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Osama Bin Laden’s Compound Yields “Motherlode” of Computer Data

Josh Wolford — Tue, 03 May 2011 20:26:46 +0000

What in the world could be on Osama Bin Laden’s hard drive?

We might find out in the coming weeks. The Navy SEALs who carried out the mission that resulted in the death of Bin Laden left the Pakistani compound with more than a body. According to Politco, the SEALs were able to recover hard drives, CDs, and flash drives from the raid that U.S. officials are calling “the motherlode of intelligence.”

Currently, the data is being combed through by hundreds of people at a secret location in Afghanistan. Everyone in Washington is understandably excited to see what kind of information, if any, is usable. “It’s going to be great even if only 10 percent of it is actionable,” officials said to Politico.

The first thought has to be about the contents. Exactly what kind of information could be on these drives? It has been reported that Bin Laden’s compound lacked phone lines or internet in order to keep a lower profile – so it’s hard to guess the contents.

About 5 years ago it was famously unearthed that Osama Bin Laden had a soft spot for some aspects of American pop culture. A woman named Kola Boof wrote a tell-all book where she claimed to be a former sex slave/ girlfriend of Bin Laden. In the book, she detailed the Al Qaeda leader’s obsession with Whitney Houston among other things such as The Wonder Years.

I guess it’s possible that all they could find is the finale to The Wonder Years, you know, the one in the barn where Winnie…ah I can’t talk about it. Talk about depressing on multiple levels.

But hopefully something of use can be taken from the drives, some sort of data that can be used effectively.

The second thought has to be about encryption. Gizmodo has an interesting take on accessing the data:

We don’t know if “the mother lode of intelligence”—as that official called it—in the hard drives and memory sticks is encrypted or not. Given Osama’s level of confidence—the circumstances appear to indicate that he was very comfortable and felt very secure in his lair—the idea of some of the data not being encrypted is not that crazy.

But even if it is, the US intelligence agencies have the necessary computing power and the expertise to crack the information open, even if the terrorists are using the AES-256 standard. You can be sure that, if there are any encrypted files, they are now being processed by supercomputers at CIA’s headquarters. The only question is how fast they can access the information. That’s the critical part: the fastest they get it, the more actionable that information would be, leading to the fast capture or killing of other leaders and operatives in the al Qaeda network.

Yesterday, video and photos surfaced from the raid of the inside of the compound. The graphic images were of blood-spattered rooms in total disarray. Today, we await the possible release of photos of Bin Laden’s body. The White House is currently debating the pros and cons of that action.

PubCon – Competitive Intelligence

Navneet Kaushal — Fri, 07 Dec 2007 20:36:17 +0000

When evaluating and planning your own direction, knowing your sector’s finer points is mission critical.

It’s difficult to look at your competitors without leaving tracks. It can be a challenge, but is extremely important to manage your own reputation. This panel will look at a number of issues surrounding competitive intelligence being probed by the competition and probing the competition yourself.

Moderator:

Jake Baillie

Speakers:

Jake Baillie, Managing Director, STN Labs
Andy Beal, Internet Marketing Consultant, Marketing Pilgrim LLC
Larry Mersman, Vice President, Trellian

First up is famed Marketing Pilgrim, Andy Beal of Marketing Pilgrim LLC. Andy wants to discus tools for spying on your competition (Sounds great!).

