The fact that SCADA systems and embedded controllers are woefully insecure is hardly news to security folk. But is is always somewhat eye opening to see how some of these systems can be compromised. One of those is in this blog post from IOActive Labs that a friend sent to me, where they used remote control drones to hack the systems that send data to the  traffic control systems.
While the specific details haven't been revealed yet, IOActive did reveal the responses they received after reporting the bugs to the manufacturers including in one case where:

(T)he vendor said that since the devices were designed that way (insecure) on purpose, they were working as designed, and that customers (state/city governments) wanted the devices to work that way (insecure), so there wasn't any security issue.

Not that I'm in Australia at present, but I'm keeping an eye on things at home. Here is a nice little article from CSO.com,au on the ICT Security Controls Required by the Australian Privacy Principles.

Early last year the big domestic infosec story here in Japan was a hacker who was running rings around the police, while making death and bomb threats against airlines and kindergartens.
The Police arrested several suspects - 'extracting' confessions from some of them who later turned out to be victims whose computers had been used by the the hacker via remote access.
The best part of the tale (tail?) is the hacker attached a memory card to the collar of a cat(!) and invited the press to 'play a game' by answering quizzes that led to the cat with the memory card. Possibly the first hack in history to involve a actual cat, and not just LOLcats.exe.

The police eventually captured and charged a new suspect, who is now claiming his innocence and pointing to the previous dubious police investigation (and confession extracting) as proof.

Prosecutors say they found on Katayama’s office computer, searches for the words “cat” and “Enoshima” that predate the email of riddles sent to journalists. But the defense asserts that the real suspect would've planted the searches, recalling the untraceable nature of the virus, which was dispersed widely through the popular online forum, 2channel. The defense, meanwhile, called the allegations “complete nonsense."

Came across this interesting article today about a new anti-forensics tool that can basically add a bunch of stuff into memory to obfuscate what an attacker has really been up to, or even plant evidence to implicate someone else! Interesting stuff, I'm looking forward to hearing more about it!

I came across this advisory today, which i believe is the result of the DDoS attacks that were launched against a number of online games platforms such as Steam and the Playstation Network over the Christmas break.

Team Cymru have s secure NTP template available for Cisco, Juniper and Unix systems, the Canadians have more information available here and CERT have some information; including how to verify if you're vulnerable; here.

明けましておめでとございます！
Happy New Year from Security-Samurai.net!

Some interesting articles that recently caught my eye on the impending changes to the Privacy Act in Australia (courtesy of itnews.com.au):

If true, this just leaves me speechless....