Article 6 - Cyber Crimes

Article 6 - The 10 Most Mysterious Cyber Crimes
The author discusses that a computer hacker is considered the best if he is not able to be caught. He tells us about a list of the most infamous unsolved computer crimes known to the public. There are security breaches happening all the time in the computing world and most of the time in the best cases the offender is captured by the FBI or another law enforcement agency. I think that it is good that the FBI is able to catch most of these offenders but what is scary are the hackers that go unnoticed and commit some sort of breach and are never caught. One such case is the WANK worm which was a 1989 attack on the computers of NASA to protest the use of use using nuclear fuel in one of their rockets.

This attach is said to have cost NASA around a half million dollars to clean. I think that it is a disgrace that someone would do that since all they were able to do was get a small message out which did not change anything and actually took money away that could have been used for research. Another attack that happened was the breach of CD universe by a hacker where he stole 300,000 credit card numbers. He then used these numbers to blackmail the company but they did not want to deal with him. In the end as retribution he posted all the numbers on a website. I think that this type of attack should not happen and that website that do electronic transactions need to protect their data.

One of the worst cases of hacking is on military equipment. A hacker from Germany was able to hack into a military contractor and steal two thirds of the source code for missile and satellite guidance software. This is attack is very bad since it breaches our national security and allows us to vulnerable to hostile countries.

References:
Article Link - http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,233122500.asp

Article 5 - Broadband Caps

Comcast put a limit on customer bandwidth usage this week. A lot of average users will be in shock to find that they can’t upload or download as much as they want but most of the limits won’t actually affect the average user. The author states that he should not be paying the same rate as him. He states that his mother checks news and send a few emails during the day but he is constantly online sending large files and download many different types of data. I agree with the author because the current agreements that the companies have are averaged out where everyone is paying the same rate and many users are abusing it but the smaller users have to pay for it.

He states that he uses it for many other things and that his usage is easily a thousand times that of his mother. He states that no reasonable person would say that they need to pay the same price. I agree that it is reasonable to pay for what you use. This way everyone get a fair speed and amount of bandwidth because that is what they paid for. The author also states that he already pays extra for a connection that is faster so if he wanted to distribute multimedia across the globe he could. I agree with the author and actually have the same type of connection because of the type of work I do.

This announcement was the official limiting of usage was today but they have been doing this quietly for a few years with a magical capacity that no one knew. They would let you use it until you reached it and then would cut your service off. I think that this is unfair and that people that need to use a large amount of bandwidth should be able to pick a package and pay for it.

References:
Article Link - http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2331596,00.asp