Blown To Bits

Archive for February, 2010

Did Google Get “Hacked” by Social Deception?

Saturday, February 6th, 2010 by Harry Lewis
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Marc Ambinder of the Atlantic reports an interesting theory of how the Chinese managed to penetrate Google’s security barrier, which should be about the best in the world. Very little of the attack was technologically novel, according to his source, University of Texas Computer Science Professor Fred Chang. The key steps were figuring out the names of key system administrators, and looking at their profiles on Facebook and other social networks. The attackers then masqueraded as social network “friends” of the sysadmins, tricking them to click on links that turned out to embed malware on their computers. From that point on the theft of passwords was easy. The masquerade required exploiting an unpatched security hole in Internet Explorer; we knew that part. But the sysadmins are presumably pretty sophisticated about suspect email, so getting the identities of their “Friends” was essential.

Of course, by Facebook’s new policy, there is no way to hide your Friends list. I wonder if stories like this one will put any pressure on Facebook to change that policy.

This is all speculation, Ambinder notes. But Chang used to have a high level job at the NSA, so it’s a fair guess he’s familiar with some of the tricks that cyberattackers have tried in the past.

DOJ to Court: Nix Again to Google Books Settlement

Thursday, February 4th, 2010 by Harry Lewis

The Justice Department objected strenuously to the draft Google Books settlement on antitrust grounds, and when Google went back behind doors with the Authors and Publishers to revise it, the DOJ’s objections were among those take most seriously in the revision. But the DOJ has just announced that it is still unhappy. The DOJ’s objections are very basic: “The [revised settlement proposal] suffers from the same core problem as the original agreement: it is an attempt to use the class action mechanism to implement forward-looking business arrangements that go far beyond the dispute before the Court in this litigation.” That sounds like a problem that is going to be hard to fix with some clever lawyering alone, and the reports don’t suggest that Google is interested in going back for another try at redrafting. So we may be nearing high noon, where Judge Chin just has to give the thumbs-up or thumbs-down on a matter of monumental importance to the world of books and of ideas. Stay tuned; February 18 is his date for the final hearing.