Daily Blog: Scouting the Internet and World at large

The recently reported manufacturing slowdown is likely to affect local provider of automation products. Transbotics posted a $1.1 million loss in 2007 just months after issuing $600,000 worth of subordinated notes for debt repayment and corporate purposes. The company blamed the loss on lower sales and increased research and development costs.

As domestic wireless carriers continue to swap customers inevitably you'll have winners and losers. At the moment Sprint seems to be the biggest loser, hemorrhaging its customer base and finding its self in a price war with AT&T, Verizon and T-Mobile. Unbelievably some are calling for the breakup of Sprint only two years after its buyout of Nextel.

The unraveling of Sprint

The No. 3 wireless carrier unveiled a dizzying array of bad news Thursday morning, including a $29.5 billion fourth-quarter loss, the draw down of $2.5 billion from its credit line and, as Fortune.com reported Wednesday, the acceleration of subscriber cancellations to 1.2 million this quarter.

Sprint (S, Fortune 500) shares fell sharply on signs that the company's downward spiral is far from over. Shares have now lost nearly half their value since Dan Hesse, a longtime AT&T executive, took over as CEO in December following a management shakeup.

You know you've made the big time when a local data loss story makes the national news. Ok, so it's not exactly Nightline but the fact the story was published to a well-known mailing list should have everyone in Charlotte Mecklenburg hanging his or her head in shame.

As the story goes a county employee's car was stolen by several teens. In the trunk were print outs containing more than 400 account numbers. Police do not suspect that the account number were used but never the less county officials were required to inform customers and creditors. Regardless the question remains: Why was a county employee driving around with a stack of confidential print outs in the trunk?

Information Stolen from 400 Mecklenburg Co. Accounts

This afternoon, people who let Mecklenburg County draft money from their accounts should be on alert. 400 account numbers were stolen.

Any of the 400 victims should alert their banks and the credit agencies.

The county sent a letter to everyone who is affected.

A county official said, Charlotte Mecklenburg Police have a 17 year-old in custody, but they are looking for two more teens.

Security research group Cult of the Dead Cow (CDC) first burst on to the scene in 1998 with a groundbreaking tool called Back Orifice. In the ten years since then the group has gone legit, for the most part, but has nonetheless continued to contribute to the collective security knowledge. Now CDC promises to crack convention wide open with another ground breaking tool, which utilizes Google hacking as a vulnerability scanner.

The critical development that Goolag Scan represents is in the shift of mindset, which has taken place since '98, which is that the web is now the "platform". Having worked for several ASPs I can confidently say that Internet security is something that CIOs worry about every day and night. While the release of this tool obviously reduces the barrier to entry for novice hackers and script kiddies, hopefully it's also a wake up call to smaller enterprise organizations that web security is a necessary and often complicated issue to solve.

Hackers turn Google into vulnerability scanner

The new tool, called Goolag Scan, is equally provocative, making it easy for unskilled users to track down vulnerabilities and sensitive information on specific websites or broad web domains.

This capability should serve as a wake-up call for system administrators to run the tool on their own sites before attackers get around to it, according to CDC.

"It's no big secret that the Web is the platform, and this platform pretty much sucks from a security perspective," said CDC spokesperson Oxblood Ruffin, in a statement. "We've seen some pretty scary holes through random tests with the scanner in North America, Europe, and the Middle East. If I were a government, a large corporation, or anyone with a large website, I'd be downloading this beast and aiming it at my site yesterday."