Andrew “Weev” Auernheimer has been placed in “administrative segregation,” prison shorthand for solitary confinement for “investigative purposes.” Supporters believe he was locked down and given no Internet access because of his ability to send Tweets to a third party who relayed them on his private account. Auernheimer has not sent electronic messages since April 8. → Read More
Needs some pharmacologicals? Dirty deeds done dirt cheap? There’s an app (or website) for that.
For years, the Silk Road has been a source for black market dealings. Hidden on the Tor network, Silk Road is technically unreachable from the “normal” Internet without special secure software. Now, however, a few hackers who are attempting to remain nameless are working on a secure version of the… → Read More
Security writer Brian Krebs’ phone was spoofed and a SWAT team called to his home last week by hackers who apparently took offense at his investigations into various online hacking organizations. His website also suffered a denial of service attack for a short period. → Read More
Services on code-sharing site GitHub have been disrupted for over an hour in what started as a “major service outage” because of a “brief DDoS attack.” This is the second DDoS attack in as many days and at least the third in the last several months: Yesterday, GitHub also reported a DDoS incident. And in October 2012, the service also went down due to malicious hackers. → Read More
On June 14th, 2010, Michael Arrington awarded a Crunchie to two members of Goatse Security via a blog post for discovering, publishing and trying to fix a pretty egregious security flaw that they discovered on AT&T’s public website. Before going to jail, Andrew Auernheimer’s (aka “weev”) bucket list of what he wanted was the Crunchie that TechCrunch awarded to him. → Read More
With hacking and malware on the rise, Europe is cracking down on cybersecurity: today the European Commission, working with the High Representative of the Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy, is launching a new cybersecurity strategy along with a proposed directive on how to implement it (both embedded below). Among other things, the directive calls for each member state of the EU to set… → Read More
Jailbreaking has returned, and already servers are overloaded. Today, a group of iOS hackers styling themselves as the Evad3rs team has released a usable jailbreak for the iPhone 5, as well as any other iOS device capable of running iOS 6.0 or 6.1, with the exception of the Apple TV (3rd generation). The process of jailbreaking devices has grown more difficult through the years. This is thanks to… → Read More
Twitter is sending out emails to 250,000 users it says may have had their accounts compromised in the last week as the site experienced “unusual access patterns that led to us identifying unauthorized access attempts to Twitter user data.” Twitter tells TechCrunch that this is “not related” to the widespread, but intermittent, outage the site saw yesterday. → Read More
Competitions like Pwn2Own are a staple of the security research scene and with Pwnium 3, Google today announced the latest edition of its own competition. What’s different this time around is the target. For the first time, the focus of the Pwnium competition is now Chrome OS, Google’s Linux-based browser-centric operating system. In total, Google is making up to $3.14159 million in pi prize money… → Read More
Facebook today announced that it has opened registration for the Hacker Cup, its annual competition for programmers with a $5,000 top prize for the best of them all. Facebook holds the Hacker Cup in rounds, starting first online and then culminating in a final onsite round at Facebook’s HQ in Menlo Park, CA for the top 25 programmers. This years preliminary rounds will be held between January 25… → Read More
ENISA, the European Network and Information Security Agency, today called out drive-by exploits as the biggest, most increasing threat of the moment in the Internet landscape, amongst a sea of other all-too-familiar issues like worms, phishing and botnets. Spam, one of the oldest and most annoying aspects of being online, is the only threat that is on the wane, according to ENISA’s Threat… → Read More
While I don’t often hold stock in random pronouncements by magazines, I’m shocked and thrilled that Entrepreneur Magazine named Limor Fried, founder of Adafruit Industries, as their 2012 Entrepreneur of the Year. Limor runs a $4.5 million company with 25 employees and she produces some of the coolest electronic gadgets around. → Read More
While organized hackathons and startup-building events have begun to sprout up across the globe thanks to companies like AngelHack and Startup Weekend, university-focused hackathons remain underrepresented. General Catalyst, the veteran venture capital firm based in Massachusetts and Palo Alto, wants to change that. General Catalyst, in partnership with hacker event specialist Signalfire, has… → Read More
Pakistan’s domain registry provider PKNIC has posted an explanation of what it says happened when visits to a number of high-profile websites last weekend redirected to another page — in many cases to one with a photo of penguins and a message from someone called Eboz claiming responsibility. It says that during a security upgrade, a vulnerability opened up, which let someone breach four user… → Read More
In a cool report by the Georgian Government, Georgian CERT researchers claim to have nabbed a hacker by infecting his PC with malware and tracking him down by grabbing his files, photographs, and even viewing him at work. The hacker ran the Georbot Botnet, a botnet designed to spy specifically on Georgian citizens. → Read More
Great design and developer talent is, as so many know, hard to come by. So online social club Grouper is launching what it calls a “Hackation” in which it plans to offer select developers a free, week-long trip to New York City. On this week-long trip, thanks to partnerships with Airbnb and Hipmunk, developers and designers will get the opportunity to visit NYC (which means free airfare from… → Read More
So here’s something you may have seen floating around on Hacker News or elsewhere, but we thought it was cool enough to share in case you’re looking for something to do with your weekend. After all, there are few of us who don’t love stories that end with robots. Especially robots controlled by phones.