DomainTools.com: Gives a great deal of background information. It tells whether the site is listed in Yahoo Directory, Open Directory, registration details, etc. It also gives information about other sites in the same IP.
ranks.nl/tools/spider.html: Great tool as it breaks up keyword density into 2, 3 and 4 word combos.
sitexplorer.search.yahoo.com: Yahoo! places the most important backlinks at the top of the list.
seomoz.org/tools: Great way to find out about competition’s page strength. Gives information on how many times they have been in del.icio.us/digg etc.
SoloSEO.com/tools/indexRank.html: This is great to find how many pages Google has indexed in the last year and how far they have grown.
copernic.com: Use to track site changes. Anytime your competition has an update you will be aware.
Technorati.com: Find out about the kind of feedback people are giving about your competition.
google.com/alerts: Use this to alert yourself on competition activities.
searchanalytics.compete.com: Lets you know which keywords are bringing in significant traffic to your site.
touchgraph.com: Show you competition’s link clusters. Know where the important links are coming from.
google.brand.edgar-online.com: Shows you your competitor’s SEC filings.
seekingalpha.com/transcripts: View transcripts.
google.com/patents: Information on your competition’s patents.
Oodle.com: Shows whether your competition is hiring or not.

Keep a track on your competition’s employee blogs. Especially if the company has no inkling about the blog. Who knows what you could stumble upon.

Next up is Larry Mersman, Vice President of Trellian.

Competitive intelligence can mean many things depending on the channel we are dealing with. For the most part, it is the gathering of information about your competitors.

Sources of information:

Articles
Blogs
Online articles
Internet Service Provider
User Panels (User Installed Software)
Website Search Patterns/History

How to find your competition?

HitWise
CoMScore
Use search engines
Find out who is bidding on your keywords

How did your competition get there?

Referring Domains/Backlinks. Who is sending them traffic?
Keyword Data: What keywords are actually being clicked on to get the user to your competition?
Where is traffic coming from? search engines, banner ads, blogs, etc.

Final points:

Knowing which keywords are performing best for your competitor will help you understand their strengths and weaknesses
Know the performance of both paid and unpaid keywords (helps in optimizing your site around proven data, possibly streamline your spending and increase your ROI)
Many companies will optimize their website around kws they think they will be found under, or where the end user will find a link to their site

Finally, it’s the users who make the choices that drive the traffic and the money to your site.

Last speaker is Jake Baillie, Managing Director, STN Labs. The best webmasters already investigate their competition. Search engine optimization is a game. Know more than your competition and you will win. Most novice webmasters have no idea. Use this to your advantage.

Mistakes made by novice webmasters:

Put sensitive data on their web servers
Use competitive research tools from their own company Ips

WHOIS (www.whois.sc) my competition:

Designed in the 80s
WHOIS was originally intended to be contact point for technical issues
Evolved to be the “legal documentation” of internet domains
Forge-abe with very little technical knowledge or even anonymized

Regional IP Databases:

Use nslookup to find the IP address of the domain
Plug the IP into a regional database IP and see what company that IP is registered to. Worst case scenario, you’ll find the ISP

Social Engineering Targets:

ISP employees
Spouses, significant others of employees or ex-employees.
Marketing departments/sales people
PR firms

Next, Jake has a script on how to get information out of people!

The Script:

Introduce yourself as someone you’re not.
Be friendly. People love friendly people. Never become confrontational
If you don’t get what you want the first time, hang up and call back to talk to someone else.

Allinanchor:

Use it to return webpages linked to with that target term
Good for discovering networks
Google the links: Search Facebook, follow people on Twitter, search MySpace etc
You can pretty much tell an SEO’d site these days by a visual link inspection
Keep an eye on unnatural traffic
Users who come in to your website after using allinanchor are not your target visitors
Those who come 20 times in 2 minutes through the same cache aren’t your target visitors
People from whois.sc are competitors

Tracking and Logging:

Track their referrer and do something cool with competitors via mod-rewrite:
Send all incoming traffic from that specific referrer to a porn site.
Serve them a 403 access forbidden message.
Make them think the site is down.

Defence against social engineering:

Instruct your employees not to talk to no one about your site.
Find a trustworthy ISP – most intelligence is gathered at this point.
Tell your Significant other to not take business calls at home.

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Kaango Enchants Two Yahoo HotJobs Partners

WebProNews Staff — Thu, 29 Nov 2007 23:22:28 +0000

Although Hearst Corp and MediaNews Group are linchpins in Yahoo’s newspaper/online classified alliance, the two publishers have made an investment in online classified ad provider Kaango.

