Hackers attacked the computer network at the Naval War College in Newport, taking down the school's network for more than two weeks, including some e-mail services and the college's Web site.

The Navy Cyber Defense Operations Command in Norfolk, Virginia, detected the intrusion around November 16 and took the system offline, spokesman Lt. Cmdr. Doug Gabos said. He said the unclassified network was used by students.

Investigators were trying to determine the extent of the intrusion, Gabos said. They planned to upgrade firewalls and make other unspecified improvements.

"Once that is complete, the network will be restored," Gabos said.

Gabos would not comment on who is suspected of attacking the network.

Hackers hit Naval War College computer network

"A local family's nativity is defaced with a pagan symbol. They found a pentagram on their baby Jesus figure Thursday morning. The words cult of the dead cow were left on a Merry Christmas sign. The phrase is usually tied to a group of Internet hackers."

So I guess that's what the cDc is up to these days..

cDc Tags Baby Jesus

UK security experts have cracked the sooper sekure new UK biometric passports. It took 48 hours. With 174 worth of sniffer hardware, attackers can read all the personal information off of any of the three million new UK passports in circulation

Boing Boing: UK RFID passports cracked

Groups of Second Life content creators were gathering digitally Tuesday to protest the dissemination of a program they worry could badly damage the virtual world's nascent economy.

The controversy gathered steam Monday when Linden Lab, which publishes Second Life, posted a blog alerting residents of the virtual world to the existence of a program or bot called CopyBot, which allows someone to copy any object in Second Life. That includes goods such as clothing that people purchase for their in-world avatars, and even the virtual PCs that computer giant Dell announced Tuesday it is going to sell in the digital world.

Big problems in the virtual realm...

'Second Life' faces threat to its virtual economy | CNET News.com

When talking about web hacks that effect brokerages, Acidius is not kidding, exaggerating, or being alarmist.

Brokerages lose $22M to hackers in three months

As if there weren't enough concerns about the integrity of the vote, a non-partisan civic organization today claimed it had hacked into the voter database for the 1.35 million voters in the city of Chicago.

Bob Wilson, an official with the Illinois Ballot Integrity Project — which bills itself as a not-for-profit civic organization dedicated to the correction of election system deficiencies — tells ABC News that last week his organization hacked the database, which contains detailed information about hundreds of thousands of Chicago voters, including their Social Security numbers, and dates of birth.

"It was a serious identity theft problem, but also a problem that could potentially create problems with the election," Wilson said.

A nefarious hacker could have changed every voter's status from active to inactive, which would have prevented them from voting, he said.

"Or we could've changed the information on what precinct you were in or what polling place you were supposed to go to," he said. "So there were ways that we could potentially change the entire online data base and disenfranchise voters throughout the entire city of Chicago."

"If we'd wanted to, we could've wiped the entire database out," Wilson claimed.

I seriously hope this database was not the primary database for this data, and just a mirror of it used for the web page. Either way, it's very bad.. But that would be extremely bad.

ABC News: Chicago Voter Database Hacked

Here's a link to the Google Calendar Dagmar put up for the Phreaknic 10 presentation schedule.

For those who are into iCal, there is also a calendar feed available.

Dagmar will be updating the schedule when he hears of any changes or additions.

Phreaknic 10 Presentation Schedule

Here's video of Clint Curtis, a former programmer for Yang Enterprises (YEI) in Florida, testifying under oath that Representative Tom Feeney asked him to write a voting machine program to rig elections.

I'm not exactly sure what the deal is here, but this rabbit hole seems very, very deep, and I find it strange that I haven't heard any of this before given all of the drama about voting machines. This is either a crazy partisan conspiracy theory or its one of the worst corruption stories in this country's history. I haven't found any details that are, one their face, disprovable. On the other hand, the main story is being carried by blogs that seem a bit sensational and partisan. As they say, a broken clock is right twice a day... Anyone got any good information on this?

Update: Apparently Bev Harris isn't impressed. I don't think she understands the technical issues. However, her observation that there is no evidence is correct.

Boing Boing: Video testimony of vote machine whistleblower

"It has become clear that Internet access in itself is a vulnerability that we cannot mitigate. We have tried incremental steps and they have proven insufficient." - Undersecretary of Commerce Mark Foulon

Computer System Under Attack - washingtonpost.com

It describes how to monitor who's voting for what via RF emissions.

Voting machine chess - Hack A Day