What it means is that domain information can’t be modified and the domain name transferred – only the registration can be renewed. This action from Network solutions was motivated by a Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) complaint filed by Microsoft against Cryptonome and its owners, regarding the publication of their Global Criminal Compliance Handbook, a document that reveals to users things that Microsoft would not like to become common knowledge.

In it you can find information about what records are retained and for how long, and what information can and will be given to law enforcement and intelligence agencies if requested by subpoena. Microsoft is not the only company whose “spy guide” has been published by Cryptome, but it’s apparently the one with the most clout.

ReadWriteWeb reports that once the complaint was filed and they requested of Paul Young, one of the owners of Cryptome, to take the document off the website, he refused. So the ISP intervened with a warning that said that if the document wasn’t removed by Thursday, they would disable the site. And so they did – one day before the imposed deadline.

In the complaint, Microsoft states as the reason for their request an infringement of copyright laws. The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), the well-known international digital rights watchdog group, spoke up: “We find it troubling that copyright law is being invoked here. Microsoft doesn’t sell this manual. There’s no market for this work. It’s not a copyright issue. John’s copying of it is fair use. We don’t do this anywhere else in speech law.”

Cryptome has been active since 1996, and this is the first time that someone has succeeded in their mission to shut it down. Young has filed a counter-notification, and we probably won’t have to wait long for the next installment of this story. If Microsoft doesn’t forward a notice of litigation, Network Solutions will reactivate the Website and unlock the domain in no more than 14 business days. In the meantime, the website is temporarily available here.

If you want to read Microsoft’s “spy guide”, you can download it at Wikileaks, who has also offered to to host Cryptome on their multi-jurisdictional network-outside the US.

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Using the link, an attacker can access any file with their current privileges – although anonymous/guest users are limited to the “nobody” account. Because Samba runs with root rights, all data can be read out and modified if the flaw is exploited. To create a specially prepared symlink, you do need a modified SMB client – Nikolaos Rangos (Kingcope), who discovered the flaw, has published a patch – or the module published on the weekend for the Metasploit framework.

The flaw was found in the current Samba 3.4.5 release and previous versions are also affected. The Samba developers have confirmed the flaw, but an update or patch have yet to be released. As a workaround, the developers recommend changing the option wide links under [global] from yes to no (wide links = no) and rebooting the server. According to the description by the Samba team, the flaw occurs because Samba allows symlinks to be created via Unix Extensions in the SMB/CIFS protocol. They therefore plan to have wide links = no as the standard in future versions.

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BitLocker is a drive encryption system that Microsoft introduced in 2007 with the introduction of Windows Vista. It’s also included in some versions of the new Windows 7 operating system, which debuted in October. Security bloggers, including researchers at Germany’s Fraunhofer Institute for Secure Information Technology, in recent days have published reports that PCs and laptops protected with BitLocker could be compromised in certain circumstances.

But Cooke said those circumstances covered scenarios that were highly unlikely to occur in real life. “This research is similar to other published attacks where the computer owner leaves a computer unattended in a hotel room and anyone with access to the room could tamper with the computer,” wrote Cooke. “This sort of attack poses a relatively low risk to folks who use BitLocker in the real world,” he said. Still, Cooke reminded Windows users that BitLocker is only one element of Microsoft’s multi-tiered approach to security.

“Even with the great enhancements made in Windows 7 such as BitLocker To Go, it still remains that BitLocker alone is not a complete security solution,” said Cooke. “IT professionals as well as users must be diligent when protecting IT resources and the best protection against these sorts of targeted attacks requires more than just technology. It requires end user education and physical security also play important roles,” Cooke wrote.

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In a security advisory, Microsoft acknowledged that a bug in SMB (Server Message Block), a Microsoft-made network file- and print-sharing protocol, could be used by attackers to cripple Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 machines.

The zero-day vulnerability was first reported by Canadian researcher Laurent Gaffie last Wednesday, when he revealed the bug and posted proof-of-concept attack code to the Full Disclosure security mailing list and his blog. According to Gaffie, exploiting the flaw crashes Windows 7 and Server 2008 R2 systems so thoroughly that the only recourse is to manually power off the computers.

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Note: This is a toolkit by Microsoft meant to be used on a thumb
drive.

There are many open source tools already available, this is just an
all-in-one set. For the curious tinkerer.

Microsoft COFEE forensic toolkit: http://cryptome.org/cofee.zip
User guide: http://cryptome.org/cofee-guide.zip

Gary McKinnon / SOLO
“People faking autism after charges should receive total immunity
from prosecution”

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