The UK is to establish three regional policing e-crime hubs as part of efforts to boost the capability of British police to tackle the growing problem of cybercrime.

The new hubs, in Yorkshire and the Humber, the Northwest and in East Midlands, will each get their own three-officer team. Each will work alongside the Metropolitan Police Central e-crime Unit.

Members of Anonymous have released an intercept of a conference call between investigators at the FBI and Scotland Yard during which operations against hacktivist group were discussed.

During the 17-minute call – which was released as an MP3 file and distributed on YouTube and elsewhere – investigators can be heard discussing various Anonymous and LulzSec-related cases. Information discussed in the call reportedly included details of evidence against suspects (sometimes referred to by their hacker handles), plans for legal action and court dates. The hacktivist group also published what it said was an FBI email detailing the addresses of invited call participants: 40 law enforcement officials in the UK, US, France, Ireland, The Netherlands and Sweden.

Source: TheRegister

GCHQ is offering its expert tech employees bonuses to prevent more staff from leaving for high-tech companies such as Google and Microsoft.

The service said that it has a government approved system of offering both recruitment and/or retention payments to keep internet security specialists. GCHQ said that it seeks to make the overall package of pay, pension, leave and flexible working as competitive as possible, but added that it also needs to demonstrate value for money for the taxpayer.

A spokesman for GCHQ told GGC that it does not comment on individual amounts, but said that reports that the sums amounted to “tens of thousands of pounds” were inaccurate.

“We are never likely to be able to compete with high-tech companies on salary alone. We clearly value our staff and their contribution to our unique mission in support of the UK’s national security and economic wellbeing,” he said.

The activist hacker group Anonymous says it has stolen thousands of emails, passwords and credit card details from a US-based security think-tank. The hackers claim they were able to obtain the information because the company, Stratfor, did not encrypt it.

They say Stratfor’s clients include the US defence department, law enforcement agencies and media organisations. An alleged member of Anonymous posted an online message, claiming that the group had used Stratfor clients’ credit card details to make “over a million dollars” in donations to different charities.

Organised distributed denial of service attacks against the main players in anti-scam movement 419eater.com, scamwarners.com and aa419.org were attacked by a huge amount of junk traffic for several days. The administrators turned to blogs for alternative channels of communication to distribute news of the attacks.

Both 419eater.com and scamwarners.com were back operating normally by Monday morning while aa419.org remains sluggish the load.

The identities of the perpetrators behind the attacks remain unclear. Scammers angry at the activities of the sites in exposing their swindles are the obvious prime suspects behind the DDoS assaults. One reader suggested that recent publicity against a range of fake Amazon sites might have prompted the attacks, but this remains unconfirmed.

Source: TheRegister

Anonymous launched an attack against the banking sector today in light their apparent greed and large salaries.

OpRobinHood aims to defraud banks for the benefit of the majority and comes as a response by hacktivists to the crackdown on the Occupy movement. Anonymous has joined forces with TeaMp0isoN, another hactivist group, to run the campaign – which is an illegal and aggressive extension of an earlier push to persuade consumers to transfer their accounts from banks to credit unions

Charities are unlikely to benefit from an Anonymous-led operation attempting to use stolen credit card details to make donations to worthwhile causes.

UK cybercops have managed to dismantle more than 2,000 fraudulent shopping websites that have ripped off thousands.

The Met’s Police Central e-Crime Unit (PCeU) hopes smashing the online rogue traders will make online shopping in the run-up to Christmas much safer. The dodgy sites targeted by the action purported to sell a raft of designer goods, including brands such as Nike, GHD, Tiffany and Ugg at bargain prices. In reality many of the sites either took money without delivering the goods or supplied knock-offs.

Detective Inspector Paul Hoare of the PCeU commented: “The sites suspended are registered in bulk by crime groups with the sole intention of duping consumers into parting with their money for, at best, poor quality counterfeit goods, or, at worst, nothing at all. In the run up to Christmas the PCeU will continue to work with Nominet and others to disable as many such sites as possible, but I would urge customers to take all precautions to ensure they buy from legitimate sites only.”

Software developers have released a JavaScript version of OpenPGP the Open Source encryption software that acts as a plugin for Google Chrome.

GPG4Browsers is currently available only as an extension for the Google Chrome browser for integration with Gmail. It works with all asymmetric and symmetric ciphers and hash functions specified in the formal OpenPGP standard, with the exception of the IDEA algorithm. It is compatible with the GnuPG implementation of OpenPGP.

The prototype implementation can be used to encrypt and decrypt messages, digitally sign messages and verify the signatures of received messages, and import and export keys. It doesn’t support the generation or manipulation of keys or work with messages that are symmetric-only encrypted.

London banks are taking part in a simulated cyberattack exercise on Tuesday designed to test the resilience of the UK’s financial service industry to a collapse of telecoms systems and Olympics-related transport disruption.

The exercise is occurring against the real world backdrop of the Occupy the City protestors, camped outside the Square Mile. The joint Financial Services Authority, Bank of England and Treasury initiative involves staff from around 80 banks. An outline of the scenario to be played out on Tuesday by UK Financial Sector Continuity explains that the excise will look at responses to simulated cyber-attack and internet service disruption.

The Anonymous hacking group ‘AntiSec’ causes further problems for the US Government today by hacking Fred Baclagan, a retired special agent supervisor of the Californian Department of Justice.

The hack exposes over 30,000 emails detail cyber investigation techniques, forensic investigations and what looks to be rather simplistic questions about how to use an FTP client.

The group appeared to have hacked into Baclagan’s Gmail account and to have accessed his voicemails and SMS message logs using unspecified techniques as part of their ongoing campaign against law enforcement officials and their “allies” in the computer security industry.

The email dump, released as a torrent last Friday in part of what has become the group’s regular FuckFBIFriday release, is also said to contain personal information including Baclagan’s home address and phone number.

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