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An eavesdropping tool allegedly used by the German government to intercept Skype calls is full of security problems and may violate a ruling by the country's constitutional court, according to a European hacker club. The information was released as part of a move towards financial transparency. The government released figures of expenses incurred by the Federal Ministry of the Interior following a parliamentary inquiry. This raises a whole lot of ethical and privacy questions. It has long been rumored that the German government was interested in developing an application to intercept Skype. Three years ago, documents released by WikiLeaks purported to show a proposal by a Bavarian company, DigiTask, offering to develop such a tool. The Chaos Computer Club obtained several versions of a program that has allegedly been used by German law enforcement in possibly hundreds of investigations to intercept Skype calls, said Frank Rieger, a member of the club. On page...

Drivers may have gotten a chuckle out of an electronic message board in Maine warning of zombies, but city officials were not amused. A Portland, Maine road sign is changed to a zombie warning on Wednesday, Oct. 10, 2012. It originally read " Night work 8 pm-6 am. Expect delays. " An electronic message board that typically warns motorists about impending roadwork instead read: " Warning Zombies Ahead! " as shown. City spokeswoman Nicole Clegg says the signs are a safety precaution and changing it could have led to driver distraction. She tells The Portland Press Herald tampering with a safety device is a misdemeanor punishable by up to a year in jail and a $1,000 fine. Subscribe  to our  Daily News-letter via email  - Be First to know about Security and Hackers.

Computer hackers broke into a Florida college's computer system and stole the confidential information of nearly 300,000 students statewide and the school's president. State and college officials said a breach that at first involved employees at Northwest Florida State College was much larger than suspected and now potentially involves student records from across the state. More than 3,000 employee records and 76,000 student records containing personal identification information were also stolen, including names, Social Security numbers, birthdates, ethnicity and gender for any student statewide who was eligible for Florida's popular Bright Futures scholarships for the 2005-06 and 2006-07 school years. The breach occurred sometime between late May and late September. The school notified the public on Monday. It was discovered during an internal review from Oct. 1 through Oct. 5. The school's president, Ty Handy, was among the employees victimized, the schoo...

The latest version of Mozilla's Firefox browser has been taken offline after a security vulnerability was discovered. Mozilla's Firefox 16 web browser got its regular six-weekly update yesterday but the organisation decided to pull the browser hours after the release. The outfit claimed it became aware of a security vulnerability in Firefox 16 and that updates are expected to ship at some point today. According to the Mozilla Security Blog , Firefox 16 features a security vulnerability that allows “ a malicious site to potentially determine which websites users have visited and have access to the URL or URL parameters. ” " As a precaution, users can downgrade to version 15.0.1 " - Firefox 16 offers several new features, most of which are aimed at developers. One such feature is the Developer Command Line, which provides keyboard control over the Developer Tools. Other features include CSS3 Animations, Image Values, IndexedDB, Transitions, and Transforms. ...

Anonymous Hackers  AnonSwedenOp  posted a video on YouTube on October 8 where it threatened the Estonian government with a possible cyber attack. " Estonian government had sacrificed its own people instead of helping its own people, Estonian government has channelled money to helping Greece that is much better off. " " Estonia says that it doesn’t have money but then they give 357 million to Greece ," the statement declares. Anonymous Group will most probably attack on Friday, October 12, according to video and this attack will go as Operation #OpEstonia. The the end of the Video, Hacker with the promise: " This must end. Estonian people, we haven't forgotten you ". Anonymous Hacker last week took down the website of Swedish central bank also and this attack can also be on high rate, if they get possible massive number of attacks. Subscribe  to our  Daily Newsletter via email  - Be First to know about Se...