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Cybersecurity firm accused of hacking its potential clients, extorting them to buy its services

Publié: mai 9, 2015, 9:27pm CEST par Manish Singh

There have been numerous instances in the past where anti-virus companies have been accused -- and in many cases caught -- of creating malware their products combat. We’re learning of yet another similar case. A former employee of cybersecurity firm Tiversa is accusing the company of fraud.

Richard Wallace, one of the former investigators at the firm has testified against the firm in a Washington DC courtroom. Wallace says that Tiversa employees would hack their potential clients to force them to buy services from the firm.

That’s not all. Wallace says that Bob Boback, the CEO at Tiversa would ask the employees to look for IP addresses of known identity thieves tapping company ties to law enforcement agencies. The firm would then present these addresses to its potential clients to scare them. "Hire us or face the music", Wallace noted.

"So, to boil this down, you would make the data breach appear to be much worse than it actually had been"? FTC Administrative Judge Michael Chappell asked. "That's correct", Wallace responded.

Wallace notes a particular case wherein he himself broke into the computers at LabMD, a cancer testing center in Atlanta to steal medical records. As part of the tactic, the company notified LabMD, but when it refused to hire Tiversa and use its services, it threatened it to bring this to the Federal Trade Commission. The FTC dragged LabMD to court and the case is still in progress.

This is the same cybersecurity firm that has been previously accused of running scams to fool customers. Back in the day, Triversa made it to national news for planting a fake story wherein it said that Iran stole the blueprints of President’s helicopter.

Image Credit: Ribah / Shutterstock
Cybersecurity firm accused of hacking potential clients, extorting them to buy its services

Publié: mai 9, 2015, 9:27pm CEST par Manish Singh

There have been numerous instances in the past where anti-virus companies have been accused -- and in many cases caught -- of creating malware their products combat. We’re learning of yet another similar case. A former employee of cybersecurity firm Tiversa is accusing the company of fraud.

Richard Wallace, one of the former investigators at the firm has testified against the firm in a Washington DC courtroom. Wallace says that Tiversa employees would hack their potential clients to force them to buy services from the firm.

That’s not all. Wallace says that Bob Boback, the CEO at Tiversa would ask the employees to look for IP addresses of known identity thieves tapping company ties to law enforcement agencies. The firm would then present these addresses to its potential clients to scare them. "Hire us or face the music", Wallace noted.

"So, to boil this down, you would make the data breach appear to be much worse than it actually had been"? FTC Administrative Judge Michael Chappell asked. "That's correct", Wallace responded.

Wallace notes a particular case wherein he himself broke into the computers at LabMD, a cancer testing center in Atlanta to steal medical records. As part of the tactic, the company notified LabMD, but when it refused to hire Tiversa and use its services, it threatened it to bring this to the Federal Trade Commission. The FTC dragged LabMD to court and the case is still in progress.

This is the same cybersecurity firm that has been previously accused of running scams to fool customers. Back in the day, Triversa made it to national news for planting a fake story wherein it said that Iran stole the blueprints of President’s helicopter.

Image Credit: Ribah / Shutterstock
At just $9, Chip is the cheapest computer to be a reality soon

Publié: mai 9, 2015, 9:15pm CEST par Manish Singh

Raspberry Pi, a credit card-sized computer carrying a dirt cheap price tag has become insanely popular in the last couple of years. But what if we told you that there is a similar computer that sports miniature form factor and costs even less? Meet CHIP, a $9 single-board computer that is capable of running light Linux-based distros.

As for the specifications, CHIP packs in a 1GHz processor coupled with 512MB RAM, and 4GB of internal storage. The board comes with optional ports for VGA and HDMI, and supports Wi-Fi and Bluetooth connectivity options. The variant with VGA port costs $19 while the HDMI capable CHIP will set you back by $24 bucks.

But what can you possibly run on this tiny computer? The company assures that most of the lightweight Linux distributions will work with CHIP, and let users browse the Web using Chromium, do their office work on LibreOffice, and supposedly run media files on VLC. Exciting huh?

That explains why in only three days since the company put its product on the crowdsourcing platform Kickstarter, CHIP has managed to get the trust of over 2,500 backers committing to contribute more than $390,000 for the original $50,000 goal.
Anonymous Tor Cloud project closes down

Publié: mai 9, 2015, 2:03pm CEST par Mark Wilson

The Tor browser is used by many to stay anonymous online -- and it's something that has been embraced by the likes of WikiLeaks as a way to safely gather information whilst hopefully avoiding the surveillance of the NSA. One lesser known project from the same stables is the Tor Cloud service, and Tor has announced that it is closing down.

Based on the Amazon EC2 cloud computing platform, Tor Cloud provided a way to share computing resources and allow faster uncensored access to the internet. However, the project is plagued with "at least one major bug ... that makes it completely dysfunctional" and after failing to find anyone to undertake the work, the decision was taken to shutter Tor Cloud. This does not mean that Tor itself is dead -- far from it -- and developers are being encouraged to create their own forked versions of Tor Cloud.

It is still possible to manually install Tor bridges on Amazon EC2 and other cloud platforms, but it is now not as simple as it was with Tor Cloud. Any existing instance of Tor Cloud remain unaffected by the closure of the service as all of the necessary settings are already in place. There is still the problem of numerous known bugs, but this is something that users and developers are free to work on.

In a blog post, Tor said:

We have tried to find a new maintainer for Tor Cloud for months, but without success. There have been offers to send us patches, but we couldn't find a Tor person to review and approve them. We encourage everyone who stepped up to start their own cloud bridges project under another name ("Onion Cloud"?), possibly forking the existing Tor Cloud code that will remain available. Tor Cloud is still a good idea, it just needs somebody to implement it.

Photo credit: Charlie Bard / Shutterstock
Vatican believes that open source is the way to preserve history

Publié: mai 9, 2015, 8:42am CEST par Sead Fadilpašić

Vatican wants to save the human history in a digital form, and the best way to do so is to use open-source, non-proprietary software that will still be easily accessible and usable in 50 years, it says.

During the EMC World conference in Las Vegas, Vatican Library CIO Luciano Ammenti argued his case. A total of 82,000 manuscripts were digitized, as there was never enough room in the reading rooms.

"The Vatican Library is a conservation library. We try to preserve our history. We tried to expand the number of reading rooms available for people that want to use our library", The Inquirer quotes him saying. "But we realized that reading rooms will never be enough. We have 82,000 manuscripts in total, and at any one time only 20 percent of them can be read in the library. To get round this over the last few years we’ve had a focus on conservation of the manuscripts in digital form".

"The main question at the start of our project was which format to save the texts. We needed to make sure people could still read the digital files in 50 years’ time".

So they chose to go for images, as images can always be looked at.

"We save it as a picture as it’s longer life than a file. You don’t rely on PowerPoint or Word. In 50 years they can still just look at it,"he said.

"Normally people try to use the TIFF format when archiving. This has several problems. It’s not open source and it doesn’t update. The last time was in 1998. On top of this it’s 32-bit and not ready for 3D imaging, which limits the information it can preserve -- what the script’s made of etc. So instead we use the FITTS format. FITTS is open source, 64-bit, 3D ready and updated regularly. It gives all the information you need on the image".

Image Credit: cesc_assawin / Shutterstock

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