Nextgov/FCW - Authors - Adam Martin

China's first aircraft carrier won't carry aircraft yet

Adam Martin, The Wire — Tue, 25 Sep 2012 13:04:38 -0400

China's first aircraft carrier entered service on Tuesday, but since it still has no planes aboard, the only primary use of the vessel is a signal of China's growing naval might. The Liaoning, as the carrier is called, has been in sea trials since last August, built on the retrofitted hull of the Soviet-made Varyag, which China bought from the Ukraine. The closest thing Japan has to an aircraft carrier is a helicopter-carrying destroyer, so the commissioning of the Liaoning represents a significant, if for now sympbolic, advance in Chinese naval power against its rival. The Associated Press points out that a working air wing is still a long way off: "It will take years to build the proper aircraft, to train pilots to land in adverse weather on a moving deck, and to develop a proper carrier battle group." In the meantime, the ship is expected to be used mostly for research and training. But the ship's launch does "raise the overall operational strength of the Chinese navy," the Defense Ministry has said. The timing of that move is everything.

Video: The arrest of the face of Anonymous will of course be televised

Adam Martin, The Wire — Thu, 13 Sep 2012 16:33:21 -0400

When you're the so-called face of Anonymous , a lot of your life gets documented online, including, for Barrett Brown, video threats to an FBI agent and his subsequent arrest. We still don't know why Brown was arrested on Wednesday night . But because he lives so much of his life online, we got to see video of his arrest, hear audio, and even get a transcript. And we can also see videos Brown posted earlier Wednesday that sure seem like they could have led to the raid.

Daily Dot did a great early rundown of how Brown's arrest became "one of the most thoroughly covered arrests in multimedia." He was with his girlfriend, on a video chat with 12 others when an off-camera commotion broke out and Brown left the frame before his girlfriend turned the webcam off. But the audio ran, and shouting from someone who sounds a lot like law enforcement can clearly be heard. Soon after, someone who had been recording the video chat posted it to Mediafire , someone else posted cleaned-up audio , and then a transcript went up on Pastebin . Brown is still in custody with the FBI, Wired reports , citing a Dallas County sheriff's spokeswoman.

GoDaddy says outage was no hack

Adam Martin, The Wire — Tue, 11 Sep 2012 17:53:52 -0400

for which one person claimed credit was not a hack at all, GoDaddy said in a press release on Tuesday, just a breakdown of the domain registrar's servers. It's the first time GoDaddy has given any information at all about what happened, though the explanation is still fairly limited: "We have determined the service outage was due to a series of internal network events that corrupted router data tables," the company wrote. But the outage was still a big attention-getter for whoever is tweeting under the handle @AnonymousOwn3r, even if he or she didn't have anything to do with it. That account took credit for the outage early on and became the focal point of just about every news story on the outage,including ours, as reporters seized on it as the only explanation being offered for the domain hosting service's outage. Meanwhile, @AnonymousOwn3r gained about 6,000 new followers overnight. It's posted retweeted lots of salutary remarks, but hasn't said anything about GoDaddy's press release. The company apologized for the outage in its press release, writing, "at no time was any customer data at risk or were any of our systems compromised." ]]>

One person is claiming credit for GoDaddy's massive outage

Adam Martin, The Wire — Tue, 11 Sep 2012 13:00:00 -0400

If the website you're trying to access won't load, chances are it's a GoDaddy joint that's been taken offline in a massive hack for which one person is claiming responsibility. The domain registrar acknowledged in a tweet that it was offline on Monday, and The Next Web reported the site's DNS servers had been disabled as well, "which means GoDaddy hosted e-mail accounts are down as well, and lots more." GoDaddy hosted more than 45 million domain names as of 2010, according to DomainSherpa. Someone tweeting with the handle @AnonymousOwn3r claimed responsibility for the attack on Monday, saying in a tweet that he or she had taken down GoDaddy's servers "bacause well i'd like to test how the cyber security is safe and for more reasons that i can not talk now." @AnonymousOwn3r's profile identifies the account holder as the "security leader of Anonymous" and an "Anonymous official member." There's not much information available yet about what happened, but GoDaddy tweets that it's "working feverishly to resolve as soon as possible."

Reuters blogs hacked for the second time this month

Adam Martin, The Wire — Wed, 15 Aug 2012 16:54:23 -0400

Once again, somebody hacked into Reuters blogs and posted an inflammatory, and false, story from the Middle East, this time reporting that Saudi Arabian Foreign Minister, Prince Saud al-Faisal (above), had died. He has not, but he did undergo minor surgery for an intestinal obstruction over the weekend. Reuters blogs are still down, and have been since Tuesday, according to a tweet from Reuters Opinion, but Reuters own reporting on the hack says it happened on Wednesday, and it already deleted the post. The fake story doesn't appear in the cached copy of Reuters' blogging site, as it did the last time this happened. In Early August, someone posted a fake story that Syrian rebels had retreated from the city of Aleppo, where fighting was intense at the time. Following the hack, we noted that a hacking outfit called the Syrian Electronic Army, which is sympathetic to the Syrian government, has been known to attack media outlets it sees as pro-rebels. If there's a connection to that group and this latest attack, it could be that Saudi Arabia has been supportive of the Syrian rebels, something Reuters (along with every other media outlet) has been reporting.

