This past week, an innocuous YouTube video was posted titled, “Anonymous Message to Congress.” The video was made in response to the shutting down of MegaUpload on Thursday by the federal government. This, as we reported, led to Anonymous’ largest coordinated attack in their history with over 5,000 people taking down over 10 federal and industry Web sites.

What is your opinion about what Anonymous are doing? Share your thoughts here.

The video, which you can watch in its entirety below, is phase one of #OpGlobalBlackout.
They do recognize that MegaUpload contained copyrighted content, but say that the take down was not about copyrighted materials. Anonymous demands that MegaUpload be reinstated within 72 hours.

Anonymous claims that they have gained access to the servers for the United Nations, PlayStation Network, Xbox Live, US Bank, Capital One, Chase Bank, Twitter, Facebook and YouTube. If their demands are not met, they will take down all of these servers.

For the banks, Anonymous claims that they have the account info of every client at these banks. They want to reassure citizens, however, that they are not going to compromise their information. They only want to make a statement to Congress.

As for Congress, they have a very special message – “To those who support PIPA and SOPA. To those congressmen who want to vote yes on these bills. We are not fucking playing.”

This has essentially turned into a game of chicken between Anonymous and the U.S. Government with the Internet in the crossfire.

Mike Masnick provides an embed of the government’s case against MegaUpload:

He raises a rather interesting point about the government’s case against MegaUpload in that…

The indictment points out that Megaupload did not have a site search, by which users could find material. That’s interesting, but it seems like an odd piece of information in making the case. Other copyright cases have specifically found that having a search engine is part of an inducement claim — so there’s an argument that the idea not to have a search engine wasn’t so much “conspiracy,” as it was an attempt to follow the guidance of the court and to stay legal. To use the lack of a feature, that previously was shown to be a problem, as evidence of a conspiracy is crazy. Damned if you do, damned if you don’t.

Here’s what some people are saying about #OpGlobalBlackout:

What do you think of this “Message to Congress”? Let us know in the comments.

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The things that are smaller than Apple:

by visually via

Overdraft fees:

Feet:

Created by: X Ray Technician Schools

Original Article: The feature has been rumored to be coming for a while, but PayPal announced today that the latest version of its iPhone app lets you transfer checks into your PayPal balance for free, by simply taking a photo with your iPhone. 

With the banks in crisis and contributing to a generalized distrust of the banking system, the news of the breech could not come at a worse time. While many in the information security world wondering who is running the servers and managing the security at many of the banking companies as they consolidate and shut down, news of a world bank hack, with five servers that contained sensitive data for a year comes as stunning information.

The data raids are not a matter of stealing inconsequential bits and bytes. The World Bank’s data center is literally a treasure trove of vital financial information from around the globe. As a clearinghouse for financial data from both governments and companies, the bank’s computers could provide intruders with both a financial and intelligence gold mine — from inside information on bids and contracts to the minutes of confidential board meetings. Source: Fox News

You can read the memos here and here, the dark reading article is right here.

In all this is going to end up not just compromising people, but compromising governmental information about money, how money is used, and where it is going around the world. The interesting part is that not just money movements, if you know what the World Bank is going to invest in next that can give a company a competitive advantage, or allow the hackers to follow the money to other banks where the security is much poorer than they were at the World Bank.

They also do not know what was stolen as they are still trying to figure out who got in, or how they compromised the systems. Dark Reading is calling it a spyware hack, but then that means that it would have to come in either via image, USB, or someone was surfing from the computer and did not have it patched, or patches were lacking and there was a hole that was exploited. There are any numbers of ways that the intruder got into the system.

There might just need to be a complete overhaul of the World Bank networks and systems to make sure that any additional back doors or other systems were not compromised. What is more worrisome though is that the key server for the bank was also hacked, meaning they have the keys that were stored on that system. This means that all the keys issued by that server are also going to have to be reissued. Interesting story, with many ideas on whom, what, and how. The cleanup is going to be very hard, and they will need to have a security crew that is capable of cleaning up the mess.

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