Here’s a little roundup to wind down your Thursday night:
The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), which oversees the National Strategy for Trusted Identities in Cyberspace (NSTIC), has delegated over $7 million in grant money to the pilot programs of five private sector organizations, according to Fierce Government IT. Similarly, ZDNet reports that the pilots “focus on identity verification, validated trust, privacy controls to protect children, identity tools to aid military families seeking help online, and trusted credentials for financial and other transactions.”
Argentinian police have arrested a 19-year-old “superhacker” after a yearlong investigation. The teen was allegedly raking in $50K per month as a part of a six-member gang of techies by using “malware to run a Botnet network of thousands of zombie computers, which were then used to illegally divert money from accounts leaving virtually no trace behind,” reports The Hacker News. The report goes on to say that the teen was largely targeting international money transfer and gambling websites.
Another article from ZDNet reports that Lavabit, a small Texas email provider (the best-known customer of which was none other than Edward Snowden), is shutting down to avoid “becom[ing] complicit in crimes against the American people.”
This last one is pretty amusing. According to Salon, a group of Brazilian hackers retaliated against the NSA by hacking the agency’s homepage and leaving the message “stop spying on us”—or so they thought. It turned out that the hackers confused the acronyms and instead left their message for NASA.
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