Error blamed for sex attacker's passport
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A convicted sex attacker was given a British passport and allowed to stay in the UK due to an error, the Home Office admits.
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The current passport mess is rare among government foul-ups: A top federal official has publicly taken the blame and expressed regret.
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UK.gov's own facebook The Passport Office has stopped 600 fraudulent passport applications using a facial recognition system it rolled out as a pilot across its fraud units last year.â¦
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The Conservatives on Wednesday demanded a government statement on the handling of data on foreign crime suspects after authorities admitted they had failed for a year to match details sent by the Dutch police on 15 serious crime suspects held in the British DNA police databank.
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JACKSONVILLE, Fla. - A newspaper mistakenly published the telephone number of a sex talk service on the front page on its Election Day issue. The number was supposed to be for a national voter hot line.
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Customers of HFC bank are furious after an e-mail error revealed their personal details to thousands of other people.
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A digital come-on tricks a New Zealand man into exposing himself to the wrong address.
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NZ PM Clark demands apology for actions of suspected Mossad agents jailed for passport fraud; Eli Cara, Uriel Kelman released on Wed.
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OTTAWA -- Canadian police wrongly identified an Ottawa software engineer as an Islamic extremist, prompting US agents to deport him to Syria, where he says he was tortured, an official inquiry concluded yesterday. Maher Arar, who holds Canadian and Syrian nationality, was arrested in New York in September 2002 and accused of being an Al Qaeda member. Arar, 36, says ...
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A Web site commissioned by the U.S. Transportation Security Administration (TSA) to help travelers whose names were erroneously listed on airline watch lists originally had multiple security problems that could lead to identity theft, says a congressional report released Friday.In addition, the TSA awarded the $48,816 contract for the Traveler Redress Web site based on a request for quotes with requirements that only one Web design firm could meet, says the report, released by the House of Representatives Committee on Oversight and Government Reform. The TSA&#39;s technical lead and author of a request for comments for the project was a longtime friend of the owner of Desyne Web Services and had briefly worked for the Virginia firm, the report says.&quot;This redress Web site had multiple security vulnerabilities: It was not hosted on a government domain, its homepage was not encrypted, one of its data submission pages was not encrypted, and its encrypted pages were not properly certified,&quot; the report says. &quot;These deficiencies exposed thousands of American travelers to potential identity theft.&quot;The TSA press office did not immediately respond to a request for comments on the House report. A receptionist at Desyne said the appropriate person for commenting was not available.The redress Web site went live in October 2006, and blogger Christopher Soghoian, a graduate student in informatics at Indiana University, pointed out security problems there last February. The TSA took the Desyne Web site down that month and now hosts a traveler redress form on its own Web site.&quot;This begs the question: Who are these guys, why don&#39;t they know how to use SSL, and how were they awarded this sweet contract?&quot; Soghoian wrote in February 2006. &quot;Why can&#39;t TSA do a simple form submission themselves?&quot;One of the biggest concerns raised by Soghoian and the House report is that the Desyne Web site did not use SSL encryption on its home page or on its submissions page. Travelers were asked to submit personal information, such as their Social Security numbers and birth dates. The site was not hosted on a government domain, meaning visitors &quot;lost any assurance they were visiting a legitimate government Web site,&quot; the House report says.The House report was also critical of Desyne&#39;s &quot;no-bid&quot; contract to operate the redress Web site. Desyne had done work for TSA since 2004, and as of late 2007, it continued to host the TSA&#39;s Web site where travelers could file claims for damaged property. The TSA&#39;s April 2006 request for quotes for the redress site said the design had to be consistent with the claims management site, and it had to be hosted on the same server that hosted the claims management site, the House report says.As of September, Desyne continued to operate Web sites for TSA, and the company has received more than $500,000 in business from the agency since 2004, the report says. &quot;TSA did not take action ... to sanction Desyne for poor performance,&quot; the report says.
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One of Britain&#39;s top government ministers, under fire over allegations he fast-tracked a visa for his former lover&#39;s nanny, may have made a fatal mistake -- breaking into song.
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Police issue a warning about a high-risk sex offender they believe is currently in Northern Ireland.
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The personal details of up to 600,000  people were lost when a Royal Navy officer's laptop was stolen  in the latest embarrassment to hit British Prime Minister  Gordon Brown.
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(InfoWorld) - A hacker successfully attacked a Web page within Microsoft's U.K. domain on Wednesday, resulting in the display of a photograph of a child waving the flag of Saudi Arabia. It was "unfortunate" that the site was vulnerable, said Roger Halbheer, chief security advisor for Microsoft in Europe, the Middle East and Africa, on Friday. The problem has since been fixed. However, the hack highlights how large software companies with technical expertise can still prove vulnerable to hackers. The hacker, who posted his name as "rEmOtEr," exploited a programming mistake in the site by using a technique known as SQL (Structured Query Language) injection to get unauthorized access to a database, Halbheer said. The site took SQL queries of a particular form, embedded in URLs (uniform resource locators), and passed them to a database. By embedding a query with an unexpected form in the requested URL, the hacker prompted the server to return error messages, Halbheer said. From those error messages, a hacker can get an idea of how the database is structured and refine a SQL query that the database will process as an instruction to insert, rather than retrieve, data. Eventually, the hacker found the right combination and inserted a link to an external Web site into the database. That meant when the normal Web page was called into a browser, the database would download data from an external link. In this case, it was two photos and a graphic, a screen shot of which is available on Zone-H.org , which tracks hacked Web sites. There are two ways to avoid this style of attack. First, the database should not be allowed to return error messages, Halbheer said. Secondly, the Web application should have validated the URL the hacker entered and rejected ones that should not be processed, he said. If a programmer makes a mistake, "the bad guy can leverage it," Halbheer said. SQL injection attacks are on the rise, overall, since valuable data is held within databases, said Paul Davie, founder and chief operating officer of Secerno, a security vendor that develops technology to protect databases from SQL attacks. "I don't think Microsoft are unique in this respect and shouldn't be held up as particularly slipshod," Davie said. "This could have happened to practically anybody."
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Doors to manual Ryanair's online check-in service fails to ensure users submit confidential details across a secure connection. As a result, travellers are invited to send confidential data across an unencrypted link.â¦
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The confusion and delays in passport processing are a warning to plan far ahead to renew or obtain a passport.
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A high risk sex offender who breached his bail conditions last year goes missing again.