Is digitale terrorisme bestrijding zinloos ?

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Een World Wide Web van aaneen gesloten computers die met elkaar kunnen communicaren door middel van een protocol.

En was ooit mede gefinancieerd door de defensie industrie "ARPANET" ontwikkeld als een militair systeem , er moest altijd verbinding gelegd kunnen worden tussen 2 computers ook als het netwerk systeem imperfecties bevat.

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Op maandag 18 juli 2005 09:46 schreef Keromane het volgende:
De omstreden bewaarplicht voor telecomaanbieders wordt ingevoerd. Dat heeft de Europese Commissie besloten. Het hoort tot een pakket anti-terreurmaatregelen. Aanleiding zijn de aanslagen in Londen.

Van iedere Nederlander zal worden vastgelegd onder welke nicknames hij zich op internet begeeft, naar welke websites ie gaat, op welke forums hij dingen plaatst, met wie ie e-mailt, welke zoekopdrachten worden ingegeven. Kortom alle verkeersgegevens. Data zelf zoals e-mailinhoud wordt niet bewaard.

http://www.elsevier.nl/ni(...)/versie/1/index.html

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Op donderdag 21 juli 2005 00:28 schreef Keromane het volgende:
Nee. De 1e Kamer was al tegen. Dit is iets wat Europa beslist.

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-- SPAM BERICHT --
Bron : http://www.invisiblesecrets.com/




What is Invisible Secrets 4 ?

We are living in the information age.
Data transmissions are vital and became a necessity nowadays. Whether you exchange private messages, or business / commercial secrets, you must protect your confidential information from hackers, your boss, or secret services. But we live in an insecure world where unwanted persons can access your personal information ( like e-mails or personal desktop documents ) and often use it against you.

You can encrypt your information, but when you realize that common encryption key lengths of 40 and 56 bits are routinely cracked with a minimum amount of effort, you can see why this might be a problem. But what if you can hide the encrypted message, and make it invisible to others?

This is how Invisible Secrets 4 works: it encrypts the message (or any information you want) and then it hides the encrypted message into an "innocent" file called carrier file.

Browsing the Net is fun and useful but it leaves traces on your computer and others can see what you used the Internet for.

Invisible Secrets 4 is now a powerful security suite that helps you solve these problems. With Invisible Secrets 4 you can hide files, encrypt files, destroy your Internet traces, shred files, make secure IP to IP password transfer and even lock any application on your computer.

Main Features

Steganography

Steganography is the art and science of hiding information by embedding messages within other, seemingly harmless messages. When a message is encrypted, it has no meaning, and it’s easy to understand that it contains sensitive information, a secret – and someone might try to break it. Steganography solves this problem by hiding the sensitive information in a harmless file called carrier file. While normal file encryption software allows you only to scramble information, Invisible Secrets 4 also allows you to hide information in five innocent looking files types: JPEG, PNG, BMP, HTML and WAV.

This method of disguising data (steganography) is not infallible. But it considerably increases the work of any experienced code-breaker, who must identify first the right carrier, extract the sensitive data from it, and only after that (if he gets this far) – the hard work of breaking the code.

Steganography is the perfect supplement for file encryption.
Invisible Secrets 4 provides both cryptographic and stenographic features, and much more...

Invisible Secrets 4 offers several methods of diversions to increase the stealth and security of your secret message and also increase the work your opponent.

New! Library of favorite carriers locations

When you want to hide any information using Steganography you will be able to access a library of favorite carrier locations. Within this library you can organize all the folders that contain your favorite carriers. It will be easier to manage files, plus you will enjoy improved performance, all while having fun hiding files.

Cryptography

Encryption is the translation of data into a secret code. To read an encrypted file, you must know the correct password (also called key) that allows you to decrypt it. File encryption is based on encryption algorithms - a process capable of translating data into a secret code.

Invisible Secrets 4 uses strong cryptography: AES-Rijndael, Blowfish, Twofish, RC4 (RC4 is a registered trademark of RSA Data Securities Inc.), Cast128, GOST, Diamond 2, Sapphire 2.

Invisible Secrets 4 is shell integrated (available from Windows Explorer), so the file encryption operations are easier than ever.

