[GOTD]Process Lasso 6.0

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Process Lasso is NOT yet another task manager; it is a process, power, and CPU optimization and automation utility. One of Process Lasso’s most popular features is a unique technology called ProBalance (Process Balance) that can improve your PC’s responsiveness and stability during high CPU loads. Windows, by design, allows programs to monopolize your CPU without sufficient restraint — leading to hangs and micro-lags. ProBalance intelligently adjusts the priorities of running programs on-demand so that badly behaved processes are less likely to negatively impact the responsiveness of your PC. It does this NOT by raising process priorities, but instead by temporarily lowering the priorities of background processes that may be interfering with PC responsiveness. It can also perform other operations on these processes, such as adjusting their I/O priorities or CPU affinities.

Another popular feature is called Energy Saver. It switches the active Power Profile after you have gone idle for mere seconds (configurable). This allows you to run your PC in the High Performance power profile, yet conserve power when you aren’t active.

In addition to these, there are countless features allowing the user to take full automated control of the processes on their PC. You can have a wide range operations performed, or settings applied, each time a process is run.

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Adobe hacked, malware files digitally signed

The eyebrow-raising hack effectively gave the attackers the ability to create malware masquerading as legitimate Adobe software and signals a raising of the stakes in the world of Advanced Persistent Threats (APTs).

Adobe today warned that an internal server with access to its digital certificate code signing infrastructure was hacked by "sophisticated threat actors" engaged in "highly targeted attacks."

The compromise, which dates back to early July, led to the creation of at least two malicious files that were digitally signed using a valid Adobe certificate, according to Adobe security chief Brad Arkin.

Although only two files were signed, the hack effectively gave the attackers the ability to create malware masquerading as legitimate Adobe software and signals a raising of the stakes in the world of Advanced Persistent Threats (APTs).

According to Arkin, one of the two digitally signed malware files is a utility that extracts password hashes from the Windows operating system.  This hints at the "lateral movement" that is common once a targeted attacker gains access to a network and attempts to elevate privileges to gain a higher level of access.

"The first malicious utility we received is pwdump7 v7.1.  This utility extracts password hashes from the Windows OS and is sometimes used as a single file that statically links the OpenSSL library libeay32.dll.  The sample we received included two separate and individually signed files. We believe the second malicious utility, myGeeksmail.dll, is a malicious ISAPI filter. Unlike the first utility, we are not aware of any publicly available versions of this ISAPI filter," Arkin explained.

"Within minutes of the initial triage of the first sample, we decommissioned our signing infrastructure and began a clean-room implementation of an interim signing service for re-signing components that were signed with the impacted key after July 10, 2012 and to continue code signing for regularly scheduled releases. The interim signing solution includes an offline human verification to ensure that all files scheduled for signature are valid Adobe software. We are in the process of designing and deploying a new, permanent signing solution," Arkin added.

Adobe did not provide details on the nature of the breach except to say that it affected a "build server" with access to the code signing infrastructure.  Arkin said the compromised machine's configuration was "not to Adobe corporate standards for a build server" and lamented the fact that this was not caught during the normal provisioning process.

"We are investigating why our code signing access provisioning process in this case failed to identify these deficiencies. The compromised build server did not have rights to any public key infrastructure (PKI) functions other than the ability to make code signing requests to the code signing service," he added.

Arkin said a forensics investigation identified malware on the build server and the likely mechanism used to first gain access to the build server.

"We also have forensic evidence linking the build server to the signing of the malicious utilities. We can confirm that the private key required for generating valid digital signatures was not extracted from the HSM. We believe the threat actors established a foothold on a different Adobe machine and then leveraged standard advanced persistent threat (APT) tactics to gain access to the build server and request signatures for the malicious utilities from the code signing service via the standard protocol used for valid Adobe software," he added.

Arkin says there is no evidence that source code was stolen during the compromise.

Adobe plans to revoke the impacted certificates on October 4, 2012.

The revocation will affect all code signed after July 10, 2012, which indicates the attackers had access to Adobe's infrastructure for more than two months.

View: Original Article

Canadian Government "Sponsored" The Pirate Bay

Like many other websites on the Internet The Pirate Bay makes its money from ads. Due to its reputation the torrent site generally has to settle for lower grade banners, but the Canadian Government recently broke this trend. This week ads from the Canadian Department of Finance’s Economic Action Plan appeared on The Pirate Bay. Unfortunately for the infamous torrent site, the feds pulled the banner campaign as soon as they were alerted to it.