The newspaper industry has always been more interested in keeping money in-house rather than sharing even a little with others. Publishers have big egos, and depending on someone else to bring home the bacon doesn’t have much appeal, even with the newsprint industry facing financial troubles.

Even the newspaper-savvy duo of Yahoo’s Sue Decker and Hilary Schneider, architects of Yahoo’s HotJobs alliance with the print classified industry, aren’t appealing enough to keep the publishers’ eyes from wandering to other girls and fantasizing about their revenue undergarments.

Classified Intelligence recounted the recent deal with Kaango by Hearst and MediaNews, a $20 million infusion that gave them an 80 percent stake in the company. Kaango has deals with about a hundred newspapers for community-oriented classified sites.

There is no mincing of words when it comes to why Hearst and MediaNews bought into Kaango, as well as cutting Lee Enterprises in for a ten percent stake. They want to take on Craigslist as well as eBay’s classifieds product, Kijiji.

Details of the deal came as news to Yahoo, according to Classified Intelligence. A Yahoo spokesperson said the company was not aware of the Kaango announcement and requested more details about it from Classified Intelligence.

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DHS Emulating Doctorow’s ‘Scroogled’ Tale

WebProNews Staff — Wed, 14 Nov 2007 16:51:29 +0000

A dark future tale by Cory Doctorow spoke of a Department of Homeland Security enforcing immigration laws, and others, with the help of Google. He may not have been far off the mark.

At DHS, researchers working in the Directorate for Science & Technology are on a mission to head off terrorist attacks, by developing a way to assemble “fuzzy data” into a clearer picture.

Visual analytics will be the key. Science Blog said “analysts must meld the encyclopedic eye of Google with the inductive genius of Sherlock Holmes” to accomplish this.

The inspiration of Edward Tufte, visual data display legend, motivates the ongoing work by DHS and its associated research partners:

The centers

Craigslist Lists New Job Posting Fees

WebProNews Staff — Thu, 04 Oct 2007 23:03:37 +0000

After deliberation in the Craigslist forums, the massively popular online classifieds site will begin imposing a fee on job postings in a quartet of new markets.

Famed for its modest pricing model and ubiquitous presence, Craigslist only charges fees in a handful of places for job postings. That list will grow by four markets: Chicago, Orange County, Portland, and Sacramento, effective November 1, 2007.

Classified Intelligence cited the announcement, which was posted on the Craigslist forums:

Over the last 6 months we have received a lot of feedback in this forum and by email, the consensus of which is that a $25 fee for posting jobs in these four cities would be beneficial, with many recent comments to the effect that we may have waited too long to implement such a fee.

Though some have balked at the new fee, many Craigslist devotees welcomed the announcement. Classified Intelligence noted the impact of adding job posting fees in markets previously by the site:

Job ads are a cash-cow for Craigslist; the number of job listings in New York and Los Angeles dropped substantially when the fee began, “but the volume quickly rebounded and by 2007 had more than tripled in each city,” the company said.

“After an initial drop-off in ad volume (in Boston, San Diego, Seattle and Washington) similar to that experienced in NYC and LA, the volume of legitimate job ads in these four cities has more than doubled.”

In addition to the job fees, Craigslist charges $10 for brokered apartment listings in New York City. Classified Intelligence believes the site’s job listings perform better, as fees drive out the junk postings.

eBay Facing Serious Dropoff In Germany

WebProNews Staff — Fri, 14 Sep 2007 16:42:23 +0000

The online marketplace is in danger of losing out on the lucrative German market, and eBay has entered full panic mode in an effort to staunch the bleeding.

A 50 percent drop in listing fees, and the replacement of inexpensive email-based customer support with pricier telephone customer service, at eBay’s German division represents the company’s try at recovering from a downturn.

The Fear is in full effect at eBay.

