Monday, January 14, 2013

Anonomous Hacks MIT in Honour of Aaron Swartz

Hopefully, my readers will watch the above video, published May 29, 2012, about Kaspersky Labs uncovering the Flame virus that attacked Iran, in an interview of Aaron Swartz by RT.

Wired now includes Evgeny Kaspersky on its list of the 15 Most Dangerous People. http://rt.com/news/kaspersky-most-dangerous-people-606/

Why dangerous though? What brings together Paula Broadwell whose book cost the CIA’s director David Petraeus his post in the government and Iran’s mysterious general Qassem Suleimani thought to be behind Tehran’s alleged nuclear weapons aspirations?

 “There used to be an established order to the world. A structure to things. You couldn't print a gun like a term paper,” writes the Wired’s Danger Room blog. “It was impossible to wreck a nuclear production plant with a few lines of code.”

This is where Evgeny Kaspersky comes in for the first time, according to the Wired.com: “If all he did in the last year was intercede in America's efforts to short-circuit Iran's nuclear ambitions – definitively unmasking a cyber-weapon for the first time – Kaspersky would've earned himself a spot on our list of the most dangerous people in the world.”

In May, Kaspersky Lab was the first company to announce the discovery of Trojan virus Flame – a powerful data-snatching malware targeting computers in Iran, Israel and other Middle Eastern countries. This was followed by August’s interception of Gauss that had also been attacking computers in the Middle East spying on financial transactions, emails and picking passwords to all kind of pages. "After looking at Stuxnet, DuQu and Flame, we can say with a high degree of certainty that Gauss comes from the same 'factory' or 'factories,'" Kaspersky Lab said in their Gauss report. "All these attack toolkits represent the high-end of nation-state-sponsored cyber-espionage and cyber war operations."

Wired has more on the cyber-security mogul besides a firm opposition to cyber warfare: “A longtime ally of Russia's secret security services, Kaspersky supplies technical expertise to the FSB, the successor to the KGB. His researchers train their agents in computer forensics.”

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Just this week Kaspersky Labs released a report on "Operation" Red October, and Aaron Swartz alegedly committed suicide in his NY home. His family has claimed it was due to government harrassment thru an overly agressive, unjust prosecution. Today we read that Annonomous has defaced MIT web pages,

 http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/aaron-swartz-death-fuels-mit-probe-white-house/story?id=18210596

and MIT has started an investigation into their part in this intrigue. The purpose of this post is to shine some light on the shadoweynature of benign hacking, vs government attacks on other governments. At issue is how to keep safe w/o destroying individual rights. What do folks think about all of this?