Police Have Suspect in Bali Bombing; Pro-Islamic Hackers Gear up for Cyberwar, Experts Say; Kournikova Virus Author Loses Appeal; How Your Brain May Be Used Against You

Police Have Suspect in Bali Bombing

According to an AP report posted on the Mercury News site this morning, investigators have a suspect in the Bali nightclub bombings that killed nearly 200 peoplemost of them foreign tourists. Top police general Gen. I Made Mangku Pastika told reporters that detectives had pieced together a composite sketch of the unnamed suspect in the Oct. 12 bombing based on witness testimony. The suspect is Indonesian and is being sought by police, he said, offering no other details.Pro-Islamic Hackers Gear up for Cyberwar, Experts SayReuters news service today. London-based computer security firm mi2g says that October has already qualified as the worst month for overt digital attacks since its records began in 1995. And according to the zone-H database, an independent site which monitors hacker activity, politically motivated website defacements make up around 11 percent of the total. Also today, an AFP story posted on the South Africa-based portal iAfrica says that the al-Qaeda network has begun using hackers who break into websites to create secret pages that send messages to its followers. What is unusual, say security specialists, is that the operators of the innocent websites are often unaware of the intrusion until well after the fact, because the data is place on a hidden file that can only be accessed with the correct code. Its less of a hijack than a parasite attack, the story quotes one expert.

Internet experts say that pro-Islamic hackers have been escalating attacks against countries backing the U.S. war on terror and its campaign against Iraq, according to

Kournikova Virus Author Loses AppealThe Register today. An appeals court in Leeuwarden, Netherlands, yesterday upheld the order imposed by a Dutch district court last September. To press for a lengthier sentence the FBI submitted evidence to the Dutch court, suggesting that $166,000 in damages was caused by the worm, based on reports of damage from 55 firms. However the court felt the FBI report didn’t give enough details, and also felt that de Wit’s position as a first-time offender who gave himself up was in his favor.

Jan de Wit, aka OnTheFly, infamous author of the Anna Kournikova worm, has lost his appeal against his sentence of 150 hours of community service for creating and distributing the prolific worm, according to a story in

Your Brain May Be Used Against YouPhiladelphia Enquirer. It is easy to imagine such scanners being used in interrogation of criminal suspects or terrorists about their associates. Gur described just such possibilities for national security experts at a recent Penn workshop. Further refined, the techniques could revolutionize police work, improve national security, and threaten personal privacy, writes the Enquirer, and quotes physicist Robert Park, an outspoken critic of old-fashioned, unreliable polygraph machines: “It’s the scariest thing around. The only thing worse than a lie detector that doesn’t work is one that does.”

Ruben Gur, a neuropsychologist at the University of Pennsylvania, says new kinds of brain scans can reveal when a person recognizes a familiar face, no matter how hard he or she tries to conceal it, according to an article in todays