The Pirate Bay is among the 50 most visited websites in Canada. Considering this popularity, it wouldn’t be strange for the government to reward the site for its loyal service to the Canadian public.

However, the banner campaign for the Department of Finance’s Economic Action Plan that went on display this week was not supposed to show up on The Pirate Bay.

The Ottowa Citizen reports that The Pirate Bay ran the ads but that the site wasn’t targeted intentionally. Instead, the feds are quick to point the finger at one of the advertising networks they teamed up with.

“The Department of Finance did not purchase ad space on The Pirate Bay web site. We did however, include four ad networks in our media buy (Bell Media, Canoe, Microsoft, Yahoo),” The Department of Finance explains.

What’s in it for you?



According to the Finance Department the advertising networks they work with follow strict guidelines and have “brand safety filters” in place. However, somewhere down the line a mistake was made and the feds point their finger at Yahoo.

“Each network confirmed that this site is not owned by them and that the appearance of the ad on this site is unauthorized. However, upon further research it was determined that some banner ads were appearing with an ‘ad choices icon’ which traces back to Yahoo,” the department states.

However, Yahoo! say they have conducted a thorough investigation into the misplaced banner and conclude that actually Sympatico is to blame.

“We have confirmed that Yahoo! was not responsible for the EAP ad showing up on The Pirate Bay. We have been able to trace the ad to Sympatico who were responsible for this ad’s appearance on the site, and they have been notified of the issue so they can take the appropriate actions.”

And so the finger pointing continues.

The Pirate Bay has witnessed the drama with a smile and has even considered plastering their entire site, especially the home page, with ads for Economic Action Plan. There’s no way the Department of Finance can stop that.

But first they have to buy a boat and loads of rum using the Canadian tax dollars generated by the ads.

View: Original Article

ISPs and Tracking Company Ready to Start Six-Strikes Anti-Piracy Scheme

Soon, five large U.S. Internet providers will begin to warn and punish alleged copyright infringers as part of the “six strikes” anti-piracy scheme. While details are still scarce, TorrentFreak is informed that MarkMonitor will be responsible for tracking down alleged infringers, and that an independent expert review of the evidence gathering technology has been completed. ISPs have also been making progress and several are now ready to start sending out warnings, although none of them wants to go first.

The MPAA and RIAA, helped by five major Internet providers in the United States, will start to warn and punish copyright infringers later this year.

The parties launched the Center for Copyright Information (CCI) and agreed on a system through which copyright infringers are warned that their behavior is unacceptable. After five or six warnings ISPs may then take a variety of repressive measures.

Initially ISPs were expected to send out the first copyright alerts by the end of 2011 but this deadline silently passed, as did the revised July 2012 start date. As of today, AT&T, Cablevision, Comcast, Time Warner Cable and Verizon are yet to send out the first alerts.

One of the reasons for the delay is that not all providers were ready to process the alerts. Previously, a spokesperson for the CCI told TorrentFreak that each ISP would roll out the scheme at its own pace, but even that plan is causing some issues.

A source connected to CCI informs TorrentFreak that several ISPs are now ready to start warning subscribers, but that none of them wants to be the first to do so. For this reason, CCI’s Executive Director Jill Lesser is now pushing for a joint launch at the end of the year.

Leading up to the official start the ISPs might do some small-scale tests in November, we were informed.

After more than a year of uncertainty we can also confirm that MarkMonitor has been hired to track down alleged infringers. MarkMonitor, which often operates under the name DtecNet, is the only tracking outfit working with the CCI.

In 2010 DtecNet was acquired by MarkMonitor, but it continues to operate under its own name. DtecNet already works closely with the RIAA and MPAA and is also responsible for collecting data on copyright infringers as part of the Irish three-strikes program.

Although little is known about the accuracy of DtecNet’s tracking software, TorrentFreak previously pointed out that the company knows very little about how BitTorrent works. A whitepaper published by DtecNet was littered with painful errors and false assumptions and has since been retracted (copy here).

We expect, however, that the company has learned from its mistakes. And if they haven’t, that will become public soon enough.

TorrentFreak is also informed that the independent technical review of MarkMonitor’s evidence gathering techniques has been completed. This review will be made public in the coming weeks according to our source.

