Manhattan DA's office

Manhattan District Attorney Cy Vance at a school visit this week.

​We often write about the latest efforts of the Manhattan District Attorney to sentence criminals and stop crime in the city. His news releases alert us to crime activity throughout the borough, but today, we thought we'd update you on DA Cy Vance's initiatives to address a different kind of crime scene -- the internet.

This week, Vance has been tackling the issue of cyberbullying in a series of school visits aimed at raising awareness of the bullying that is increasingly taking place online and on cell phones.

More >>

​Talking Points Memo (or TPM, as the kids call it), was down for about 8 hours overnight. This major site interruption comes after they ran 14 mugshots of alleged members of the hacker group Anonymous after their arrests. TPM obtained the mugshots through the Freedom of Information Act and were not the only site to post the images (Gawker posted the images as well, but their site didn't face any apparent issues). There is no direct evidence that it was an Anonymous attack, but the timing is one hell of a coincidence.

More >>

​Jake Davis, an 18 year-old believed by Scotland Yard to be the leader of the hacker group LulzSec, was released on bail this morning. He appeared at a City of Westminster Magistrates' Court wearing "jeans, a black T-shirt, denim shirt and sunglasses," the Telegraph reports. Prosecutors say that Davis had a collection of 750,000 personal passwords on his home network of 16 computers.

More >>

​The private consultant on the CityTime debacle fired this week for failing to keep track of his time sheets has now been charged with taking $5 million in illegal kickbacks, the Department of Investigation and the U.S. Attorney's office said.

Gerard Denault, formerly of Science Applications International Corp., was also charged with wire fraud, conspiracy, and money laundering. He was arrested in Danbury, Connecticut, yesterday. He is accused of taking the kickbacks via international shell companies.
Denault, 49, is the sixth person indicted in connection with CityTime corruption charges.

More >>

​The beleaguered lead contractor in the $800 million CityTime debacle has fired the project manager for paying himself for hours he didn't even work, Comptroller John Liu reports.

Science Applications International Corp. tells the city that it has fired Gerard Denault, who was leading the company's development of the effort to automate the city's time card system. SAIC says it will return $2.4 million paid to Denault.

The project ballooned from an estimated $63 million to more than $800 million, sparking city investigations, the fraud indictment of eight people, and major embarrassment to the Bloomberg administration. The Voice reported on the scandal here.

More >>

​Chris Hansen -- the host of NBC's infamous child sex scandal exploitation show To Catch A Predator -- was not arrested for child molestation. Yet "chris hansen arrested for child molestation" is a "volcanic"-level trending Google search, currently ranked in the top spot. How did this happen and what does 4Chan's kind deed from yesterday have to do with it?

More >>

Can you guess this man's password?

​Let's say you're part of a gang of infamous, powerful Chinese hackers with a really cool name, say, "the Shadow Network." You've busted through the fortified security systems of sensitive targets "including foreign ministries, embassies, and even a computer at NATO headquarters." All in all, you've stolen confidential, privileged information from 103 countries and almost 1,300 computers.

But what do you really want?

More >>

zazzle.com

​It all started when a 16-year-old was called into the assistant principal's office for eating Mike and Ikes. Now, the Lower Merion School District in an affluent suburb of Philadelphia is facing a federal class-action lawsuit, an FBI investigation, and a grand jury subpoena over allegations that they remotely accessed the cameras on school-supplied laptop computers to spy on students.

More >>

Thieves stole three laptops from a locked campus office at Columbia on January 18, putting vital computer info from 1,400 students and others in danger. Finally, we might get an idea of how much porn they're looking at when they're supposed to be matriculating instead of masturbating.

Seriously, though, this is, well, serious. Students and employees who were victims were offered two years of credit-monitoring services. The students, however, are still required to pay nearly $19,000 a year in tuition.

​Knowledge is power! A recent Cyber Ark Software survey reveals a boom in data theft among workers on Wall Street and at Canary Wharf in London. A quarter of respondents professed a willingness to take data from their employers, though 85 percent of them know it's illegal. The survey suggests that the money boys and girls aren't shopping their ill-gotten, sensitive company information on the open market, necessarily -- they're holding it in case they get fired and need something on which to get by (though "41 percent of respondents have already taken sensitive data with them to a new position").

The survey also shows, understandably, drop from 52 to 40 percent of these workers worried about finding another job in the recession over the past year...

More >>