Password Manager

With Invisible Secrets 4 you can store passwords in encrypted password lists. The password lists are useful because you don’t have to remember all the passwords you are using, only one access key to open the password list. For each password you provide a description and some additional information (like username and URL related to the password, priority and more). When you select a description from the list, the edit boxes from the main window which require the input of a password will be automatically filled with the selected password.

With Invisible Secrets 4 you can also generate real-random passwords.

New! Passwords accessible from tray menu

You will have faster access to your passwords by accessing the password manager directly from the tray menu.

New! Virtual Keyboard

The virtual keyboard was created in order to prevent any key logger software from stealing your passwords. Whether you want to hide a file using Steganography, or you want to encrypt a file or want to access any password protected information, you will be able to enter your password safely using the Virtual Keyboard. The virtual keyboard is easily maneuvered using the mouse.

Destroy Files

Deleting files and folders from Windows Explorer is not secure. This will delete only the file's name so that you will no longer see it in Windows Explorer. To destroy files and folder beyond recovery you must overwrite the file/folder before erase. Invisible Secrets 4 provides an integrated Shredder (DoD 5220.22-M compliant) for this operation.

Internet Trace Destructor

Internet Traces are information left behind on your computer while you browse the Internet: internet cache, cookies, recently typed URLs, Internet Explorer History and Most Recently Used Documents / Applications.
With Invisible Secrets 4 you can destroy all these traces so that nobody would ever know what did you use the Internet for, and what websites you visited.

Cryptboard

The Cryptboard is a new concept in Invisible Secrets 4. While working in Window Explorer (or other shell programs) you can add files to the Cryptboard - which is similar to a basket that contains files. The files are remembered in a list (called Cryptboard), and you can perform various security operations on them in a single step, anytime you want. The Cryptboard is accessible through the context menu, the tray icon, or from the main program.

Email Encryption

Invisible Secrets 4 offers a new function: creation of Self Decrypting Packages. Using this function you can create an executable package with encrypted content. Before encryption the files are compressed. After the package is created you can send it by email. All the receiver needs to decrypt the package at destination is the correct password (no need of special programs), since the package is a program itself.

New! Self-decrypting packages can be zipped now before mailing them

Until now the self-decrypting packages were sent as "*.exe" attachments, but some servers could reject email messages with this type of attachment. With Invisible Secrets 4.3 you will be able to safely send the self-decrypting packages as zip files.

IP-to-IP Password Transfer

In security everything is related to passwords and keys. Once two parties agree on a password they can initiate a secure communication and send encrypted emails or documents. The only problem is to communicate to the recipient the correct key,
without the danger that a hacker might intercept the password during the transfer. This feature allows you to exchange a password between two computers using an encrypted internet line.

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Op donderdag 21 juli 2005 13:28 schreef zoalshetis het volgende:
tuurlijk heeft dat zin. net als de aivd heel wat aanslagen heeft verijdeld.

daarnaast is het als terrorist altijd heel makkelijk om een 'aanslag' te plegen. en terroristen zullen dat ook altijd blijven doen. maar elke aanslag die niet doorgaat is er een. lijkt mij.

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Op donderdag 21 juli 2005 13:31 schreef Tijger_m het volgende:
In de huidige vorm? Ja, redelijk zinloos indien de terrorist over gemiddelde computer kennis beschikt.

Is het mogelijk om het zinvol te maken? Ook ja maar dan komt de overheid voor grote problemen te staan, encryptie zou dan verboden moeten worden of eenvoudig kraakbaar voor de overheid (denk aan een veplichte verstrekking van PGP keys aan de overheid bv) en al het internet verkeer moet gefilterd worden a la China.

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Non Obvious Relationship Awareness Permalink
Bron : O reilly
By tim on April 14, 2005

The most interesting person I met this year at PC Forum was Jeff Jonas, founder of System Research and Development (SRD), the data mining company that made its name in Las Vegas with a technology called NORA (Non-Obvious Relationship Awareness) -- software that would alert casino security, for instance, that the dealer at table 11 once shared a phone number with the guy who is winning big at that same table.