The decision to make the review public is part of an effort by the CCI to be more transparent about its operations. Two weeks ago University of Idaho Law Professor Annemarie Bridy criticized the organization for being overly secret, and others have voiced similar concerns.

After the SOPA and PIPA revolt anti-piracy efforts are out of fashion, so whether more transparency will be enough to take away all concerns remains to be seen.

View: Original Article

Why Activism Is Necessary, But Isn't Enough To Save Net Liberty

When the first Pirate Party was founded, it was with the realization that activism alone had come to the end of the road. Everybody was discussing net liberty issues and how they were being restricted by the copyright industry – everybody except the politicians. We needed to take the fight to these politicians. But how?

Politicians had been condescending for years over net liberties. They received instructions on just how evil the net and everything around it was from their civil servants, who in turn were fed the state of the world by lobbyists who were walking the state department halls like children in the house.

At the same time, the debate on net liberties raged on everywhere else. In Sweden, we had the Piratbyrån (Pirate Bureau), which had been very successful in providing a counterpoint to the corporate spew-outs since 2003. They were also the people initially starting The Pirate Bay, which has survived its parent – the Pirate Bureau was decommissioned a couple of years back.

When the summer of 2005 came around, the Swedish politicians railroaded through yet another harshening of the copyright monopoly where downloading was criminalized (not just uploading), in what was seen as an attempt to safeguard old distribution channels against indie artists, all hell broke loose. This was discussed over family dinners, over coffee at work, at universities, between friends. And yet, politicians appeared to not even notice this was important to people.

This was utterly infuriating. How could the politicians so thoroughly miss that this discussion was happening everywhere? They’re usually the first to do the flip-waffle-and-flop dance over any issue that the public starts even whispering about.
The answer was twofold: lobbyism is powerful, and that people of the public had talked about the politicians, but not to the politicians. Specifically, and crucially, nobody had talked to the politicians in a way that threatened their job over the issue.

The key to seeing the route ahead was to realize that the politicians weren’t necessarily evil, but just didn’t have the time and energy to learn a completely new perspective to them. You had to motivate them.

Threatening their job over not understanding the issue turned out to be a most effective motivator in this aspect – one that was needed in parallel with activism that allowed the politicians to learn about the issues quickly.

Techdirt also addresses exactly this in a recent article, as they describe how lobbyists win over the public only if the public leaves walkover, but if the public does choose to engage, how votes beat lobbying every single time.

So the end conclusion is this: activism is necessary, because it drives discussion and learning, but it does not drive policy: on its own, it is not sufficient. At the end of the day, politicians must risk losing votes in order to care.

That’s why running for office and starting to just nibble at those votes has a tremendous effect in changing the world very quickly. You don’t need to be a politician – you can be a civil liberties activist running for office. In fact, that’s often even better.

View: Original Article

New Anti-Piracy Watchlist Zooms In On File-Sharing Tolerant Countries

he Congressional International Anti-Piracy Caucus has just released its 2012 International Piracy Watch List. In addition to countries such as China, Russia and Ukraine, this year Italy and Switzerland make fresh appearances in the list. Both countries are accused of not doing enough to combat online infringement with the latter allegedly proving itself as a “magnet for rogue sites.”

The Congressional International Anti-Piracy Caucus (IAPC) has just released its annual report in which it criticizes countries that in their view simply aren’t doing enough to protect the intellectual property rights of American creators.

It will come as little surprise that the two nations topping the list are China and Russia, with neither country expected to get a clean bill of health from the West now or in the near future.

On file-sharing issues, China’s leading search engine Baidu was cautiously praised for coming to an agreement with rightsholders, a move that led to its removal from the USTR’s Notorious Markets list. Russia was again criticized for its lack of IP protection legislation which has led to “rampant Internet piracy affecting the global market.”

Ukraine, former home to the currently suspended Demonoid BitTorrent tracker, was also subjected to the usual criticisms with the note that instead of improving, things are actually getting worse.

“Ukraine is a hub for infringing content through peer-to-peer networks and hosted websites, and is home to one of the world’s most notorious pirate markets, EX.ua,” write the IAPC.

After local authorities took down the file-hosting service in January the site made an almost immediate return. IAPC say that the Ukrainian government bowed to public protest.

But while the watch list inclusion of the China, Russia and Ukraine trio will shock no-one, there are also two new euro entries – Italy and Switzerland.

“Piracy in Italy continues to hurt both Italian and American creators. To date, there has not been a sufficient legislative framework for addressing the problem, or clear leadership in developing one,” the report notes.

