Blackberry devices are under scrutiny once again as, director of research for Germany’s Praetorian Global, Jesse D’Aguanno demonstrates its effectiveness as a hacking tool at this years DefCon. D’Aguanno plans to release a software suite later this month that will allow an attacker to penetrate a companies Intranet with veritable ease. The vunerability occurs as there is little to no segmentation between the Blackberry device and the internal network.

More Information : http://www.praetoriang.net/presentations/blackjack.html

The Register is running a two-page article on the cloning of the new biometric passports that are becoming widely implemented. Lukas Grunwald, from Germany’s DN-Systems consultants, demonstrated, at Black Hat, the ease to which a biometric passport can be fraudulently cloned. What may be even more surprising, is that the, widely available, ICAO documentation actually outlines the technical processes in quite a lot of detail.

To read more, please follow this link to The Register

Telecoms regulator Ofcom, are making efforts to increase the availability of wireless networks in rural parts of the UK where broadband isnt readily available.

The problem with wireless networks outside of urban areas is that, due to the relatively low range, a greater number of transmitters is required to provide wide coverage. This of course costs alot of money. Ofcom aims to increase the range of each node in order to reduce the number of transmitters required.

In a BBC article, Selina Lo of Ruckus said;

“A typical network will have hundreds or low thousands of access points. If you have power limits, these nodes have to be closer together and you need a lot more nodes.”

In an effort to reduce mobile phone related crime, the Mobile Industry Crime Action Forum (MICAF), along with all five major UK mobile networks, have vowed to block 80% of stolen phones, within 24-48 hours of being reported.

MICAF are now making the phone networks take full accountability for the theft of mobile phones. Backing the incentive, Home Secretary, John Reid has pledge £1.35 million in order to form a new “National Phone Crime” unit.

It is likely that the IMEI will be blocked in order to render the phones useless, but many people fear that this may lead to an increase in stolen phones as thiefs will be likely to use the phoen for 48 hours and discard it in place of another.

At this years HOPE conference in New York, Jonathan Westhues of www.cq.cx demonstrated the ability to clone an RFID chip imbedded in the arm of his colleague. Using a laptop running signal processing software, a standard RFID reader and antenna, Westhues was able to read the ID number from the embedded VeriChip.

“Their (VeriChip’s) website claims that it cannot be counterfeited — that is something that Jonathan and I have shown to be untrue,” Annalee Newitz (colleague).

A “VeriChip” is an implantable, passive Radio Frequency Identification Device (RFID) about the size of a grain of sand that can be used in a variety of applications such as assessing whether somebody has authority to enter a high-security area.

more information can be found at Westhues site : http://cq.cx/verichip.pl

Popular social networking site MySpace.com has been down since sunday. Visitors to the site have been instead greeted with a notice from the companys president and founder, Tom Anderson, and a flash interface for the classic arcade game Pacman.

Whilst the official word is that the outage is due to a power loss, rumours are spreading that the chav valhalla has been a victim of futher spyware in their banner advertising, with some people, such as RadioIO.com’s beat Hi, going as far to claim that the server has been hacked.

Its almost that time of year again when we all don our Red Hats and Slacks and make our way to London. This years LinuxWorld Expo will offer 26 hours of Open Source topics as well as 16 top name industry speakers, by the likes of Bruce Perens, Alan Cox, Ian Pratt and Chris DiBona.

For more information and registration, please follow this link for the LinuxWorld Expo 2006

A Niue website is offering unlock codes for numerous models of Nokia and Samsung mobile phones. Whilst I havent checked it out yet, it’s probably worth a quick look. The Nokia side of things presents a small form to fill in, requiring the IMEI of your phone and the serial number. The Samsung page is pretty much the same and, although in Maori(?), is fairly straight forward to follow.

Nokia Unlock Procedure
Samsung Unlock Procedure

Slashdot is reporting that the encryption in the Galileo GPS signal has been broken. The pseudo random number generator used to obscure the information stored in the Galileo GPS signal has been broken. From the article: ‘Members of Cornell’s Global Positioning System (GPS) Laboratory have cracked the so-called pseudo random number (PRN) codes of Europe’s first global navigation satellite, despite efforts to keep the codes secret. That means free access for consumers who use navigation devices — including handheld receivers and systems installed in vehicles — that need PRNs to listen to satellites.’”

Source: Slashdot - Cracking the GPS Galileo Satellite