Central's blog

In light of recent events it's paramount that everyone observe complete protection at this site.

Things have been way too open in the past with people advertising precisely who they are and even going the swashbuckling route by soliciting correspondence at Hotmail accounts. (Hotmail accounts are no longer permitted for registration here at WLC.)

Irina's been out requesting that all reporters establish an account at mail.be. We've had some response but not enough. It would seem some people here don't take security seriously.

I don't think it's necessary to reiterate the obvious. The bad guys (and Georgie claimed they were at the door all the time) are trying to get in here constantly. We're most likely under a new concerted DDoS attack at the moment; the security implications when doing what we do are not trivial.

Your mail.be account should never be used 'naked' - you must connect with Tor. Those accounts are held and managed on offshore servers. So far so good. But they expose your sender IPs. And that is not good. (Yes we've written to them about this but we hardly are on pins and needles that they'll change. So we stay safe until further notice the only way we know.)

Our protection here is only as good as the weakest link in the chain. This site has been under attack on an almost daily basis. Although we're not aware of any actual break-in, we have to be prepared for this.

Try this scenario on for size.

One of the bad guys wants to get at and destroy WLC. First step is to see who's actually writing. An account with a Hotmail or other crappy webmail service is found. Bad guy now goes into that bag of tricks always kept at hand and/or simply uses Google to look up 'Hotmail hacks'.

The Hotmail account of the WLC member is now broken into. All the correspondence naively kept in that account with other members of WLC is mined. Only a few more steps at most are needed before everyone here is toast.

Watch how Ny won't answer the key question. This is going into an article of ours shortly.
(Note: the link has a better transcript; this copy wasn't properly proofread and will be fixed later.)
http://rixstep.com/1/20101119,02.shtml