made to be affixed to the mouth of an ATM machine and secretly swipe credit and debit card information when bank customers slip their cards into the machines to pull out money. Skimmers have been around for years, of course, but thieves are constantly improving them, and the device pictured is a perfect example of that evolution.

This particular skimmer was found Dec. 6, 2009, attached to the front of a Citibank ATM in Woodland Hills, Calif. Would you have been able to spot this?” ( via )

criminalwisdom:

Chicago OG Gang Cards

“Gang cards, most prominent in the 70’s and early 80’s, back in the day when a gang was more of a neighborhood crew then what it is today. Fists, bats, and bottles days, before guns became the norm in the gang. Most of the gangs were just about the neighborhood and hanging out together. Stock art from the printer as well as some hand drawn illustrations were the back bone of many of the cards.”
~ We Are Supervision ( via )

( Thanks, Ken!)

via: thedaytheytriedtokillme:

• The FBI report estimates that since 2003, the Chinese Army has specifically developed a network of over 30,000 Chinese military cyberspies, plus more than 150,000 private-sector computer experts, whose mission is to steal American military and technological secrets and cause mischief in government and financial services. China’s goal, says the FBI report, is to have the world’s premier “informationized armed forces” by 2020. According to the bureau’s classified information, the Chinese hackers are adept at implanting malicious computer code, and in 2009 companies in diverse industries such as oil and gas, banking, aerospace, and telecommunications encountered costly and at times debilitating problems with Chinese-implanted “malware.” The FBI analyst would not name the affected companies.
• One of China’s most effective weapons, according to the FBI report, is a continuation of what Pentagon security investigators originally dubbed Titan Rain; it is a Chinese scanner program that probes national defense and high-tech industrial computer networks thousands of times a minute looking for vulnerabilities. The Chinese military hackers, the FBI analyst told me, enter without any keystroke errors, leave no digital fingerprints, and create a clean backdoor exit in under 20 minutes, feats considered capable only for a military or civilian spy agency of only a few governments.
• These attacks are proliferating. The FBI report lays out the identifiable attacks originating from China just on the Defense Department computers; they increased from 44,000 in 2007 to 55,000 in 2008, and topped 90,000 last year. “They probe, they test our responses, as quick as we make changes and fix vulnerabilities, they are moving a step ahead,” the analyst told me.
• The Chinese hackers aren’t after credit-card numbers or bank accounts or looking to steal private identities. Instead, they are hunting for information. Although the barrage of attacks may at times appear random, the FBI report concludes that it is part of a strategy to fully flush out U.S. military telecommunications and to better understand—and to attempt to intercept—intelligence being gathered by American spy agencies, particularly the National Security Agency.

thedaytheytriedtokillme:

India Developing ‘Kill Vehicle’ to Knock Enemy Satellites Out of the Sky

Imagine the damage you can do if you hack them.

Visualizing the Underwear Bomber’s Online Life

• The Obama administration is due to release a declassified intelligence report today on Detroit terror suspect Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, a.k.a. the Underwear Bomber. Courtesy of the invaluable Computational Legal Studies Blog, we can take a closer look at Abdulmutallab’s online life — and possibly, his increasing radicalization.
• Under the online handle “Farouk1986,” Abdulmutallab was a regular on the Islamic forum Gawaher.com, where he appears to have posted 310 times between 2005 and 2007. Thanks to the Evan Kohlmann of the NEFA Foundation, we now have all of Farouk1986’s posts, assembled into a single file. The CLS Blog took this one step further, generating a basic visualization and analysis of the structure of Farouk1986’s online communication network as it evolved over time.
• To do that, the CLS Blog expanded on the NEFA dataset to map out Farouk1986’s secondary and indirect communications and generate deeper context. “In order to obtain a better understanding of this communication network, we retrieved every ‘topic’ in which Farouk1986 participated at least once,” the authors write. “Each ‘topic’ is comprised of one or more ‘posts’ from one or more users. Each ‘post’ may be in response to another user’s ‘post.’ The NEFA data contains only posts made by Farouk1986 – our data contains the entire context within which his posts existed.”
• So what does this add to the understanding of the man who attempted to take down Northwest Airlines flight 253? For starters, Farouk1986 appeared to have joined an existing online network that moved his life in a more religious direction. Once he joined that network, his online interactions became more stable. Put otherwise, it may reflect the tendency of online behavior to become a “feedback loop.” Instead of expanding his apparent network of contacts, it became more exclusive and self-reinforcing.

(SO this is how the NSA does it for all bloggers of note…hmmm…A practical understanding of John Boyd’s OODA loop definitely in effect here.)

2020:

The Dawn of the MicroCopters

• Forget 2012. As far as many Mexicans are concerned, the ancient Mayas were being generous: the sky’s actually going to fall next year. Why? Because it’s 2010, Mexico’s bicentennial, and Mexican history has an eerie way of repeating itself. Mexico’s 1910 centennial, after all, saw the start of the bloody, decade-long Mexican Revolution, which killed more than a million people. And that cataclysm was precisely a century after the start of Mexico’s bloody, decade-long War of Independence in 1810.
• You get the picture. As a result, there’s been no shortage of talk lately about possible unrest, especially in the form of armed rebel groups, erupting south of the border in 2010. But is there really a basis for concern? None as apparent as the popular grievances that existed in 1809 or 1909. But this is still Mexico; and while Spanish colonizers no longer oppress the country, and dictators like Porfirio Diaz aren’t brutalizing campesinos, the country nonetheless is reeling from the worst criminal violence in its history and one of its hardest economic slumps. “We are very near a social crisis,” José Narro, the director of the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) in Mexico City, said recently. “The conditions are there.”

