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China states that it was not involved in the attacks on Google and other Silicon Valley corporations. They have even gone as far as to defend their regime of censorship and firewalling! The "accusation that the Chinese government participated in (any) cyberattack, either in an explicit or inexplicit way, is groundless and aims to denigrate China," a spokesman from the Chinese Ministry of Industry and Information Technology told the Xinhua Chinese news agency.

If China isn't behind these sophisticated, masterful attacks... who -- or what -- is?

In further news, there's by Bruce Schneier. The hackers used a backdoor in Gmail to gain access -- a backdoor required by U.S. law enforcement agencies. It's not uncommon for such rear entries to exist -- they started to appear in Western nations around the same time as anti-terrorism laws -- but the fact that such backdoors are easy to hack is a concern.

Basically, all major online services have such backdoors programmed into them. It's not crazy to assume that similar attacks were used on the other 30 Silicon Valley businesses. It's not such a problem that these backdoors exist -- it's a problem that once in place, someone will discover them -- they will be hacked.

Schneier finishes his CNN Opinion pieces with a poignant and chilling thought about the current state of technology and the things to come:

"The problem is that such control makes us all less safe. Whether the eavesdroppers are the good guys or the bad guys, these systems put us all at greater risk. Communications systems that have no inherent eavesdropping capabilities are more secure than systems with those capabilities built in. And it's bad civic hygiene to build technologies that could someday be used to facilitate a police state."

SOURCE: Download Squad

At least Rs11 crore of refunds were discovered to have been stolen last week by hacking into the password of some assessing officers who are responsible for crediting the refunds. The refunds were credited to fake accounts for which the returns had been filed electronically.

"We have stopped the payment and have been able to prevent at least two cases. Also investigation and action has been initiated by the Directorate of Income Tax (Investigation), Mumbai to detect the bank accounts to which the refunds had been credited and the beneficiaries," the finance ministry said.

All high value refunds issued during the current financial year will be checked again. "The system of handling high value refunds will be replaced with a more robust and foolproof system," the finance ministry said.

Income tax refunds could get delayed, said an official. Refunds in 2009-10 have doubled from the last year at Rs 12,421 crore as many refunds were deferred. It was Rs 6,899 crore the previous fiscal.

The investigators have identified the bank accounts, beneficiaries and some of those involved in the scam, the finance ministry claimed.

Central Bureau of Investigation and the Mumbai police are looking for the beneficiaries.

SOURCE: Indiatimes

This is a myth - cookies are a friendly internet tool primarily used by the advertising and e-commerce industry to make surfing easier and quicker. They have several roles, none of which can compromise your privacy:

1. Protection - to ensure you are a genuine visitor and not someone else using your password.
2. Authenticate and speed up your identification and e-commerce transactions.
3. Recognise preferences e.g. remember user names and passwords for websites.
4. Cap the frequency of ad serving and to make sure that advertisements are rotated and not duplicated during any one visit to a site

Many websites use the services of other companies to provide the content and services on their website. These third parties may provide content or services to more than one website. If they are using cookies, in theory, they can understand what that cookie does on a number of different sites.

Web beacons, also called web bugs and clear GIFs are used in combination with cookies to help people running websites to understand the behaviour of their customers. A web beacon is typically a transparent graphic image (usually 1 pixel x 1 pixel) that is placed on a site or in an email.

The use of a web beacon allows the site to record the simple actions of the user opening the page that contains the beacon. The beacon is one of the ingredients of the page, just like other images and text except it is so small and clear that it is effectively invisible. Web pages and graphical emails use presentation code that tells your computer what to do when a page is opened. While they may contain some of the text that you see on the screen at the time they typically contains a number of instructions, or tags' that then ask the website's server to send you further content (such as an image or a block of text that changes frequently). Web beacons are retrieved in the same way and the action of calling the material from another server allows the event to be counted.

When a user's browser requests information from a website in this way certain simple information can also be gathered, such as: the IP address of your computer; time the material was viewed; the type of browser that retrieved the image; and the existence of cookies previously set by that server. This is information that is available to any web server you visit. Web beacons do not give any "extra" information away. They are simply a convenient way of gathering the simplest of statistics and managing cookies.

Web beacons are typically used by a third-party to monitor the activity of a site. Turning off the browser's cookies will prevent web beacons from tracking your specific activity. The web beacon may still record an anonymous visit from your IP address, but unique information will not be recorded.

For example a company owning a network of sites may use web beacons in order to count and recognise users travelling around its network. Rather than gathering statistics and managing cookies on all their servers separately, they can use web beacons to keep them all together. Being able to recognise you enables the site owner to personalise your visit and make it more user friendly.

Why do websites use Web Beacons?

CookieDigger helps identify weak cookie generation and insecure implementations of session management by web applications. The tool works by collecting and analyzing cookies issued by a web application for multiple users. The tool reports on the predictability and entropy of the cookie and whether critical information, such as user name and password, are included in the cookie values.

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SOURCE: http://www.foundstone.com

Many important files within Microsoft Windows have structures that are undocumented. One of the principals of computer forensics is that all analysis methodologies must be well documented and repeatable, and they must have an acceptable margin of error. Currently, there are a lack of open source methods and tools that forensic analysts can rely upon to examine the data found in proprietary Microsoft files.

Many computer crime investigations require the reconstruction of a subject's Recycle Bin. Since this analysis technique is executed regularly, we researched the structure of the data found in the Recycle Bin repository files (INFO2 files). Rifiuti, the Italian word meaning "trash", was developed to examine the contents of the INFO2 file in the Recycle Bin. The foundation of Rifiuti's examination methodology is presented in the white paper located here. Rifiuti will parse the information in an INFO2 file and output the results in a field delimited manner so that it may be imported into your favorite spreadsheet program. Rifiuti is built to work on multiple platforms and will execute on Windows (through Cygwin), Mac OS X, Linux, and *BSD platforms.

Usage: rifiuti [options]

-t Field Delimiter (TAB by default)

Example Usage:

[kjones:rifiuti/rifiuti_20030410_1/bin] kjones% ./rifiuti INFO2 > INFO2.txt

Open INFO2.txt as a TAB delimited file in MS Excel to further sort and filter your results

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SOURCE: http://www.foundstone.com

ShoWin displays useful information about windows by dragging a cursor over them.

Perhaps one of the most popular uses of this program is to display hidden password editbox fields (text behind the asterisks *****). This will work in many programs although Microsoft have changed the way things work in some of their applications, most notably MS Office products and Windows 2000. ShoWin will not work in these cases. Neither will it work for password entry boxes on web pages, at least with most web browsers.

Additional features include the ability to enable windows that have been disabled, unhide hidden windows (try the program with the include invisibles option set and see how many windows you have on your desktop that you didn't know about!) and force windows to stay on top or be placed below others.

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SOURCE: http://www.foundstone.com

Shot of the last ten logon failures by username in condensed mode - SOMEONE GUESSING A PASSWORD

Shot of IIS Activity