PARIS, April 11 (UPI) — French automaker Renault SA said it had reached tentative settlements with three improperly fired executives, but others could lose jobs due to the scandal.
The scandal began in January, when the company said it had evidence three executives in its electric car division had been paid to leak information. The company has since said it had been scammed and paid for fraudulent information that implicated the executives, The Wall Street Journal reported Monday.
After a director’s meeting Monday in which Chief Executive Officer Carlos Ghosn was reported to have apologized to board members, Renault said second in command, Chief Operating Officer Patrick Pelata, would be reassigned and three officials in the firm’s internal security office would now be subjected to disciplinary action.
Chief legal counsel Christian Husson, corporate secretary Laurence Dors and senior executive Jean-Yves Coudriou were all suspended, the firm said.
Renault said it had reached preliminary settlements with Michel Balthazard, Matthieu Tenenbaum and Bertrand Rochette, the three who were fired in January, and with Philippe Clogenson, an executive wrongfully dismissed in 2009.
French authorities are investigating the fraud concerning the purchase of false information, the newspaper said.
Allegations of espionage and email snooping enveloped Montreal’s city hall on Monday, with a senior elected member of the governing party at the centre of the scandal.
Veteran city councillor Claude Dauphin said Monday he wants answers after being informed his emails were opened by a senior city bureaucrat after prompting by provincial police.
The fresh allegations added to an increasingly chaotic situation at scandal-plagued city hall.
Mayor Gerald Tremblay revealed the espionage occurred in the midst of an internal investigation involving Dauphin, who is chairman of city council and a member of Tremblay’s political party.
Municipal regulations explicitly forbid city employees from investigating elected officials and their staff.
“The real case that concerns us today is whether or not an elected official was subject to an investigation without his knowledge: Were my communications spied upon?,” Dauphin said shortly before an afternoon city council meeting that was quickly postponed.
“If the response is yes, then it’s totally unacceptable and it’s totally illegal.”
Dauphin is asking why city controller Pierre Reid opened his emails.
Reid is a veteran bureaucrat who has been at the centre of espionage scandals in recent months.
The 30-year veteran city employee spearheaded a secret investigation into Montreal auditor general Jacques Bergeron which came to light in February.
On Monday, Reid was relieved of his duties as controller but will remain with the city in a different capacity, Tremblay said.
Tremblay noted the emails were opened as part of an internal investigation into a deal involving Dauphin, a probe the mayor said produced “troubling facts.”
He said Reid was acting in good faith and only doing his job and that it was police who suggested the emails be scrutinized.
The catch: there was no formal, written request from either the police or the Quebec government.
“I think that Pierre Reid had a difficult (job),” Tremblay said.
“He was in a position where there were a lot of allegations of collusion and corruption and a lot of irregularities.”
The Tremblay administration has been under fire to fire Reid since a revelation that a 10-month investigation of the auditor general was conducted after anonymous tips that Bergeron had behaved improperly.
The bureaucrats alleged the investigation found that Bergeron awarded contracts to his family and used city resources for personal reasons.
Some elected officials expressed concern that espionage was widespread within city hall and they asked again on Monday for Reid to be fired outright.
“I don’t understand how Mayor Tremblay can reconcile his solemn declarations to Montrealers that there had been no espionage of elected officials,” said opposition Coun. Alex Norris of Projet Montreal.
“It’s a completely absurd situation and it’s difficult to maintain any confidence in Mayor Tremblay when he says one thing and then the opposite two weeks later.”
The mayor has also requested that new guidelines be drafted to require official written authorization from police or government officials before emails are searched.
Tremblay said Dauphin will be asked to step down as council speaker and from the party caucus pending the police investigation. A city hall motion to that effect could come as early as Tuesday.
Dauphin has denied any wrongdoing and says the transaction involving property in the west-end borough where he is mayor was above board.
He said he will not step down.
“On the basis of a document I haven’t seen, the mayor asked me to resign, which I’ve refused,” Dauphin said, adding his reputation is on the line.
Users of Internet Protocol version 4 (IPv4) networks, beware man-in-the-middle attacks. That’s because such networks can be exploited using capabilities built into IPv6, the next-generation standard for expanding the number of addresses for Internet-connected devices.
In particular, someone with malicious intent could “impose a parasitic IPv6 overlay network on top of an IPv4-only network, so that an attacker can carry out man-in-the-middle attacks on IPv4 traffic,” said Alec Waters, a security researcher for InfoSec Institute, in a blog post. While his proof-of-concept attack scenario targets Windows 7, it should also work against Windows Vista, Windows 2008 Server, or “any operating system that ships with IPv6 installed and operational by default,” he said.
The attack works by introducing an IPv6 router into an IPv4 network, but only connecting the router to the IPv4 Internet. Using router advertising (RA) to create addresses–via a process known as Stateless Address Auto Configuration (SLAAC)–the attacker can control where traffic travels. Next, an attacker can use NAT-PT, “an experimental protocol used to connect IPv6 only networks to the legacy IPv4 network,” said Johannes Ullrich, chief research officer for the SANS Institute, in a blog post that analyzes this so-called SLAAC attack.
“By combining the fake RA advertisements with NAT-PT, the attacker has the ability to intercept traffic that would normally use IPv4,” he said. “To make things more interesting, if a host has IPv6 and IPv4 connectivity, the IPv6 connection is preferred, causing this attack to work even better.”
One mitigating factor, however, is that an attacker would have to physically place a router in the targeted environment–although that could also be a public Wi-Fi hotspot.
This vulnerability was filed with MITRE on April 6, though a Windows fix was absent from this month’s mega-Patch Tuesday.
