Frigital Records

The British House of Lords has decided to extradite Gary McKinnon, a British citizen who hacked his way into several U.S. military, defense and NASA computers, to the United States to stand trial. McKinnon has been fighting extradition since the discovery in 2002 that he was the one who broke into the U.S. government’s most sensitive networks — reportedly from a friend’s aunt’s house — between 2001 and 2002. He allegedly caused US$900,000 in damages to computers located in 14 states.

Terrorist Charges

The U.S. government does not place much weight on McKinnon’s odd motives. McKinnon reportedly left a note on an Army computer criticizing U.S. foreign policy as government-sponsored terrorism.

In the indictment against him, the U.S. government accuses McKinnon of handicapping it in the aftermath of September 11.

“The entire network of 300 computers at NWS Earle, located in Colts Neck, N.J., was effectively shut down for an entire week. … [F]or another three weeks afterward, military personnel and government civilian employees at NWSE were only able to send and receive internal e-mail . It was only approximately a month after McKinnon’s last intrusion into the network that NWS Earle was able to automatically route Naval message traffic and access the Internet,” according to the indictment.

In fighting extradition, McKinnon maintained that a trial in the U.S. could subject him to terrorist sentencing guidelines. With the House of Lords rejecting that argument, he has just one other option: appealing to the European Court of Human Rights.

Patchy Security

That McKinnon was able to access secure government information using basic hacking software is not all that remarkable, said Matt Shanahan, SVP of marketing and strategy for AdmitOne Security.

“In most cases, when people hack into a system — the vast majority of the time — they are able to get in because reasonable controls were not in place,” he told TechNewsWorld. “In the case of McKinnon, there were a number of devices the systems administrator had not set.”

A highly fragmented systems administration environment , together with the fact that a lot of controls are manual, usually results in some vulnerability, Shanahan said.

“People usually forget to set something, or they are using a virtual machine that might not have been set up correctly and then copies the same mistake 100 times,” he explained. “McKinnon was able to find, and then take advantage of, these vulnerabilities.”

The answer is reducing fragmentation as much as possible, Shanahan suggested, and automating the process instead of relying on individuals to make necessary adjustments.

No doubt, a red-faced U.S. administration has patched the vulnerabilities that McKinnon was able to exploit.

Still Vulnerable

What is worrisome is that high-level professional hackers still have ways to access these systems if they want to, said Bill Johnson, CEO of TDI.

“We have become a big proponent of securing the computer baseboard manager controller, or BMC,” he told TechNewsWorld.

The BMC is network-accessible once a hacker can get past the firewall, and it allows command and control of the main motherboard, he said.

“Even systems in NASA would be vulnerable to this method of attack,” noted Johnson.

Source:http://www.technewsworld.com

NASA’s planning to spend another month and $2 million on its Mars robotic lander mission to obtain more icy soil samples, study the weather, and size up the planet’s suitability for human life.

In a press conference Thursday, NASA scientists said that the Mars Phoenix Lander mission has been going so well that it plans to extend the vehicle’s stay through the end of September, instead of August. On May 25, the Phoenix landed more than 200 million miles away from Earth, on the edge of a volcano in the northern hemisphere of Mars, and has since confirmed the existence of frozen ice on the Red Planet.

Part of the goal of the extended mission is to continue studying icy soil samples in the area of the Lander. Just Wednesday, scientists said that the Phoenix’s robotic arm picked up a sample of Mars soil and put it into its onboard oven–an act that prompted celebration among the project leads. Early analysis of the sample proved the existence of a small amount of H20 because the ice melted, but the scientists ultimately want to collect a sample with a larger composition of permafrost, they said.

“We’re looking to understand the history of the ice, trying to figure out if it’s ever melted, see if its chemistry has changed. Getting back this analysis, we’ll hope to be able to answer questions like (whether this is) a habitable zone on Mars,” said Victoria Hipkin, mission scientist for Phoenix Meteorological Station at the Canadian Space Agency.

NASA is particularly looking for organic materials, but it has yet to find them. One hypothesis is that the soil might contain a strong oxidant, according to one of the NASA scientists. Instead, it has found potassium–among other minerals–a clay-like component, and properties it has yet to identify.

One goal of the extended mission will be to dig two more trenches around the site of the lander and study their soil. NASA plans to name the trenches with fantasy names like its other ditches–Snow White and Goldilocks. The new ones will be named Cupboard and Neverland.

“We have lots more to explore within reach of the robotic arm,” said Peter Smith, Phoenix’s principal investigator from the University of Arizona at Tucson.

Phoenix is also giving the scientists their first details about weather in the Mars arctic. The extended mission will help NASA better understand seasonal changes from springtime in Mars, when it landed, to high summer, to the end of the mission in its fall time frame. For example, the team is using sophisticated sensors to measure the atmosphere’s pressure, humidity, and winds. So far, the sensors have shown maximum wind speeds of 15 miles per hour on Mars.

One of the mission’s requirements was to capture a color panoramic view of the landing site with its on-board 1-megapixel digital camera. The Phoenix team completed that task stitching together more than 400 images taken from the lander over a month’s time. According to the team, it took about 15 relay passes to download the data–100 megabytes’ worth–from the craft. The image confirmed water ice underneath the site of the lander.

Through August and September, the team plans to get a “Happily Ever After” panoramic image, with more than 1,500 high-resolution pictures stitched together from the site. NASA expects that collection of images will be about two-thirds of a gigabyte and take 100 orbital passes to download. The panoramas help bring context to the terrain and mission, and help the scientists pick future spots for investigation.

The significance of all this? “We’ve gotten to the point where we’re pretty sure we found water, and determined it was H20. One of the things (with upcoming missions will be) moving away from finding water to a search for life,” said Michael Meyer, chief scientist of the Mars Exploration Program at NASA.

Source:http://news.cnet.com