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The Navy's quixotic quest to bury an unclassified laser leak

Adam Martin, The Wire — Tue, 07 Aug 2012 15:19:50 -0400

Bookmark this for a fun lunch read: Wired's Danger Room blog has a lengthy, entertaining report on its wrangling with the Naval Criminal Investigative Service over an unclassified document describing a fictional laser weapon, that NCIS insists was "leaked." The Navy's interest in who shared a five-year-old document, marked For Official Use Only but not classified as "secret," fits in with the current "leak fever" zeitgeist, but the weapon described in the document is kind of ridiculous. It's basically a laser that can target insurgents and burn their clothing, and eventually their insides. (Shades of Real Genius?)

Wired's report, by Sharon Weinberger and Noah Shachtman, is a good way to understand how an official policy cracking down on leaks can get out of hand until it "provides official justification for reprisals, even when the threat to national security teeters on the absurd." Come for the straight-faced descriptions of outrageous sci-fi weaponry, stay for the serious examination of military policy.

Read more at The Atlantic Wire.

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Reuters blogs hacked with fake story about Syrian rebel retreat

Adam Martin, The Wire — Mon, 06 Aug 2012 14:00:00 -0400

Reuters became involved in the Syrian conflict in a way it didn't intend to on Friday, when someone hacked into its blogging site and published a fake post purporting to quote a Syrian rebel leader saying his forces were withdrawing from Aleppo. Reuters indicated several incorrect stories went out, but the one post we know of ran on Jeffrey Goldfarb's blog, which usually covers economics and finance. The newswire hasn't said who it thinks is responsible for the hack, but the computer hacking outfit with the most prominent track record in this conflict is Syrian Electronic Army, loyal to the Syrian regime and known for breaking into foreign sites it perceives as sympathetic to the rebels. Reuters' main news site is reporting that the Syrian army is mounting a huge offensive against the rebels in Aleppo, but that the rebels are still there. Reuters entire blogging site is down, but thanks to Google's cache, we can still see the phony post, a partial screenshot of which is below:

Read the entire story at The Atlantic Wire.

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Report: Russia stopped Syria from gassing rebels

Adam Martin, The Wire — Tue, 24 Jul 2012 15:00:00 -0400

Syria's public position is that it won't use its chemical weapons unless some outside state attacks it, but a Reuters report by Samia Nakhoul on Tuesday included some scary news that Bashar al-Assad's regime was close to using them on rebels two weeks ago, but Russia stopped it. The story largely focuses on the cooperation between the United States, Israel, and Russia to stop Syria from using its chemical weapons, and includes some terrifying comments from a diplomat who makes Syria sound a lot like a regime that came to the brink of chemical warfare once already in this conflict. Per Nakhoul:

One Western diplomat in the region said: "There was talk of them using it two weeks ago, but the Russians intervened quickly to stop him.

"If you think how desperate these people are and what they have done in the past, you have to assume they would be prepared to use it. All of us think he (Assad) is capable of using it and will do it if he was pushed to the wall," the diplomat said, referring to credible reports that Assad was preparing to use Sarin gas against Syrian rebels.

But "the Russians got hold of him and told him ‘don't even think about it'".

Read the full story at The Atlantic Wire. ]]>

Now that Google has camera planes, Street View cars are so passé

Adam Martin, The Wire — Thu, 07 Jun 2012 13:00:00 -0400

Google's just-announced 3D maps sound awesome, but they also include a serious downside for the privacy crowd: Anybody who got creeped out by Street View cars shooting their block will now have to worry about Google's camera-toting fleet of airplanes. And those creeped out by Google's camera cars did not represent an insignificant population: Most of Germany, for example, disliked them enough to make Google stop operating them there.

However unlike the cars, which you could see driving by with their Google logos and big camera towers, as Reuters' Alexei Oreskovic notes, you'll probably never notice a Google plane. For one thing, Google's not saying which cities it's releasing maps for, so we don't know where the planes are operating. Also, Google didn't buy the planes like it did the cars. It's contracting with private owners so the planes probably won't have Google's logo emblazoned on them. However, when the 3D maps are all finished, they do sound like they'll be pretty cool. Reuters' Oreskovic quoted Google Earth product manager Peter Birch: "We're trying to create the illusion that you're just flying over the city, almost as if you were in your own personal helicopter."