As you can imagine, the government came knocking after 9/11. SRD got funding from In-Q-Tel, the CIA's venture fund, and was acquired by IBM earlier this year. Jeff is now an IBM distinguished engineer and chief scientist of IBM's Entity Analytics division.

His current focus is "anonymous entity resolution" -- the ability to share sensitive data without actually revealing it. That is, by using one-way hashes, you can look across various databases for a match without actually pooling all the data and making it available to all. As you can imagine, solving this problem is fairly critical to the government if they want "total information awareness" while maintaining citizen privacy and some semblance of civil liberties.

I also find this idea fascinating with regard to social networking. As I've noted in my talks for the past couple of years, social networking as currently practiced by services like Friendster, Orkut, and LinkedIn is really a "hack." (This is a good thing.) Much as screen scraping was a hack that showed the way to web services, current social networking apps point us towards a future in which we've truly reinvented the address book for the age of the internet. Why should we have to ask people if they will be our friends, and refer dates or jobs to us? Our true social networking applications -- our email, our IM, and our phones -- already know who our friends are. Microsoft Research's Wallop project is a step in the right direction -- a tool that lets us visualize and manage our communications web -- but it only extends to first degree connections. What anonymous entity resolution would allow is an application that extends the Wallop idea to a full six degrees by comparing data across address books without actually sharing the addresses themselves unless the owner was willing.

Of course, this could be bad for highly connected people. I already know that Linda Stone is my shortest path to almost anybody, but once all my contacts know that as well, Linda might just have to go hide under a rock. Still, just as Napster unleashed a music revolution by choosing an unorthodox default (if you download, you make your computer available as a server as well), I believe that "opt out" rather than "opt in" is the trigger that will allow social networking to achieve its full potential as one of the core "Web 2.0" applications.

But back to NORA. A lot of what we do at O'Reilly is driven by pattern recognition, watching emerging trends, and deciding on the right point where adding a strong dose of information to the mix (books, conferences, advocacy) will help some important new idea reach a wider audience and hopefully reach its full potential. Mostly we do this pattern recognition by talking to cool people ("alpha geeks") but we also do some data mining ourselves. But as Jeff points out, most current data mining efforts are rather like a game of Go Fish. (For example, in the intelligence context, "Do you have an Osama? No. Well, then, do you have a Saddam?") Instead, he says, we need "fire and forget" queries, that return whenever they have data. (I also believe strongly in visualization tools like the ones we're building in our own research group, tools that let you see aggregate patterns and trends.)

At any rate, Jeff's definitely one of the movers and shakers of one of the areas that I believe is going to have a huge impact going forward. He's also an O'Reilly kind of guy -- a high school dropout, a self-taught hacker who developed software that a lot of PhDs told him couldn't be done.

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Terrorism and the 'Net

US cybersecurity chief's sudden resignation comes as terrorists increasingly use the Internet as a tool.
by Tom Regan | csmonitor.com

While Al Qaeda and its affiliates have always used e-mail and the Internet, these electronic tools have become "even more important in recent years," the BBC reported Wednesday. As the US and its allies have stepped up pressure on the Al Qaeda leadership, the terrorist organization has been forced to evolve into a more decentalized institution. With this less formal structure in place, the Internet has become a key tool for such an organization to use.

'They lost their base in Afghanistan, they lost their training camps, they lost a government that allowed them do what they want within a country. Now they're surviving on Internet to a large degree. It is really their new base,' says terrorism expert Peter Bergen.

For instance, The Taipei Times reports that Al Qaeda has a "virtual university" that teaches "electronic jihad."

This increasing dependence on the Internet by terrorists was one reason that many lawmakers and security experts were alarmed by the sudden resignation last week of Amit Yoran, director of the Department of Homeland Security's National Cyber Security Division. Computer Weekly reports that Mr. Yoran had become so upset with the lack of attention the Bush administration was paying to cybersecurity, that he reportedly only gave one day's notice - in fact, the day before his resignation Yoran had appeared at a function in Washington promoting cybersecurity.

While Yoran said he left for "family reasons," and the DHS said he left for "professional" reasons, the computer news website, The Register, reported last Friday that Yoran had become "increasingly frustrated" with his job's "lack of political clout," even though it is the top computer security job in the US.

