US cannot say how many had communications watched

(AP)

WASHINGTON (AP) — Like its predecessor, the Obama administration says it cannot count how many people in the U.S. have had their telephone calls and emails monitored by government agents in national security investigations under federal surveillance law.

The national intelligence office said in a letter this week to two Senate Democrats that it was "not reasonably possible to identify the number."

The senators, Ron Wyden of Oregon and Mark Udall of Colorado, worry that the government may be monitoring communications of law-abiding citizens with inadequate justification.

"We're not asking these questions to embarrass the administration or make the intelligence community's job more difficult," Wyden said in a statement Thursday. "Congress needs to know if the laws it writes are being interpreted and implemented as intended before it is asked to extend them, and failing to assure the public that government agencies aren't violating the rights of law-abiding Americans erodes public confidence and makes it harder for intelligence agencies to do their jobs."

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ZeuS Trojan for Google Android Spotted

krebsonsecurity.com

Criminals have developed a component of the ZeuS Trojan designed to run on Google Android phones. The new strain of malware comes as security experts are warning about the threat from mobile malware that may use tainted ads and drive-by downloads.

Researchers at Fortinet said the malicious file is a new version of “Zitmo,” a family of mobile malware first spotted last year that stands for “ZeuS in the mobile.” The Zitmo variant, disguised as a security application, is designed to intercept the one-time passcodes that banks send to mobile users as an added security feature. It masquerades as a component of Rapport, a banking activation application from Trusteer. Once installed, the malware lies in wait for incoming text messages, and forwards them to a remote Web server.

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Flying Drone Can Crack Wi-Fi Networks, Snoop On Cell Phones

forbes.com

How do one ex-Air Force official and one former airplane hobby shop owner, both of whom happen to have decades of experience as network security contractors for the military, spend their weekends? Building a flying, unmanned, automated password-cracking, Wi-Fi-sniffing, cell-phone eavesdropping spy drone, of course.

At the Black Hat and Defcon security conferences in Las Vegas next week, Mike Tassey and Richard Perkins plan to show the crowd of hackers a year’s worth of progress on their Wireless Aerial Surveillace Platform, or WASP, the second year Tassey and Perkins have displayed the 14-pound, six-foot long, six-foot wingspan unmanned aerial vehicle. The WASP, built from a retired Army target drone converted from a gasoline engine to electric batteries, is equipped with an HD camera, a cigarette-pack sized on-board Linux computer packed with network-hacking tools including the BackTrack testing toolset and a custom-built 340 million word dictionary for brute-force guessing of passwords, and eleven antennae.

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