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WikiLeaks’ chief claims his organization doesn’t know who sent it some 91,000 secret U.S. military documents, telling journalists that the website is set up to hide the source of its data from those who receive it.

Editor-in-chief Julian Assange says the added layer of secrecy helps protect the site’s sources from spy agencies and hostile corporations. He acknowledged that the site’s anonymous submissions raised concerns about the authenticity of the material, but said the site has not yet been fooled by a bogus document.

Assange made the claim in a lengthy hour talk before London’s Frontline Club late Tuesday, in which he outlined the workings of WikiLeaks and defended its mission.

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Visa Inc., the world’s biggest payments network, fell as much as 5 percent after saying the U.S. Department of Justice may sue the company over a policy that bars merchants from charging extra to customers who pay with credit cards.

“The department has indicated that it is considering filing a civil lawsuit,” Chief Executive Officer Joseph W. Saunders said yesterday in a conference call with analysts after San Francisco-based Visa reported fiscal third-quarter results. “We are currently engaged in constructive negotiations with the department to resolve its concerns as it relates to Visa without litigation or payment of monetary damages.”

Visa, American Express Co. and Purchase, New York-based MasterCard Inc. disclosed in 2008 that the Justice Department was investigating the companies over so-called anti-surcharging policies and rules prohibiting merchants from “steering” customers to other forms of payment.

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In response to a report in the Wall Street Journal, the National Security Agency revealed some information about its plans for “Perfect Citizen,” which it described as a research and engineering effort around vulnerability assessment and capabilities development. The National Security Agency revealed some information about the nature of its “Perfect Citizen” cyber-security program after a report about the agency’s plans surfaced in the media. While the agency is unwilling to confirm or deny some details of the Wall Street Journal article, the agency described Perfect Citizen as a “vulnerabilities-assessment and capabilities-development” effort, and stressed that there is no monitoring activity involved. “Specifically, it does not involve the monitoring of communications or the placement of sensors on utility company systems,” NSA spokesperson Judith Emmel said in a statement. “This contract provides a set of technical solutions that help the National Security Agency better understand the threats to national security networks, which is a critical part of NSA’s mission of defending the nation.” Defense contractor Raytheon was reported by the Journal to have received the contract for the project. According to the Journal, Perfect Citizen would involve placing sensors across a variety of computer networks belonging to government agencies and private sector companies involved in critical infrastructure in order to protect against cyber-attacks. The focus would be large, typically older systems designed without Internet connectivity or security in mind, the Journal reported.

See www.eweek.com/c/a/Security/NSA-Cyber-Security-Program-Details-Revealed-275248

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Thieves are stealing credit-card numbers through skimmers they secretly installed inside pumps at gas stations throughout the Southeast, using Bluetooth wireless to transmit stolen card numbers, according to law enforcement officials. “We’ve sent detectives out to every gas station within a mile of Interstate 75,” says Lt. Steve Maynard, spokesman for the Alachua County Sheriff’s Office, which last Thursday was first notified about a suspicious skimming device discovered by a maintenance worker at a Shell Station located in the vicinity of Gainesville, Fla. So far, three card-skimming devices hidden in gas pumps at three stations have been discovered by investigators, and the U.S. Secret Service has been notified. The Sheriff’s Office, along with other local police departments, are trying to inspect as many gas stations in the area as possible, especially focusing on those along I-75. But law enforcement is encouraging gas station operators to look for signs of the skimmers at their pumps and contact them if they think they’ve found something. The Secret Service has indicated there’s a crime wave throughout the Southeast involving the gas-station pump card skimmers, and it may be traced back to a single gang that may be working out of Miami, Maynard says. Nearby St. Johns County in Florida has also been hit by the gas-pump card skimmers. Maynard says criminals wanting to hide the credit-card skimmers in gas pumps must have a key to the pump, but in some cases, a single key will serve to get into many gas pumps. It’s not known whether the gas-pump skimming operation involves insiders. Law enforcement is encouraging gas-station operators to train video surveillance they may use on the pumps.

