Wednesday 25 July 2012

From Bahrain With Love: FinFisher’s Spy Kit Exposed?

From Bahrain With Love: FinFisher’s Spy Kit Exposed? – The Citizen Lab: "FinFisher Suite is described by its distributors, Gamma International UK Ltd., as “Governmental IT Intrusion and Remote Monitoring Solutions.” 1 The toolset first gained notoriety after it was revealed that the Egyptian Government’s state security apparatus had been involved in negotiations with Gamma International UK Ltd. over the purchase of the software. Promotional materials have been leaked that describe the tools as providing a wide range of intrusion and monitoring capabilities.2 Despite this, however, the toolset itself has not been publicly analyzed.
This post contains analysis of several pieces of malware obtained by Vernon Silver of Bloomberg News that were sent to Bahraini pro-democracy activists in April and May of this year. The purpose of this work is identification and classification of the malware to better understand the actors behind the attacks and the risk to victims. In order to accomplish this, we undertook several different approaches during the investigation." 'via Blog this'

Monday 16 July 2012

How not to legislate? Lords Committee knocks Digital Economy Act Costs Order

Lords Committee knocks Digital Economy Act Costs Order | Open Rights Group: "The IOC and the Costs Order are supposed to clarify key substantive issues in the Digital Economy Act. It is telling that 2 years after it passed, some of these are still a cause for concern - including, as the Committee points out, why a £20 appeals fee was decided to be most effective and reasonable option. There are some lessons here - if you rush an Act, based on an inadequate analysis of objectives and how to achieve them, without sufficient scrutiny, then you'll probably have to spend quite a lot of time afterwards trying to clear up the mess." 'via Blog this'