Be Still my Bleeding Heart …

Be Still my Bleeding Heart …

“Secure web servers are the equivalent of heavy armored cars. The problem is, they are being used to transfer rolls of coins and checks written in crayon by people on park benches to merchants doing business in cardboard boxes from beneath highway bridges. Further, the roads are subject to random detours, anyone with a screwdriver can control the traffic lights, and there are no police.” — Dr. Eugene Spafford, (Web Security & Commerce, p9, O’Reilly, 1997, S. Garfinkel & G. Spafford)

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The Many Sides of Bitcoin

The Many Sides of Bitcoin

Pariah, darling, or somewhere in between. Bitcoin has continued to linger in the daily media spotlight since the shuttering of darknet’s black-market drug bazaar, , and the subsequent announcement of the arrest of its alleged owner, Ross William Ulbricht (aka ), on October 2, 2013. Media mavens have long cast bitcoin as a sort of “geek fantasy” or in this case, a means to launder dirty money, primarily used by criminals engaging in drug trafficking, credit card fraud, or even murder for hire. Just prior to this news, bitcoin market prices had stabilized, hovering around the mid $100s.

Cyber Jihadists

Cyber Jihadists

“We’re facing a very great threat of loosely-coupled, organizational networks that increasingly rely on IT infrastructure to coordinate their movements and recruit young disenfranchised, apathetic guys as suicidal pawns in a sophisticated, dispersed movement. (…)” (AHM, Usenet, September 21, 2001)

Hacker Gangs

Hacker Gangs

Meet Jim Script Kiddie (). He is the guy (usually in his early to mid teens) who comes into a hacker forum, asking inane questions like, “how can I be a hacker?” He also tends to over-indulge in “hacker speak” making him look pretty much like a moron to seasoned (and not so) computer netizens.

The New Old War

The New Old War

In 1956, FBI Director, J. Edgar Hoover initiated a program, code-named (counter intelligence program) ushering in what would become the mainstay for how intelligence communities dealt with domesitic affairs. The sole directive of this program was “to expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit, or otherwise neutralize” the activities of various dissidents and their leaders.