For more information go to: http://www.knowconnect.com/mirln/current AND/OR http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9179136/Bluetooth_at_heart_of_gas_station_credit_card_scam_in_Southeast_?taxonomyId=85

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Many Companies Continue to Ignore the Issue (Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, 22 June 2010) – After a year of high-tech breaches at some of the nation’s biggest companies, a provision in a Senate bill calls on the White House to encourage a market for cybersecurity insurance to protect businesses from debilitating costs brought on by hacking and compromised information. The bill, introduced by Sens. Jay Rockefeller, D-W.V., and Olympia Snowe, R-Maine, says the president or his appointee must report to Congress on “the feasibility of creating a market for cybersecurity risk management” one year after the bill’s passing. But a crashed server policy is not as easy to write as a crashed car policy. Many businesses are deterred by an application process described as appropriately exhaustive but forever imprecise. The process is complicated by the tricky nature of monetizing data. Web experts always have held that “information wants to be free.” But how much is it worth when it’s stolen? Companies lost an average of $234,000 per breach in 2009, a recent report by the Computer Security Institute in New York found. But a report released last Tuesday by the Carnegie Mellon CyLab found that 65 percent of its Fortune 1,000 respondents were not reviewing their companies’ cybersecurity policies. Jody Westby, a researcher who worked on the CyLab report that indicated board negligence, said the insurance provision in the cybersecurity bill was a mandate by an ill-informed Congress. “This is interventionist, regulatory, heavy-handed action by Congress,” said Ms. Westby from an technology best practices conference in Burkina Faso, West Africa. “This isn’t anything that Congress is going to fix,” she said. “It’s something boards in America need to fix.”

For more information please visit: http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/10173/1067262-96.stm AND/OR http://www.knowconnect.com/mirln/current/

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NEW YORK (AP) – Apple Inc. will hold a press conference on Friday to discuss the latest iPhone model amid complaints about its antenna and Consumer Reports magazine’s refusal to endorse it until the problems get fixed.

Apple would not provide details on the nature of the event at the company’s headquarters in Cupertino, Calif., other than to say it will involve the iPhone 4.

On Monday, Consumer Reports said careful testing has confirmed user reports that holding the phone over a particular spot drastically reduces the signal strength it receives. Covering the spot with duct tape or a case alleviates the problem.

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Organizers claim more than 30,000 people deleted their accounts on the world’s most popular social network service (SNS), a drop in Facebook’s half-billion-person ocean, but an important symbol.

What did Facebook do wrong?

They’ve been playing fast and loose with privacy. Every time Facebook restructures its privacy controls—say whether your photos can be seen by only certain friends, all your friends, friends of friends, or the whole world—the new default settings always open up your private information to more viewers. Check this infographic.

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Critics of “three-strikes” laws think society risks disenfranchising large segments of the population, especially with outdated copyright laws more relevant to a world before digital distribution.

In an age of growing attempts by copyright holders to implement so-called “three-strikes” legislation to deal with online piracy, some think Internet disconnection for accused file-sharers could raise concerns over the “right to freedom of expression.”

“It’s a social inclusion question,” says Cyberspace Law and Policy Centre executive director David Vaile.

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AT&T Inc. acknowledged Wednesday that a security hole in its website had exposed iPad users’ email addresses, a breach that highlights how corporations still have problems protecting private information.

A small group of computer experts that calls itself Goatse Security claimed responsibility for the intrusion, saying the group had exploited an opening in AT&T’s website to find numbers that identify iPads connected to AT&T’s mobile network.

Those numbers allowed the group to uncover 114,000 email addresses of thousands of iPad customers, including prominent officials in companies, politics and the military, the group said. Gawker Media LLC reported the breach Wednesday. It doesn’t appear any financial or billing information was made public.

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