Giving up revenue while adding costs shows this, as a new report from Classified Intelligence described eBay’s German woes:

The announcement came in the wake of signs that all was not well with the core business, which had prompted observers to ask whether the impressive growth phase of the 12-year-old marketplace might be drawing to a close.

In July, EBay Inc. said the number of products listed worldwide dropped 6 percent in the second quarter compared with the year-ago period. In Germany, the online publication iBusiness reported “a clear drop in the number of concurrent auctions running on EBay.de” in 2007. Axel Gronen, an EBay.de analyst, suggested the number of active new members might be declining from year to year.

With eBay Germany’s newly-rediscovered love for consumer-to-consumer business, Classified Intelligence suggested the growth potential on the professional seller side could be hitting a ceiling.

German sellers can place a listing, with photo, on eBay for about 67 cents. An earlier Reuters report about this said Germany and the US are eBay’s top two markets.

Profitability losses from their upgraded support, which lowered phone question costs to 14 cents from 59 cents per minute, and reduced listing fees will need to be offset with a larger volume of participants.

That will be the real trick for eBay.

Sellers should be eager to capitalize on the lower fees with more competitive pricing for buyers, and that could set up a nice cycle of growth for eBay to recoup these new costs.

eBay has been spending money on promotion on the US side of their business. Forbes cited one analyst who thinks the impact on margins will be offset by sellers using more auction features.

Listings have been rising since late August, after a year of declining, according to Forbes. eBay’s strategy looks like it’s working.

When Spies Do Search

WebProNews Staff — Fri, 07 Sep 2007 23:39:36 +0000

The Central Intelligence Agency launched CIA Wire, a service that will help users of the Library of National Intelligence sift through available information from participating agencies.

The Iraq war and the 9/11 terrorist attacks have been the most recent examples of situations where better availability of intelligence may have led to better choices being made, ones that could have preempted the losses of thousands of lives.

Government agencies are no strangers to insularity and a fiefdom mentality. What’s theirs is theirs, and they have never been real fans of sharing. That long-standing issue could get in the way of what should be a promising development for intelligence analysts throughout the federal bureaucracy.

ResourceShelf cited the opening of CIA Wire, the CIA’s contribution to the Library of National Intelligence (LNI). It may be intentional or happenstance that it opened four days ahead of the sixth anniversary of the 9/11 tragedy.

As a top-secret resource, access to the CIA Wire will be limited. A report at FCW.com said the full LNI initiative will launch by October 31st, and described the process of how requests for documents will be fulfilled:

Mike Wertheimer, assistant deputy director of national intelligence for analytic transformation and technology in the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, said that when intelligence community employees request a document from LNI, one of three things can happen:

They will receive a copy of the document. They will need to be cleared before obtaining a copy of the document. They will not be able to view the document.

“We will measure attribute-based access for the first time and then we can start to automate,” Wertheimer said. “LNI is just the starting point for us to get a handle on what we know and how we use it.”

Minimal information will be available in the form of metadata arranged in a "card catalog listing." Requesting the linked document starts the aforementioned verification process.

We found the mention of "available information" on LNI a telling phrase. It refers to the data an agency chooses to make available to the project, not just what the agency possesses.

To give our analysts the best chance of heading off future threats, agencies need to do their utmost to make as much information available as possible. An analyst with proper clearances who could make a critical connection between disparate events should have the opportunity to do so.

Tuesday the 11th should be a grim reinforcement of that idea.

Newspapers Sniping Over CareerBuilder

WebProNews Staff — Thu, 21 Jun 2007 22:50:30 +0000

McClatchy, Gannett, and Tribune own parts of the CareerBuilder job listings site, but McClatchy is starting to feel like it’s just heard the song stop during musical chairs, and all the seats are taken.

Newspapers Sniping Over CareerBuilder

Online job classifieds at McClatchy’s existing newspapers have performed well in 2007. But the Knight Ridder papers it acquired, which use CareerBuilder as their employment presence on the Internet, have seen their job revenue drop 14.4 percent.

