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HAGERSTOWN, Md. — A key figure in the government's investigation of thousands of leaked secret war records says the suspected culprit had help. Adrian Lamo is the computer hacker who turned in Army intelligence analyst Bradley Manning. Lamo says someone told him that he helped Manning set up encryption software that Manning allegedly used to send classified information to the whistleblower website Wikileaks. Lamo isn't naming the apparent accomplice. But he says the man is among a group of people in the Boston area who work with Wikileaks.

Much to the chagrin of the entertainment industry, the encryption that protects most high-definition video content may have just been cracked. Intel Corp. officials confirmed Tuesday to FoxNews.com an investigation into a security breach, possibly a fundamental compromise of High-bandwidth Digital Content Protection (HDCP) -- the digital rights management software that governs every device that plays high-def content.

Three rifle volleys echoed through the Hills Tuesday afternoon, bidding farewell to the nation’s last Oglala Lakota code talker. Clarence Wolf Guts, an 86-year-old World War II veteran, was laid to rest in the Black Hills National Cemetery with the Lord’s Prayer and drum beat resonating inside the rock rotunda. A procession of 30 vehicles -- including one white Chevy Impala with the sign “We love you Grandpa Clarence, forever in our heart.” -- followed a white van that carried Wolf Guts from a traditional Lakota ceremony in Wanblee to Sturgis. A crowd of over 60 traveled to pay their...

07 June 2010 "JIHADIS DISCOVER GOOGLE'S ENCRYPTED SEARCH" SNIPPET: "What this means is that their connection to Google's servers is encrypted. Their search terms are not encrypted."

Note: The following text is a quote: Manhattan U.S. Attorney Charges Two Brooklyn Men with Conspiring to Provide Material Support to al Qaeda PREET BHARARA, the United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York, GEORGE VENIZELOS, the Special Agent-in-Charge of the New York Office of the Federal Bureau of Investigation ("FBI"), and RAYMOND W. KELLY, the Police Commissioner of the City of New York, announced the indictment of U.S. citizens WESAM EL-HANAFI and SABIRHAN HASANOFF for allegedly conspiring to provide material support, including computer advice and assistance, to al Qaeda. EL-HANAFI and HASANOFF are expected to be presented...

SAN FRANCISCO – Deep inside millions of computers is a digital Fort Knox, a special chip with the locks to highly guarded secrets, including classified government reports and confidential business plans. Now a former U.S. Army computer-security specialist has devised a way to break those locks.The attack can force heavily secured computers to spill documents that likely were presumed to be safe. This discovery shows one way that spies and other richly financed attackers can acquire military and trade secrets, and comes as worries about state-sponsored computer espionage intensify, underscored by recent hacking attacks on Google Inc.The new attack discovered...

Senior U.S. military officers working for the Joint Chiefs of Staff discussed the danger of Russia and China intercepting and doctoring video from drone aircraft in 2004, but the Pentagon didn't begin securing the signals until this year, according to people familiar with the matter. The disclosure came after The Wall Street Journal reported insurgents in Iraq had intercepted video feeds from drones, downloading unencrypted communications from the unmanned planes. Shiite fighters in Iraq used software programs such as SkyGrabber -- available for as little as $25.95 on the Internet -- to regularly capture drone video feeds, said a person...

A MAN who established a sophisticated network of peepholes and cameras to spy on his flatmates has escaped a jail sentence after police were unable to crack an encryption code on his home computer. Rohan James Wyllie, 39, yesterday pleaded guilty in Southport District Court to charges of attempting to visually record one of his flatmates when she was in a private place without her consent. But police were unable to prove his elaborate surveillance system had actually been used. Wyllie's three flatmates, two women and a man, grew suspicious that he was up to something when they noticed lights...

Computer scientists in Japan say they've developed a way to break the WPA encryption system used in wireless routers in about one minute. The attack gives hackers a way to read encrypted traffic sent between computers and certain types of routers that use the WPA (Wi-Fi Protected Access) encryption system. The attack was developed by Toshihiro Ohigashi of Hiroshima University and Masakatu Morii of Kobe University, who plan to discuss further details at a technical conference set for Sept. 25 in Hiroshima. Last November, security researchers first showed how WPA could be broken, but the Japanese researchers have taken the...

Note: The following text is a quote: Former State Department Official and Wife Arrested for Serving as Illegal Agents of Cuba for Nearly 30 Years Couple Allegedly Conspired to Provide Classified Information to Cuban Government A former State Department official and his wife have been arrested on charges of serving as illegal agents of the Cuban government for nearly 30 years and conspiring to provide classified U.S. information to the Cuban government. The arrests were announced today by David Kris, Assistant Attorney General for National Security; Channing D. Phillips, Acting U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia; Joseph Persichini, Jr.,...