Robots have indeed fascinated many of us since childhood, and thanks to modern technology… → Read More
It’s hard being a hacker’s darling. Pastebin is a dox dumping site – as well as a useful tool for programmers and writers who want to share a piece of text or store it for later – and it is facing what could be a termed a problem of popularity. Because groups like Anonymous have used the service to dump sensitive information, the company has been banned in Turkey and Pakistan and, more important… → Read More
One of the most exciting trends of the early 21st century has been the explosion of hacker culture around the world. By hackers, I don’t mean people who pose security threats to computer networks. I’m referring simply to people who use technology to create useful products. For a number of reasons, the next few decades will see more hackers added to the global population than at any time in… → Read More
A San Francisco-based team has just won the DARPA Shredder Challenge. DARPA, the government agency whose work led to the creation of the Internet, challenged the public to reconstruct five shredded documents. The winning team, called “All Your Shreds Are Belong to U.S.” completed the task in 33 days, spending nearly 600 man-hours building algorithms and piecing together more than 10,000… → Read More
Remember when Google was hacked by Chinese spies about 18 months ago? Well, that just scratched the surface of some of the more serious and persistent hacking operations over the past few years. In a detailed blog post that is both eye-opening and a brilliant piece of marketing, McAfee’s VP of Threat Research Dmitri Alperovitch lays out the details of Operation Shady RAT (Remote Access Tool), an… → Read More
Unfortunately for PlayStation Network and Qriocity services users, it looks like the widespread network outages will continue.
Since Sony’s PlayStation and music networks went down two days ago, there has been a fair amount of public speculation over the cause of the outage. (Largely due to Sony’s tight-lipped handling of public relations.) Many blamed vengeful gremlins loose in Sony’s server… → Read More
A Chinese company, NetQin, allegedly secretly installed malware whenever users installed a copy of their special “cellular malware detector” and then charged a 30 cent update fee to remove the virus. The software also deleted other anti-virus solutions on Android phones. NetQin has denied the accusation and chalks up the nasty talk to an upset competitor. → Read More
The crusading Phil Torrone offers us a long and detailed list of things Sony has done in the past decade or so to stifle CE innovation and prevent the unauthorized use of their hardware. Whether you’re on the side of “hack everything every day” or, on the other hand, wish these script kiddie pirates would just shut up, you have to admit that Sony’s often ham-handed techniques have diminished their… → Read More
Chinese hackers are at it again. This time they went after five multinational oil and gas companies and got some very sensitive information including bidding contracts, proprietary industrial processes and other financial documents. The attack is being called “Night Dragon” by Dmitri Alperovitch, McAfee’s vice president for threat research. Alperovitch said that, “It speaks to quite a sad state of… → Read More
This, ladies and gentlemen, is good clean fun for everyone. It’s a video, yes, and one that shows what could be the world’s worst hacker attempting to create a little mischief. This is genuinely worth the click-through, trust me. → Read More
Help Mozilla squash a bug, earn some money. Nothing wrong with that, right? The organization that brought us Firefox has expanded its program that pays people between $500 and $,300 for finding and reporting glitches in its software. The program originally only applied to Mozilla’s applications, like Firefox and Thunderbird, but now applies to its various online sites, like getpersonas.com and… → Read More
At the Security Innovation Network (SINET) Showcase at The National Press Club in Washington, D.C., this week, Michael Chertoff, former Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, presented a dire assessment of the cyber-security threat facing our nation. He discussed how rogue governments and hackers are quietly infiltrating our computer systems and the disasters that can be… → Read More
Now here’s a delightful story. A gentleman in Austin, Texas was laid off from his job as a car mechanic. The thing is, he was “pretty good with computers.” So, in order to get petty revenge on his former employers, he used a system to remotely disable more than 100 cars. Fun! → Read More
From now on, any story about “hackers” or “hacking” will be accompanied by a link to the song “Halcyon And On And On,” as made famous by the movie Hackers. With that in mind: who made more money last year, Wall Street fat-cats or hackers? The U.S. FDIC says that online scams cost businesses $25 million last year. These scams include phishing and other associated nonsense, which you really ought to… → Read More
Austin, TX
Seattle, WA
San Diego, CA
Menlo Park, CA
Boston, MA
Disrupt Europe: Berlin Hackathon
Berlin, Germany
