monday sept 30

NSA Corporate Spying Ira Winkler

Spies Among Us AMAZON link here

CSPAN BOOK TV link here
Ira Winkler, former security analyst at the National Security Agency, discloses how companies and individuals can protect themselves from hacking and identity theft. In "Spies Among Us" the author shares his security secrets as well as what he describes as cost-effective countermeasures for all types of attacks.

SPIES AMONG US CSPAN VIDEO HERE

Corporate Espionage AMAZON link here


DefCon 2012   General Alexander wore a T-Shirt-----most news stories just said ""The NSA boss, dressed down in jeans and a t-shirt for the occasion"" link here and every other news story

RACHEL MADDOW EXPLAINS THE T-SHIRT link here
June 10, 2013  We begin tonight with this very cool kid. Her name is CyFi. C-Y-F-I.  CyFi article

CyFi is obviously cooler than I am and probably significantly cooler
than you are as well. No offense. CyFi is the founder of something called
DefCon Kids.

DefCon is an annual convention of sorts for computer hackers, for
people who see themselves as white hat computer hackers. See themselves as
the good guys in the hacking world.

The kids part of DefCon is called DefCon kids. And CyFi is one of the
founding kid hackers of that convention.

In 2011, CyFi figured out a vulnerability in mobile phone apps. She
found a bug called Time Traveler that exists in games that you play on your
cell phone. She says she found the bug when she started to get bored with
the games.

And in figuring out how to change the time configurator in the games,
she found some glaring weak spots in games that supposedly had been tested
for security by all sorts of official corporate types. She found the Time
Traveler bug in a game called "Smurfs Village". She found it in "Pocket
Frogs". She found it in "Zombie Farm". She found it and she fixed it in
"Farm Story".

And she did all of this when she was 10 years old.

When I was 10 years old, I was fighting a daily losing battle with
cursive. But CyFi was debugging cell phone apps.

And at DefCon kids in 2011, they held a contest for other young
hackers to try to do the same kind of work. It was a bug chasing contest
for computer code, essentially. Find it and fix it.

And they named the contest after her. AT&T, the big corporation, gave
the prizes for winning that contest at DefCon kids that year, because AT&T
is apparently one of those companies that`s smart enough to know it`s good
to have hackers try to help you if you have the choice.

You can see here in small letters on this logo there, see it`s CyFi C-
Y-F-I, CyFi zero day contest. That`s her contest.

Last year, her contest logo ended up on this shirt on this guy. This
guy is one of the most powerful people in the country. His name is Keith
B. Alexander.

He`s generally called "General Alexander" because he is a general in
the U.S. Army. People who wear the uniform for a living sometimes don`t
exactly pull it off when all of a sudden they have to appear in public not
in a uniform, so forgive him the tucked in t-shirt. But there he is.

General Alexander is the commander of the U.S. Cyber Command. He is
the director of the National Security Agency which we sometimes forget is a
part of the military.

And last year, as part of his job, running cyber command and running
the NSA, he took off the uniform, put on the jeans and the t-shirt, and
spoke to CyFi`s DefCon kids.

He also talked to the grown-ups, to the white hat, good guy grown-up
hackers of DefCon. That was him in the hacker contest logo t-shirt tucked
into the jeans. Got up on stage at the hacker convention and he talked to
that room full of hackers because he, as head of the NSA, wants to hire
them.