Rfiddler zapper kills RFID tags dead, the hard way

• Sure, there may be a number of relatively easy ways to destroy or disable an RFID tag (tossing it in the microwave, for instance), but where’s the fun in that? There are plenty of good times to be had with this so-called “Rfiddler” built by Codeninja though, which disables tags (and potentially anything else in its sights) by emitting a strong electromagnetic field — not to mention some sounds that will cause anyone standing in its vicinity to take a few big steps back. Head on past the [link] for a video, and hit up the link below for the complete parts list if you’re interested in building your own….

I just re-watched “The Mindscape of Alan Moore” yesterday!Funny too is that I am working on a print zine with a friend - more details soon.

• Alan Moore, the influential comics visionary who wrote Watchmen and V for Vendetta, has taken up a new mission for our age of global depression: Bringing back the underground fanzine.
• The first issue of Moore’s print zine Dodgem Logic, released last month in the United Kingdom, is an engaging, educational and often hilarious read. The new publication is stuffed with subcultural snark as well as post-civilization how-tos on guerrilla gardening, Dumpster diving and surviving the econopocalypse.
• Perhaps most promising, Dodgem Logic’s spirit of triumphant creative individualism celebrates Moore’s individualist philosophy, delivering a perfectly timed message for a world filled with failing states and superpowers.
• “This might be the time in which big, centralized authorities prove that they are no longer capable of running the show, or even pretending to run the show,” the always eloquent Moore told Wired.com by phone from his home in Northampton, England. “Increasingly, it is going to be up to us if our culture gets through these next couple of decades in any shape at all.”

poortaste:

Civilization, as we know it, is largely the creation of psychopaths. All civilizations, our own included, have been based on slavery and “warfare.” Incidentally, the latter term is a euphemism for mass murder.

The prevailing recipe for civilization is simple:

1) Use lies and brainwashing to create an army of controlled, systematic mass murderers;

2) Use that army to enslave large numbers of people (i.e. seize control of their labour power and its fruits);

3) Use that slave labour power to improve the brainwashing process (by using the economic surplus to employ scribes, priests, and PR men). Then go back to step one and repeat the process.

Psychopaths have played a disproportionate role in the development of civilization, because they are hard-wired to lie, kill, injure, and generally inflict great suffering on other humans without feeling any remorse. The inventor of civilization—the first tribal chieftain who successfully brainwashed an army of controlled mass murderers—was almost certainly a genetic psychopath. Since that momentous discovery, psychopaths have enjoyed a significant advantage over non-psychopaths in the struggle for power in civilizational hierarchies—especially military hierarchies….

• A key terror suspect who allegedly helped to plan last year’s attacks in Mumbai and plotted to strike Europe was an American secret agent who went rogue, Indian officials believe.
• David Headley, 49, who was born in Washington to a Pakistan diplomat father and an American mother, was arrested in Chicago in October. He is accused of reconnoitring targets in India and Europe for Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT), the Pakistan-based terror group behind the Mumbai attacks and of having links to al-Qaeda. He has denied the charges.
• He came to the attention of the US security services in 1997 when he was arrested in New York for heroin smuggling. He earned a reduced sentence by working for the US Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) infiltrating Pakistan-linked narcotics gangs.
• Indian investigators, who have been denied access to Mr Headley, suspect that he remained on the payroll of the US security services — possibly working for the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) — but switched his allegiance to LeT.
• Despite being firmly on the radar of the US intelligence agencies, he was allowed to return to India as recently as March. Indian officials are furious that their American counterparts did not share details of that visit at the time. The Indian media has raised the possibility that Mr Headley was being protected by his American handlers — a theory that experts say is credible.
• “The feeling in India is that the US has not been transparent,” said B. Raman, a former counter-terrorism chief in the Indian foreign intelligence service, the Research and Analysis Wing.
• “That Headley was an agent for the DEA is known. Whether he was being used by the CIA as well is a matter of speculation, but it is almost certain that the CIA was aware of him and his movements across the subcontinent.”

• MALTRATA, MEXICO — Drug traffickers employing high-tech drills, miles of rubber hose and a fleet of stolen tanker trucks have siphoned more than $1 billion worth of oil from Mexico’s pipelines over the past two years, in a vast and audacious conspiracy that is bleeding the national treasury, according to U.S. and Mexican law enforcement officials and the state-run oil company.
• Using sophisticated smuggling networks, the traffickers have transported a portion of the pilfered petroleum across the border to sell to U.S. companies, some of which knew that it was stolen, according to court documents and interviews with American officials involved in an expanding investigation of oil services firms in Texas.
• The widespread theft of Mexico’s most vital national resource by criminal organizations represents a costly new front in President Felipe Calderón’s war against the drug cartels, and it shows how the traffickers are rapidly evolving from traditional narcotics smuggling to activities as diverse as oil theft, transport and sales.

(Thus gangs are setting themselves up as the go-to lifelines when nation-states begin to fail and become hollow.)

earthmancomehome:

The answer is not to monitor us all to combat the actions of a few. Total security, in cyberspace or otherwise, is impossible, and attempts to create it are subject strongly to the law of diminishing returns. The only way to combat violent extremism is to tackle its causes, a banal statement in itself perhaps. Like it or not, states will decide what types of material are deemed inappropriate to view and share online, but treating all internet use as de facto potentially problematic and appropriate for regulation does no-one any favours. Hot on the heels of Google’s CEO last week stating, ‘If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place’ (a specious argument at the best of times) there are rough times ahead.