Category: Uncategorised

Microsoft has rolled out a new version of the desktop Skype client that should make users of its service a little safer from denial-of-service attacks. The Skype client has long leaked IP address information, allowing other users on the network to determine which IP address is being used by an account. A number of online services of various degrees of shadiness offer instant IP address lookups, and historically at least, these have worked effectively.

This leakage has been particularly widely abused in gaming communities. Many professional Dota 2 games last year were disrupted by denial-of-service attacks. Players were forcibly disconnected from the game, causing their team to play at a 4-versus-5 disadvantage. Skype, which is often used for coordinating games and in-team communication, was routinely fingered as the culprit since it leaks the IP address information of the players and thus enables these attacks.

The information leakage is likely a relic of Skype's peer-to-peer nature; the IP address of each user had to be disseminated in order to enable direct peer-to-peer connections to those users. But for some time, the client has had an option to hide your IP address from people who aren't on your contact list. In this mode, any traffic between non-contacts goes through Microsoft's servers, and IP addresses aren't readily disclosed. Judicious use of this option protects your address from the various IP address lookup services, thereby protecting against denial of service attacks.

(credit: Chris Potter/Flickr)

Cigna Corp. announced Friday that it is temporarily banned from enrolling new customers in its Medicare Advantage and standalone prescription-drug plans following an October audit from the US Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS).

In a letter dated January 21, the CMS reported that “widespread and systemic failures” at the insurer resulted in customers being denied medical coverage and prescriptions they rightly had access to. After customers filed grievances about being inappropriately denied services, Cigna failed to properly address those complaints, the CMS said.

The problems at Cigna, which the agency noted has a “long-standing history of non-compliance,” created a “serious threat to the health and safety of Medicare beneficiaries.” Those beneficiaries are people over 65 and young people with disabilities.

(credit: Andrew)

In 2015, the FBI seized a Tor-hidden child-porn website known as Playpen and allowed it to run for 13 days so that the FBI could deploy malware in order to identify and prosecute the website’s users. That malware, known in FBI-speak as a "network investigative technique," was authorized by a federal court in Virginia in February 2015.

In a new revelation, Vice Motherboard has now determined that this operation had much wider berth. The FBI’s Playpen operation was effectively transformed into a global one, reaching Turkey, Colombia, and Greece, among others.

Motherboard’s Joseph Cox wrote on Twitter on Friday that he was able to find a document describing this infiltration as something called "Operation Pacifier" by using creative "Google-fu."

Newegg Chief Legal Officer Lee Cheng mourns the lack of patent trolls willing to challenge him: "I never get invited to parties anymore." (credit: Newegg)

A shell company that sued dozens of computer peripheral makers has quickly dropped Newegg house brand Rosewill from its list of defendants. The motion to dismiss, filed yesterday, comes just days after Newegg's lawyers filed notices of their appearance in the case.

Minero Digital LLC dismissed its case against Rosewill one day after Newegg Chief Legal Officer Lee Cheng authorized his outside lawyer to try to settle the case in exchange for a "nominal donation to charity." During that conversation (the attorneys' first discussion about the case), Newegg's outside counsel said that although the proposed agreement wouldn't pay Minero anything, it was likely to be Newegg's best and final offer. He suggested Minero search the Internet for news articles about Newegg's policies on settling "patent troll" type cases. (The short version: Newegg doesn't pay patent trolls.)

The next day, Minero dismissed the lawsuit against Rosewill. The dismissal is without prejudice, which means it could be re-filed in the future.

We recently published a bit of a rant about many Wikipedia science entries leaving a lot to be desired. In response, we were informed that an effort to improve that situation was already brewing. In fact, we're now happy to point out that the Wiki Education Foundation has declared 2016 the Wikipedia Year of Science.

The Wiki Education Foundation is a nonprofit that helps provide teachers and college-level instructors with the tools they need to get their students engaged in projects intended to improve Wikipedia. For example, the teachers could assign a class to improve entires in a specific topic area and use materials provided by the foundation to help the students edit entries and provide proper references.

This year, thanks to support from the Simons Foundation and Google, the Wiki Education Foundation is targeting entries in the sciences. The effort has already produced new materials for instructors to use, monthly themes (February's is zoology), and a general goal to improve biographical information for female scientists.

A recently identified backdoor in hardware sold by security company Fortinet has been found in several new products, many that were running current software, the company warned this week.

The undocumented account with a hard-coded password came to light last week when attack code exploiting the backdoor was posted online. In response, Fortinet officials said it affected only older versions of Fortinet's FortiOS software. The company went on to say the undocumented method for logging into servers using the secure shell (SSH) protocol was a "remote management" feature that had been removed in July 2014.

In a blog post published this week, Fortinet revised the statement to say the backdoor was still active in several current company products, including some versions of its FortiSwitch, FortiAnalyzer, and FortiCache devices. The company said it made the discovery after conducting a review of its products. Company officials wrote:

(credit: Virginia Tech)

Private Internet service providers are speaking out against a proposal to build a publicly funded fiber network in West Virginia.

State Sen. Chris Walters, a Republican, introduced a bill this week that would deploy more than 2,000 miles of fiber optic cable. The state-owned and operated network would include only middle-mile infrastructure and not the "last mile" fiber connections that extend to people's homes and businesses. This network would be open access, however, so any Internet service provider could gain access to the lines and build last-mile facilities to offer service directly to customers.

That arrangement would make it easier for small Internet service providers to compete against the big ones. Naturally, small ISPs support the project while big ISPs oppose it, the Charleston Gazette-Mail reported.