“Without substantial reforms, the piracy problem will continue unabated in Italy and the widespread perception will endure that illegal downloading is not harmful.”

In recent years Italy’s Guardia di Finanza (Financial Guard) has been involved in many file-sharing investigations (1) (2). It has also ordered a trio of prominent ISP-level blocks against leading BitTorrent sites, first against The Pirate Bay, then the now-defunct BTjunkie and most recently KickAssTorrents.

However, following the so-called Peppermint Jam case, Italy’s Data Protection Authority ruled that monitoring P2P users and collecting their IP addresses is illegal.

The IAPC’s complaints about the Swiss go even further, with the landlocked country accused of loose IP protection that makes it a magnet for, apparently, some of the world’s worst sites.

“Switzerland’s copyright law is inadequate, making it a home for rogue sites whose clear purpose is to facilitate and enable massive unauthorized making available of pirated material,” the report warns.

As noted by Ars, the first large site that springs to mind in Switzerland is RapidShare, but Daniel Raimer, General Counsel for the file-locker site, says he believes the report refers to another company.

“RapidShare understands that this action does not pertain to RapidShare,” Raimer said. “We continue to work with the content industry to mitigate copyright abuse and make our services as accountable and transparent as they can possibly be.”

The lack of clarity from IAPC appears to be relatively new. In previous years’ reports the caucus hasn’t shied away from naming sites. However, in recent months TorrentFreak has indeed noticed an upward trend of file-sharing related sites (BitTorrent, streaming and cyberlockers) appearing on Swiss-based hosting. The other possible objection from IAPC is the presence of the Razorback2 eD2K (eDonkey) indexing system which was subjected to huge raids in 2006 but later recovered.

The position on general file-sharing in Switzerland also appears to be a problem. IAPC notes that the country needs to “clarify that copying from illegal sources is illegal.” This is a reference to Swiss copyright law which contains a private copy exception but does not state that the copy has to be made from a legal source. This effectively legitimizes downloading and streaming of pirate content for personal use.

While the IAPC recognizes former watch list entries Canada and Spain as nations “in transition” due to their recent efforts to reform copyright law, neither country escapes completely. Both are encouraged to continue down a legislative path that will see greater protection for US intellectual property.

The full report can be viewed here.

Original Article: TorrentFreak

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Megaupload's Coming Back??

January this year the U.S. Government destroyed Megaupload, but founder Kim Dotcom is a not done with the file-hosting business yet and is preparing to come back with a vengeance. The coding work for the new Megaupload is nearly finished, the servers have been ordered, and investors are lining up. A return of the file-hosting site appears to be looming.



With 50 million visitors per day at its peak, Megaupload was one of the largest websites on the Internet.

This quickly changed January this year when the U.S. Government took down the file-hosting service and had several key employees arrested including founder Kim Dotcom.

Abruptly, the focus of Megaupload’s team shifted from serving customers to defending itself in a high-profile criminal prosecution. While the criminal case is moving ahead very slowly, Megaupload’s founder does have some progress to report on another front.

Dotcom previously announced that he planned to bring Megaupload back to life, and new information suggests that this may happen rather quickly. In an update this weekend he tweets that most of the work on the second incarnation of the site is already done.

“Quick update on the new Mega: Code 90% done. Servers on the way. Lawyers, partners and investors are ready,” Dotcom teases.

“Be patient it’s coming,” he adds.

From the brief progress update it’s clear that the site is on schedule for launch later this year. In addition, it’s interesting to note that despite the ongoing criminal case, partners and investors are happy to be involved.

In recent weeks Dotcom has delivered several hints about the new Megaupload, which he says will be bigger and better than the file-hosting service that was taken down.

“We are building a massive global network. All non-US hosters will be able to connect servers & bandwidth,” he explained earlier.

According to Dotcom we can expect a Megaupload with an even greater range of applications than just file-sharing. While developers of file managers are being encouraged to get in touch for early API access, Dotcom is also calling out to those involved in email and fax tools, VOIP and video apps.

It’s clear that Dotcom doesn’t have the slightest urge to throw in the towel.

“They abused the wrong guy. I am going to turn this world upside down. Power to the people. Bye bye Echelon. Hello Freedom,” Dotcom added.

It will be at least a few more weeks before the new Megaupload appears online, but there are exciting times ahead. MEGA exciting.

View: Original Article