DVDs are set to explore new dimensions.Punchstock Spreading into extra dimensions could help next-generation DVDs to store even more data than they currently do. The new technique could squeeze around 140 times the capacity of the best Blu-rays into a standard-sized disk. Traditional DVDs and Blu-ray disks store data in two dimensions, and there's been a recent push to increase their capacity by creating multi-layered disks that store data across three dimensions. But, asks James Chon at the Swinburne University of Technology in Melbourne, Australia, why stop there?Chon and his colleagues are stepping into hyperspace, by encoding information in two...

For some, the internet is merely a hiding place — a web of secret corridors where all manner of shameful deeds unfold. But the police never expected that it might become a strategic platform where two groups of society's outcasts, terrorists and child sex abusers, could meet to exchange operational secrets. The realisation that there might be something in common between violent Muslim fanatics known for their supposed piety and sexual deviants who prey on children has only slowly dawned on officers. Cracking the mystery of how these worlds overlap is expected to improve understanding of the mindsets of both...

Defendants can't deny police an encryption key because of fears the data it unlocks will incriminate them, a British appeals court has ruled. The case marked an interesting challenge to the UK's Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (RIPA), which in part compels someone served under the act to divulge an encryption key used to scramble data on a PC's hard drive. Failure to do so could mean a two-year prison sentence or up to five years if the case involves national security. The appeals court heard a case in which two suspects refused to give up encryption keys, arguing that...

New mathematical attack works against a broad range cryptographic functions.Unless you're a dyed in the wool cryptographic geek you probably didn't know that there was a Crypto conference, or even a chain of worldwide crypto conferences that take place each year. Fortunately, for the most of us that aren't crypto geeks there are a handful of very highly skilled people who are; they can take the highly theoretical and complex mathematical proofs and arguments that make up most of modern cryptographic and cryptanalytic research and put it into plain language. Probably the best known is Bruce Schneier, who is a...

The growing use of encryption software -- like Microsoft's own BitLocker -- by cyber criminals has led Microsoft to develop a set of tools that law enforcement agents can use to get around the software, executives at the company said...Microsoft first released the toolset, called the Computer Online Forensic Evidence Extractor (COFEE)...Microsoft gives the software to agents for free.

Security approach common on Vista, Apple and Linux laptops The disk encryption technology used to secure the data in your Windows, Apple and Linux laptops can be easily circumvented, according to new research out of Princeton University. The flaw in this approach, the researchers say, is that data previously thought to disappear immediately from dynamic RAM (DRAM) actually takes its time to dissolve, leaving the data on the computer vulnerable to thievery regardless of whether the laptop is on or off. That's because the disk encryption key, unlocked via a password when you log on to your computer, then is...

Today eight colleagues and I are releasing a significant new research result. We show that disk encryption, the standard approach to protecting sensitive data on laptops, can be defeated by relatively simple methods. We demonstrate our methods by using them to defeat three popular disk encryption products: BitLocker, which comes with Windows Vista; FileVault, which comes with MacOS X; and dm-crypt, which is used with Linux. The research team includes J. Alex Halderman, Seth D. Schoen, Nadia Heninger, William Clarkson, William Paul, Joseph A. Calandrino, Ariel J. Feldman, Jacob Appelbaum, and Edward W. Felten. Our site has links to the...

A recently released tool that allegedly was designed to help al-Qaeda supporters encrypt their Internet-based communications is a well-written and easily portable piece of code, according to a security researcher who has analyzed the software.

An Arabic-language Web site hosted on a server located in Tampa, Fla., is apparently offering a new version of software that was designed to help al-Qaeda supporters encrypt their Internet communications. The new encryption tool is called Mujahideen Secrets 2 and appears to be an updated version of easier-to-crack software that was released early last year, said Paul Henry, vice president of technology evangelism at Secure Computing Corp. in San Jose. The tool is being distributed free of charge on a password-protected Web site that belongs to an Islamic forum known as al-Ekhlaas, according to Henry and a blog posting...

A couple of years ago, Michael T. Arnold landed at the Los Angeles International Airport after a 20-hour flight from the Philippines. He had his laptop with him, and a customs officer took a look at what was on his hard drive. Clicking on folders called “Kodak pictures” and “Kodak memories,” the officer found child pornography. The search was not unusual: the government contends that it is perfectly free to inspect every laptop that enters the country, whether or not there is anything suspicious about the computer or its owner. Rummaging through a computer’s hard drive, the government says, is...