Unlike here in New Zealand, the US takes hacking very seriously and hackers there face the prospect of long jail terms if they're caught.

It's also common knowledge that Kiwi hackers have been involved in a number of high-profile (and some not so high-profile) hacks on overseas websites in recent years.

Perhaps this explains why some NZ Net users whose ISPs use Telecom's links to the rest of the world are effectively blocked from accessing sites under the .army.mil domain space.

Netgate was advised of this problem last week but as of this morning, attempts to connect to www.army.mil remain futile -- even the site's nameservers are unreachable.

What's going on here -- are Telecom-hosted hackers really that much of a threat to the US Army? :-)

Readers Say (updated hourly) cyberthreat and .army.mil domain - Rob Have Your Say

A BNZ Online Banking Security Weakness?
I'm reporting this only because the BNZ have finally spotted and fixed the problem -- otherwise I'd be advising them of the problem today.

Last week it was brought to my attention that a directory on the BNZ's secure server was open to browsing.

Simply by typing in the right URL you could get a snapshot of the file-structure that existed on part of that server. In that directory there were a number of library files and at least one log file.

I did not attempt to access those files and, although the security lapse may not have posed a direct threat to users' data, one can only hope that the bank is reviewing its operations and security routines as a result of this potentially embarrassing snafu.

Stand By For Action
"Anything can happen in the next half-hour"... or so goes the introduction to one of Gerry Anderson's TV puppet series from the 1960's -- and similar sentiments might well be expressed with the commissioning of the Southern Cross cable later this week.

Thanks to media hype, Net users all over the country are primed and ready for faster Net-surfing, better streaming media and all sorts of other improvements.

Unfortunately, apart from the lucky few who have an ADSL connection, I suspect they'll be rather disappointed.

IHUG seem to be taking a sensible tack by not jumping straight on the SC bandwagon -- after all, we all know how problematic even the best new technology can be don't we?

The Weekly
Yes, I know the first edition of the weekly has yet to appear -- but I'm still working on it.

Hopefully (if current leads pan out) it will include a very interesting expose' into the astoundingly bad behaviour of a group of local "new economy" company directors (some of who are also on the board of a public company). Just how competent and ethical are the managers of some of our hi-tech public companies?

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