'The department has had an identity crisis on cybersecurity for some time now,' said Roger Cressey, a security consultant who worked in the Clinton and Bush administrations. 'They have not figured out how to approach this issue in a systematic way.'

The computer blog Ars Technica reports Yoran was the fourth computer security czar in a little more than a year to quit over the issue of how much attention the Bush administration was paying to cybersecurity. The turnover started in January 2003, when White House "cybersecurity czar" Richard Clarke left the job for the same reaons that Yoran did.

The Bush administration has acted quickly to replace Yoran. The Washington Post reports Thursday that Andy Purdy, who served as deputy cyber-security director under Yoran, will act as interim director. But security experts in Washington said that it doesn't matter who gets the job if the conditions don't change.

Paul Kurtz, executive director of the Cyber Security Industry Alliance and a former White House computer-security official, said, "It's hard to find somebody in this town who doesn't get along with Andy,' but "it's the position, not the person, that counts. Andy is a terribly nice guy and will obviously try to do the best thing, but without authority and without the ability to reach up into [the department] and to reach out among other federal agencies as a more senior person, it's going to be difficult for him to do the job,' Kurtz said.

The National Journal's Technology Daily reports that Yoran's resignation, which it says caused "quite a stir" at senior levels of the Bush administration, has "breathed new life" into congressional efforts to elevate the position within the DHS.

A new, trimmed provision to raise cybersecurity's status in Homeland Security appeared in Monday's Rules Committee version of an intelligence reform bill, H.R. 10. The new provision would elevate cyber security two levels, from director to assistant secretary, and give the new assistant secretary primary authority over the National Communications System.

Meanwhile, the Straits Times of Singapore looks at how a person called Abu Maysara Al-Iraqi is using the Internet to become one of the key information points for the insurgents in Iraq. He is a spokesman for Islamist militant Abu Musab Al-Zarqawi, who is reportedly building his own global terrorist network primarily through the Internet. The Oakland Tribune reports on how Mr. Al-Iraqi is using a legitimate technology developed in the San Francisco Bay area to get the insurents' often violent messages out to the world.

But last month, Abu Maysara [Al-Iraqi] found a silver bullet – a technology called YouSendIt. Developed by three Canadian programmers in Silicon Valley, it allows senders to create multiple links to a large file so it can be viewed by an unlimited number of people. Users type in their e-mail addresses, upload the file and YouSendIt creates a free, anonymous Web page for them. To distribute videos of the contractors who were kidnapped last month, Abu Maysara created dozens of links using YouSendIt and sent them to chat rooms all over the Internet. He compressed the files, or made them as small as possible, investigators said, so that they could be copied more quickly. By the time US officials got word of the videos, they had been anonymously copied from computer to computer.

In an opinion piece in the Straits Times, Carl Skadian cites US Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz as saying recently that the Internet has become one of the prime tools of the terrorists. Mr. Skadian writes that it "gives a whole new awful meaning to the words 'online community.'

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Op zaterdag 23 juli 2005 01:51 schreef Yildiz het volgende:
Hopelijk ziet een goede redacteur dit bericht en gaat er serieus wat mee doen. Ik hoop het echt.
Vandaag had ik het er nog over met een collega, hij zou er voor de straat op gaan, om te demonstreren.

Dus het leeft echt wel.

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Bron : Tweakers.Net
P2p-netwerken voor ondergrondse propaganda

Door Bart Veldstra - dinsdag 2 augustus 2005 - 00:52 - Bron: New York Times - Views: 11.056
Ian Clarke vertelde in zijn toespraak op een security conference in Las Vegas dat de volgende versie van het p2p-programma Freenet het knap lastig maakt voor overheidsinstellingen om de identiteiten van de leden te achterhalen. Dit soort netwerken, getypeerd als darknets, kunnen pas bereikt worden als een reeds bestaand lid de nieuwe gebruiker erin laat. Daarbij is Freenet zo opgezet dat het praktisch onmogelijk is om gebruikers te traceren of de informatie die gedeeld wordt te controleren. Dit maakt het bijzonder geschikt om illegale informatie te verspreiden, zoals verboden boeken of kinderpornografie. Het doel waarvoor Clarke Freenet heeft geschreven, is echter politiek van aard; hij wil gebruikers in staat stellen onder de censuur uit te komen die in landen als China door de overheid wordt toegepast. De ontwikkelaar vindt dat de nadelen van een darknet, zoals het mogelijk maken van softwarepiraterij, niet opwegen tegen de voordelen van een ongecensureerd en anoniem netwerk.