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Video: SpaceX has docked: 'Looks like we caught a dragon by the tail'

Adam Martin, The Wire — Fri, 25 May 2012 14:13:16 -0400

It's official: The first private mission to the International Space Station is a success. The SpaceX Dragon capsule, which blasted off on the Spacex Falcon 9 rocket Tuesday, successfully docked with the space station at 9:56 a.m. EDT , when a robotic arm grabbed it and secured it. In classic quotable NASA fashion, astronaut Don Pettit said: "Looks like we caught a Dragon by the tail." The unmanned capsule delivered a half a ton of supplies to the station but more important was the symbolic achievement for a private company, California-based Space Exploration Technologies Corp., which was founded by former PayPal CEO Elon Musk. Spacex is one of several companies vying for contracts to resupply the space station and eventually bring astronauts to it, and as of now it's the only one to successfully carry out a mission. Check out NASA's live feed:

Live video by Ustream

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Washington Post helps us keep track of White House visitors

Adam Martin, The Wire — Mon, 21 May 2012 15:00:00 -0400

The White House makes no secret of its visitor logs, but it doesn't serve them up in an easily searchable database with the information prettily graphed, but thanks to The Washington Post, anyone can easily keep track of the White House's many, many visitors.

Monday's story by T.W. Farnum, pointing to some visitors of note, really just serves to introduce The Post's new tool for exploring the visitors' list, which primarily tracks lobbying activity at the White House, and other news outlets are already using it to write stories of their own. Politico's Josh Gerstein found a visit by Eldon Roth, CEO of Beef Products, Inc., which makes pink slime -- a detail Farnum did not mention.

Read the full story at The Atlantic Wire.

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Virus attack plunges Commerce bureau into bureaucratic Dark Ages

Adam Martin — Mon, 09 Apr 2012 00:00:00 -0400

HomeStudio / Shutterstock.com

It's a good thing turnover is low at the federal Economic Development Administration, so there are people around who remember how to use things like fax machines, the Yellow Pages, and note pads now that the agency's been without Internet access for 80 days--a severe fallout from a virus that came in an email. While the administration's plight serves as a cautionary tale to keep up with virus protection and be careful with attachments, it also sounds kind of fun, at least if you're not one of the people tasked with combatting the virus or rebuilding the operating network. For now, the agency's a place you can go to see a real circa 1980s office at work, just like in Dolly Parton's Nine to Five.

Per The Washington Post's Lisa Rein , "Employees became reacquainted with their neighborhood post office and the beep-squeak-hiss of the fax machine. The must-have office supply switched from iPhone to toner."

Read the full story at The Atlantic Wire

( Image via HomeStudio / Shutterstock.com )

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NASA considers leaving International Space Station unmanned

Adam Martin — Tue, 30 Aug 2011 00:00:00 -0400

After one of the Russian rockets it plans to use to ferry astronauts and supplies to the International Space Station crashed last week, NASA said on Monday that it may evacuate the station and let it orbit unmanned for a while.

The NASA announcement follows one from the Russian space agency, which said it will postpone a manned mission to the station that had been scheduled for September 22.

That mission has been pushed back to late October and, in the meantime, the Russian agency Roscosmos has scheduled two unmanned missions. The Soyuz rockets were supposed to take over for space shuttles and bring U.S. astronauts and supplies to the station. But last week's crash has called that plan into question.

"If Russian Soyuz rockets remain grounded beyond mid-November, there will be no way to launch new crews before the current residents are supposed to leave," the Associated Press reported on Monday. "Currently, six astronauts reside on the space station," writes Space.com's Mike Wall. "But three of them are due to return to Earth next month, and the rest are scheduled to come back in mid-November. If the rocket anomaly isn't identified and fixed soon, a fresh crew won't be able to get to the station before the last three astronauts depart."

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CIA Website Allegedly Hacked

Adam Martin — Thu, 16 Jun 2011 00:00:00 -0400

The mischief keeps coming from hacking collective LulzSec, but Wednesday's attack might be its biggest and most serious yet: The goofy hackers with the logo reminiscent of Mr. Peanut claimed it took down the Central Intelligence Agency's Web site Wednesday. (Temporarily, at least: though at 6:50 p.m. we couldn't load the CIA's site, as of 7:20 p.m. it was back, though a bit sluggish.)

They announced via Twitter shortly before 6 p.m. that cia.gov had been taken down, "Tango down ... for the lulz," and adding later, "Come for the DDoS, stay for the h4x." DDoS stands for distributed denial-of-service attack, a form of hack that involves overwhelming a target's servers with traffic. Doing something "for the lulz" means doing it for "for the laughs," or just for the sake of doing it.

The group has been "fed-baiting" of late, as Andy Greenberg puts it, most recently claiming a data breach of the U.S. Senate's site and previously exposing login data from a security firm affiliated with the Federal Bureau of Investigation. But targeting the CIA's site would be the group's most significant attack on a government site. The Pentagon has recently declared cyber-attacks to be acts of war. But the group's attitude seems clear from the language in their Senate data dump: "Is this an act of war, gentlemen? Problem?" It probably is a problem now.

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