But is this a vulnerability or a feature? In fact, there’s a dispute over whether this is a bug at all. According to the MITRE vulnerability listing, “it can be argued that preferring IPv6 complies with [the IPv6 protocol], and that attempting to determine the legitimacy of an RA is currently outside the scope of recommended behavior of host operating systems.”
“The severity of the attack is disputed, because this is the default configuration of Windows Vista/7/2008 OSes, and it also follows the RFC recommended implementation of a ‘dual stack’ (IPv4 and IPv6) network stack,” said Jack Koziol, a senior instructor and security program manager at InfoSec Institute, and co-author of The Shellcoder’s Handbook: Discovering and Exploiting Security Holes, in an email interview. Regardless of how it’s labeled, he said, IPv4 is still “vulnerable to the traffic interception and the SLAAC attack.”
The IPv6 story has been a tale of slow adoption. But as IPv4 addresses dwindle, organizations have been urged to increase their adoption of IPv6, for which a standard was developed by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) in 2003. Even the White House has put its muscle behind such a message, releasing a transition tool to emphasize the importance of adopting the newer protocol.
So, how can IPv4-using organizations protect themselves against a SLAAC attack? “IPv6 is a wonderful protocol. But if you don’t need it: Turn it off. If you need it, then monitor and defend it like IPv4,” said Ullrich.
Interestingly, there’s a defense against the SLAAC attack, known as the Secure Neighbor Discovery (SEND) protocol, said Koziol. Except that Microsoft doesn’t use SEND in its current products. “It seems after the engineers from Microsoft and Ericsson finished writing the IETF document, they also wrote and filed a patent on the process. So Microsoft has concerns implementing SEND, due to legal concerns with Ericsson,” he said.
Hugh Grant … on a revenge mission against the UK tabloids.
Hugh Grant has turned the tables on the English paparazzi by bugging a confessed tabloid phone-hacker.
The Four Weddings and a Funeral star secretly taped a conversation with former News of the World reporter Paul McMullan and managed to elicit some juicy confessions from the former hack.
McMullan is one of the whistleblowers in the phone-hacking scandal which has shamed the Rupert Murdoch-owned tabloid News of The World and forced News International to issue a public apology to bugged celebrities.
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In an article for New Statesman, Grant revealed his revenge mission.
Grant visited McMullan at his Dover pub after a chance encounter with the former News of the World features editor when the actorâs car broke down on a country road.
McMullan had given Grant a lift and during the journey confirmed he had been among the celebrities bugged by News of the World.
Grant decided he wanted to know more and returned with a concealed tape recorder to McMullanâs pub.
During the conversation, McMullan repeated accusations against former News of The World editor Andy Coulsonâs knowledge of the nefarious methods used by his reporters, including McMullan himself, to generate stories.
He also said 20 per cent of the Metropolitan police had taken back-handers from tabloid hacks and told Grant celebrities had to expect to lose their right to privacy.
ââI mean, if you donât like it, youâve just got to get off the stage. Itâll do wonders,ââ he said.
The New Statesman website reportedly crashed as Grantâs article created a stir in England and on Twitter. Stephen Fry tweeted ââsheer class from Hugh Grant. Magnificent.ââ
During the reported conversation, McMullan spilled the beans on his dealing with various celebrities:
On Johnny Depp
McMullan said it was difficult to snatch a shot of Depp.
ââYou know, I was in Venice and he was a nightmare to do because he walks around looking like Michael Jackson. And the punchline was . . . after leading everyone a merry dance the film was shot on an open balcony – I mean, it was like – he was standing there in public,ââ he said.
On Nicole Kidman
McMullan told Grant he was sent to find out about Nicole Kidmanâs sex life while she was in Cannes for the movie Moulin Rouge!.
ââBasically my brief was to see who Nicole Kidman was shagging – what she was doing, poking through her bins and get some stuff on her,ââ he said.
On the Royal Family
McMullan claimed the so-called Squidgy tapes of Princess Dianaâs phone conversations were recorded by members of the paparazzi using a digital scanner in the back of van parked outside her residence.
The tapes were originally said to have been recorded by radio hams. Digital scanners were later outlawed.
On Rupert Murdoch
He said the chief of News Limited may not have been aware of the illegal activities going on at his English newspapers.
On Divine Brown
He said Murdoch was furious when Brown, the prostitute caught with Grant in 1995, was used on the front-page of one of his tabloids and complained it was lowering the tone of the publication.
Corporate espionage is a business almost as old as corporations, but thanks to the Internet revolution it has a new business model: cybercrime. A new report from McAfee illustrates how intellectual property and trade secrets are becoming the primary target for hackers, and providing the currency that fuels the cyber underground.
The recent attack against RSA–resulting in the compromise of sensitive data related to the SecurID two-factor authentication that many corporations rely on to guard against unauthorized access and protect data–is an example of how even the very companies that we trust to help guard against corporate espionage are not invulnerable themselves. Hacked SecurID tokens could be used as a stepping stone to more serious corporate espionage.
“Cybercriminals have shifted their focus from physical assets to data driven properties, such as trade secrets or product planning documents,” said Simon Hunt, vice president and chief technology officer, endpoint security at McAfee. “We’ve seen significant attacks targeting this type of information. Sophisticated attacks such as s Operation Aurora, and even unsophisticated attacks like Night Dragon, have infiltrated some of the of the largest, and seemingly most protected corporations in the world. Criminals are targeting corporate intellectual capital and they are often succeeding.”
Personal information–names, addresses, birth dates–are still hot commodities for identity theft, and financial details–credit card numbers, bank account passwords–are big business as well. Don’t hold your breath waiting for botnets and other malware to stop trying to steal those types of data. But, hacking into corporate networks and stealing intellectual capital is generally safer and more lucrative.
