news.buyenne.com

Enlarge (credit: CloudFlare)

In less than two months, online businesses have paid more than $100,000 to scammers who set up a fake distributed denial-of-service gang that has yet to launch a single attack.

The charlatans sent businesses around the globe extortion e-mails threatening debilitating DDoS attacks unless the recipients paid as much as $23,000 by Bitcoin in protection money, according to a blog post published Monday by CloudFlare, a service that helps protect businesses from such attacks. Stealing the name of an established gang that was well known for waging such extortion rackets, the scammers called themselves the Armada Collective.

"If you don't pay by [date], attack will start, yours service going down permanently price to stop will increase to increase to 20 BTC and will go up 10 BTC for every day of the attack," the typical demand stated. "This is not a joke."

Reps. Jim Sensenbrenner, R-Wisc. (left) and Jason Chaffetz, R-Utah (center) are both signatories to a letter demanding answers about how many Americans have had their information caught up by NSA "upstream" data collection. (credit: Getty Images)

On Friday, a group of members of Congress who are central to the surveillance debate demanded some kind of answer, even a vague one, about how many Americans are having their data harvested by surveillance programs.

In a sharply worded letter (PDF) to Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, 14 members of the House Judiciary Committee insisted he provide some type of "public estimate" of the number of US communications that are being caught up in surveillance programs authorized by Section 702 of the FISA Amendments Act. That's the law that spy agencies like the NSA use to justify "upstream collection" of bulk data from Internet infrastructure.

"We note that we are not the first to ask you for this basic information," states the group of representatives. They mentioned that Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) and former Sen. Mark Udall (D-N.M.) have asked for such information since 2011.

(credit: US DefenseImagery)

Opening a new front in its campaign to defeat Islamic State terrorists, the US military has, for the first time, directed its Cyber Command to mount hacking attacks against ISIS computers and networks, The New York Times reported Sunday.

While US National Security Agency hackers have targeted ISIS members for years, its military counterpart, the Cyber Command, virtually conducted no attacks against the terrorist organization. The new campaign reflects President Obama's desire to bring the types of clandestine military hacking operations that have targeted Iran and other nations to the battle against ISIS. According to the NYT:

The goal of the new campaign is to disrupt the ability of the Islamic State to spread its message, attract new adherents, circulate orders from commanders and carry out day-to-day functions, like paying its fighters. A benefit of the administration’s exceedingly rare public discussion of the campaign, officials said, is to rattle the Islamic State’s commanders, who have begun to realize that sophisticated hacking efforts are manipulating their data. Potential recruits may also be deterred if they come to worry about the security of their communications with the militant group.

Defense Secretary Ashton B. Carter is among those who have publicly discussed the new mission, but only in broad terms, and this month the deputy secretary of defense, Robert O. Work, was more colorful in describing the effort.

“We are dropping cyberbombs,” Mr. Work said. “We have never done that before.”

The campaign began by installing several implants in the militants’ networks to learn the online habits of commanders. Now, Cyber Command members plan to imitate the commanders or alter their messages. The goal is to redirect militants to areas more vulnerable to attack by American drones or local ground forces. In other cases, officials said, US military hackers may use attacks to interrupt electronic transfers and misdirect payments.

Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, seen here in 2013. (credit: Partnership for Public Service)

Director of National Intelligence James Clapper said Monday that the Snowden revelations have sped up the sophistication of encryption by "about seven years," according to the Christian Science Monitor.

"From our standpoint, it’s not a good thing," Clapper reportedly said at CSM's breakfast event. When asked how he came up with that figure, he cited the National Security Agency.

“The projected growth maturation and installation of commercially available encryption—what they had forecasted for seven years ahead, three years ago—was accelerated to now because of the revelation of the leaks," Clapper continued.

If you're hoping for a gameplay reveal from John Romero's newest game announcement, too bad. Instead, here's some concept art. Hey, look, a barrel. (credit: Night Work Games)

How deep—and selective—does your first-person-shooter nostalgia run? John Romero and Adrian Carmack, who cut their teeth on Doom and Quake before burning their reputations to the ground with Daikatana, are curious to find out. The ex-id Software staffers launched a Kickstarter campaign for a new video game on Monday with little more than fond memories and concept art as selling points.

Don't do anything illegal, and don't forget your physical hashtag-filled sign, kids!

In a four-minute video, Romero told fans that new game Blackroom "hearkens back to classic shooter gameplay," but the Kickstarter campaign doesn't currently back those promises up with hard details. Sci-fi concept art is shown as Romero describes a hologram-obsessed plot and tells us to expect "circle-strafing enemies and, of course, rocket jumping." But as of press time, the campaign isn't forthcoming with anything that looks like gameplay, let alone any enemy, level, or weapon descriptions. (The closest we really get is a recent Romero-built remake of a Doom level, and it's admittedly a damned good take on e1m8.)

We also have no idea who is going to build the game alongside Romero and Carmack—remember, that's Adrian Carmack, id's former art director, not John Carmack, id's original lead programmer. Romero is listed as the game's only programmer thus far. Instead, fans are assured that the project already has a "metal composer" in the form of George Lynch, who has played in bands such as Dokken. More staffers will presumably be hired to help build a "10-hour" single-player campaign and a multiplayer mode that consists of six Romero-made maps plus whatever the community creates, since the game will be "fully moddable" and support custom maps and dedicated servers.

Enlarge / Oh, Tyrion. I'm worried, too. (credit: HBO)

Spoiler alert: The below contains heavy spoilers for the Game of Thrones season six premiere and the entire series to date. If you haven’t watched and want to go in fresh, stop reading now.

Though Game of Thrones has earned a reputation for its top-billing-can’t-keep-you-safe unpredictability, the season six premiere last night did what every Game of Thrones premiere has done. It’s a sweeping check-in on the characters who are still standing and a chance to resolve most of the major cliffhangers from last year. Only once that's done do we begin the arduous table-setting process for what we hope are the more action-heavy episodes that typically hit around the middle and end of the season.

So let’s remember where everyone was at the end of last year: