Security Starts With You: Kids Edition

We're back with our regularly scheduled programming after a productive team retreat last week. We highlight recent security issues around the world in this week's news round-up, from Russia, to China, and on to Alexa Dell's Twitter account.

• Kremlin-funded news website Russia Today was hit by a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack over the weekend, likely in protest against the station's support for Julian Assange.
• Philipp Winter and Stefan Lindskog of Karlstad University publish a paper explaining how China's Great Firewall is effectively blocking Tor.
• Michael Dell of Dell Inc. spends $2.7 million per year on security for himself and his family, but he neglected one major gap in his security plan: his kids on social networks.
• Intelligence experts have long debated the value of open source intelligence collected from public data, but analysts are increasingly using data gathered from social media to predict social, cultural, and political shifts.
• The Electronic Frontier Foundation reports that pro-Syrian hackers are using a fake anti-hacking tool (suspiciously named AntiHacker) to install keyloggers and steal user passwords.
• British research firm Goode Intelligence says that mobile devices will feature biometric security before the end of the decade.
• InfoSec Institute has a handy guide for how to achieve anonymity with Tor. Warning: some familiarity with Linux required.
• The 2nd Freedom Online conference will take place on September 6 and 7 in Nairobi, Kenya and will focus on ICT, social responsibility, censorship, and access to the Internet.
• BentFork sounds like a new iteration of Stuxnet, but it's not: thieves in France used bent forks to steal over €1 million from ATMs.
• Face-recognition technology is becoming more widespread: from Facebook, to Disneyland, to cameras in public spaces. Sound crazy? Welcome to the future of biometric surveillance.
• The BBC predicts that the technology boom in Kenya is dependent on human capital for continued growth.
• Shlomo Kramer of Imperva warns that companies fail to understand the transformative nature of security: instead of making necessary changes to ward off the bad guys, IT managers prefer to rely on outdated security practices.