Government

As the finger-pointing and name-calling surrounding the WikiLeaks issue continue in Washington, the White House this week facilitated a cooperative agreement among several key public and private organizations designed to spur joint information security research projects.

A recent internal audit at NASA, the U.S. space agency, found significant weakness in the way the agency disposes of IT equipment, including evidence that used hard drives containing sensitive NASA data may have been sold to the public on the secondhand market.

Another day, another flurry of media reports stemming from the ongoing leak of sensitive diplomatic cables by the Website Wikileaks. Reports have surfaced that the group is in disarray now that Wikileaks chief Julian Assange was denied bail by a UK court, even as hacktivists try to take down the Web sites of individuals and corporations that have been pulled into the scandal.

How do you know when your alt.hacking conference has arrived? Maybe when scalpers are offering tickets for the event on eBay for almost three times the face value. That’s the situation the organizers of hacking conference Shmoocon have found themselves in, as illicit auctions for tickets to next year’s conference, to be held January 28-30, threatening to overshadow the event.

The
Washington Post is reporting that Petty Officer Bryan Minkyu Martin was
arrested sometime last week on suspicion of stealing classified documents from
military networks and attempting to sell them to a foreign agent.

OK. It’s been just over a week since information leaking Web site Wikileaks released the first installment of leaked U.S. diplomatic cables, with each day bringing new documents from the purported hoard of some 250,000 pages, and new developments from a range of very pissed off Western governments.

The man accused of running the Mega-D spam-spewing botnet has pleaded not guilty to charges that he was using the botnet to send millions of spam messages a day, some of them laden with malware.