Classified Intelligence reported the awful truth McClatchy CEO Gary Pruitt discussed at a recent Newspaper Association of America event. “We would prefer to stay with CareerBuilder … but we have to consider all options, which would include selling our share,” Pruitt said at the NAA’s Mid-Year Review.

At one point, Knight Ridder owned a third of CareerBuilder, as did Gannett and Tribune. When McClatchy bought Knight Ridder, the papers renegotiated the ownership. McClatchy ended up with 15 percent, a figure that has reduced its revenue opportunity, according to McClatchy VP of interactive media, Christian Hendricks.

Classified Intelligence indicated that neither CareerBuilder nor Gannett are too concerned about McClatchy crying foul now. CareerBuilder’s CEO said his firm would be successful “whether McClatchy’s in or McClatchy’s out.”

Gannett CFO Gracia Moore told Dow Jones that Pruitt “knew what the deal was when he signed up for it.” If comments were music, Moore’s statement would be a very tiny violin playing for Pruitt, it seems.

Monster Rampages With New Pricing

WebProNews Staff — Fri, 01 Jun 2007 15:33:28 +0000

The job classified competition with CareerBuilder has heated up, with Monster.com readying new strategies to fight back against the news publisher/Microsoft-controlled site.

CareerBuilder’s win over Monster on MSN in European markets followed its success in pushing monster aside on MSN’s US web properties. Like a certain Japanese monster movie icon, Monster is rising from the depths it has reached recently.

Classified Intelligence reported how Monster will respond to events like the million-share selloff its CEO and chairman, Andrew McKelvey, just conducted. Classified Intelligence writer John Zappe cited stock analysts who perceived the stock sale as meaning Monster isn’t going to be sold at a premium anytime soon.

They will build on their success internationally. Monster ranks well in Europe, with comScore figures showing the cumulative Monster properties ranking first in traffic there.

Some price cutting will take place, as they seek to undercut CareerBuilder for listings:

Monster, like CareerBuilder, took a price increase at the end of last year that raised the single job-posting price to $475 (vs. $419 at CareerBuilder and $349 at HotJobs for a specific geography). Monster now cut its single-listing price back to $395 and reduced its multiple posting packages as well.

Monster will take other strategies from Europe, and bring them to the United States. One of those will be the implementation of mobile services for US customers. Monster Mobile will come to the US, but a date has not been announced.

Another hasn’t been connected to a US move, but we would be surprised if it didn’t happen. Zappe said Monster wants to grab passive job-seekers, those who have a job and are desirable to other companies due to their skills and experience.

That passive market has been coveted in the US as well. Monster will have to communicate to people the adage that the best time to look for a better job is when you already have a job. First, they will refine that strategy in Europe and build on their existing strength on the Continent.

Yahoo Loses HotJobs Power Broker

WebProNews Staff — Fri, 18 May 2007 22:56:07 +0000

Dan Finnegan will leave Yahoo at the end of June, after having worked on building the newspaper consortium that places Yahoo ads and local search on paper websites.

The news zipped around Yahoo today via an internal email from Hilary Schneider, Finnegan’s boss. Classified Intelligence reported on the announcement earlier today.

Schneider credited Finnegan for his work on constructing the partnership with 12 newspaper companies, encompassing 264 newspapers. Finnegan joined Yahoo in April 2002 as EVP and GM of HotJobs.

Also, Schneider said Finnegan remarked last fall that he planned to look into entrepreneurial opportunities once the newspaper deals had been completed. Classified Intelligence said, "He was not expected to stay long after Schneider joined the company."

Schneider had been Finnegan’s successor as president at Knight Ridder Digital. She became his boss upon arriving at Yahoo in 2006.

Numbers from Compete show HotJobs enjoyed a spike in traffic through December and January, but is now relatively flat compared to the same period last year.