Ian Clarke - Bedenker van het Freenet-netwerkConventionele p2p-netwerken als Gnutella en eDonkey kunnen eenvoudig bereikt worden door het downloaden van een client die via een server contact krijgt met andere leden en nodes van het betreffende netwerk. In het verleden hebben netwerken, die door middel van een hoofdserver verbinding maken, onder vuur gelegen van antipiraterijorganisaties en muziek- en filmmaatschappijen vanwege de mogelijkheid om illegale bestanden te verspreiden. Dit heeft als resultaat gehad dat er nieuwe netwerken als Kademlia werden ontwikkeld. In dit soort netwerken fungeert iedere computer met een client als een server die zoekopdrachten kan uitvoeren. Experts denken dat de juridische stappen die organisaties als Brein en BSA ondernemen tegen de ontwikkelaars en gebruikers van p2p-clients tot gevolg heeft dat de netwerken steeds meer op darknets gaan lijken en de programma's vergelijkbare functionaliteit zullen gaan bevatten.

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Op zaterdag 6 augustus 2005 06:43 schreef Krush het volgende:
Maar in het kader van de Grote Strijd is alles geoorloofd

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bron : Tweakers
VS investeert in traceren internettelefoontjes

Door René Wichers - donderdag 11 augustus 2005 - 12:37 - Bron: News.com - Views: 2.788
Onderzoekers van de George Mason University hebben een manier gevonden om VoIP-gesprekken te watermerken en zo gesprekspartners te kunnen traceren. De Amerikaanse National Science Foundation heeft daarop een beurs van ruim driehonderdduizend dollar toegekend voor de ontwikkeling van software die van de techniek gebruik maakt, omdat dat als 'essentieel voor de jacht op terroristen en misdadigers' wordt gezien. Gesprekken die via VoIP-provider Skype worden gevoerd zouden al succesvol met de gebruikte techniek gevolgd kunnen worden. Gecodeerde gesprekken kunnen dan wel niet daadwerkelijk met de techniek worden afgeluisterd, maar zelfs als er anonieme proxy's worden gebruikt kan worden aangetoond dat twee partijen contact met elkaar hebben gehad.

SSH-affiche 'Door de timing van de data iets aan te passen kunnen we een markering toevoegen zonder dat dat extra overhead oplevert. Het is een heel subtiel signaal, dat wegvalt tegen de achtergrondruis', aldus onderzoeker Xinyuan Wang. Als een gesprek minimaal negentig seconden duurt, zou er niet meer dan drie milliseconden afwijking in het signaal hoeven te worden aangebracht om het gesprek te kunnen volgen. 'Vanuit het oogpunt van privacy is dit niet goed', aldus Wang, 'maar de politie kan hier wel opsporingswerk mee doen.'

Ook de FBI zou geïnteresseerd zijn om de software in een opvolger van het beruchte Carnivore-systeem te gebruiken; volgens de dienst bieden de nieuwe telefonievarianten terroristen momenteel nog alle vrijheid. Afgelopen vrijdag keurde de FCC nog een aantal verplichtingen voor VoIP-providers goed, die het afluisteren van gesprekken mogelijk moeten maken. Peter Wayner, een auteur die in cryptografie gespecialiseerd is, voorspelt een wapenwedloop tussen VoIP-programmeurs en afluisteraars. Het onderzoek van Wang en zijn collega's zal volgens hem 'waarschijnlijk net zoveel nieuwe anonimiseer-software opleveren, als dat het manieren om mensen van hun privacy te beroven oplevert.' Bovendien zou de techniek nog dermate onvolwassen zijn dat toepassing alleen in extreme gevallen lonend is.