Monday, 16 May 2011

"Fox Broadcasting employees might want to change their passwords: A database of about 300 employees and associates' email addresses and passwords, apparently stolen from a Fox.com database, have been leaked by a hacking group that previously stole thousands of X Factor contestants' personal information.

The group Lulz Security has taken credit for the hack. Last night, Lulz Security took over and defaced the LinkedIn accounts of 16 Fox Broadcasting employees and the Twitter accounts of two Fox affiliates, apparently to prove the leak's validity.

"Fox News 15 has decided to rape its own face. A sad day for our 25 viewers,"

read one tweet. They then tweeted a list of Fox Broadcasting and local Fox affiliates' emails and passwords."

Source: Gawker: Database of Fox employees' passwords hacked via Digital Forensics Magazine.com, Latest news

Item One

What is the significance?

The significance is this: It means that @LulzSec or Lulz Security or lulzsec.com or lulzsecurity.com was in existence, and active prior to the Unveilance hack of 7 June 2011, about which I, for one, wasn't aware. In addition, I am puzzled about this mysterious URL that Keith Murphy the treacherous head of Unveilance used https://twitter.com/#!/_oday I assume this is supposed to be a representation of _0Day, but in lower case letters? Maybe someone already claimed _0Day, so Keith Murphy had to use lower-case _oday. Except that 0 and O and o are different. Or at least the first one, zero, is different than upper or lower case O. Twitter doesn't seem to be consistent about its treatment of upper and lower cases, I've noticed.

Next, there is the matter of Zero-Day's other mysterious Twitter URL: http://yangtwitter.appspot.com/

EDIT: Further details of the actual hack are available from http://lulzsecurity.com/releases/ No surprises there.

Final note

The Unveilance corporate website lists two charity organizations that it sponsors. Ironically, at least one of them (I didn't check both) is operated by.... Keith Murphy!

His Twitter account under that name (which I now no longer recall) had some very unsavory Tweets. He is Canadian (Ontario? Ottawa?), but can't seem to master American colloquial English usage. Much more troubling is his apparent fascination with topics such as vivisection and physical brutalities inflicted on women. Or so Twitter update links indicate.

Item Two

On 8 June 2010, I landed on the Stratfor Global Intelligence website for the first time. After wandering around in search of new widgets, I happened upon the exciting sounding Free non-subscriber Graphic of the Day archive. I selected the May 10, 2011 graphic, "Foreign Currencies versus the U.S. Dollar". However, when I clicked the link Stratfor Graphic of the Day: Forex v US dollar I was more than a little surprised to receive the following message in my browser, with the same URL still displayed (no redirect):

Sorry, 194.143.145.131 has been banned.

Needless to say, that is NOT my IP address! Why did this happen, I wonder?

Item 3

WHAT is going on in the State of Missouri with the Zygomycosis fungus horror?