QOTD on Free Speech

At some point people who care about free speech will realise that free speech has to be funded, otherwise it's not free. -- Paul Lashmar, investigative journalist

Src: BBC News - WikiLeaks whistleblower site in temporary shutdown

QOTD - DDoS is the new poetry

It's time for the cybersecurity community to accept the uncomfortable truth that DDOS is what people do when they hate each other. In the past, they used to trade hate mail; today, they trade DDOS attacks.
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Thanks to the Internet, today there are plenty of other ways for concerned and patriotic citizens to show their excitement about a war their country is fighting. DDOS is the new poetry.
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Trying to analyze the cyber-dimension of a real war is impossible without understanding the causes, the conduct, and the aftermath of the war. -- Evgeny Morozov, a fellow at the Open Society Institute

Src: There is no need for Kremlin in this hypothesis or why DDOS is the new poetry | Net Effect | ForeignPolicy.com

BBC-controlled botnet - legal or not?

This is as controversial as it gets. As part of a news media show called "Click", the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), ran a story about cyber security in which it controlled a botnet of at least 22,000 computers. It used the botnet to send spam (to their own account) and to perform a Distributed Denial of Service attack (DDoS) with permission of the site owner. Once done with their experiment, the BBC "warned users that their PCs are infected, and advised them on how to make their systems more secure" by modifying their desktop background.

There are several actions for which the BBC could find themselves in hot water:

1. They may have violated the UK Computer Misuse Act by sending spam.
2. They may have violated laws by conducting a DDoS attack.
3. They may have violated laws by changing content on compromised machines (i.e. zombie machines part of the botnet), in this case modifying the desktop background image.
   

Src: BBC team exposes cyber crime risk
Src: Did BBC break the law by using a botnet to send spam? | Graham Cluley's blog