Here’s some troubling news for my fellow World of Warcraftplayers. It seems that hackers, account thieves, and other miscreants have now embraced man-in-the-middle (MITM) attacks to further their evil ways. Blizzard says it’s not a widespread issue, and it’s rather difficult to pull off, but it’s something y’all should be aware of. → Read More
More news from that China hacking deal. Investigators have tracked the attacks that befell Google and other victims to two schools in China, one of which has ties to the Chinese military. Whether or not this was an officially sanctioned series of attacks, or merely a couple of comp-sci students testing out their skills, clearly nobody knows. That’s the beauty of these hacks: there’s not a chance… → Read More
Kevin’s new phone There’s a guy named Kevin Mitnick who, once upon a time, was public enemy number one when it came to computer crime. Mitnick has turned over a new leaf and is now a computer crime consultant and, apparently, his disloyalty to the script-kiddie credo has made him a target for hackers. → Read More
Here’s a fun story. Police in Australia thought they were being mighty clever when they took over an “underground hacking forum.” (The forum is r00t-y0u.org, though it seems to be down right now.) One of the hackers on the forum then retaliated by breaking into police computers using a simple SQL injection. Security fail. → Read More
Cyber criminals AKA teenagers who are just more organized than the IT staffs of their victims stole $415,000 from a sheriff’s department in Bullitt County, Kentucky. That’s right: Bullitt County. Kentucky. → Read More
The maturity of a certain segment of the pro-Pirate Bay brigade continues to impress. In the wake of last week’s guilty verdict, people had taken to the streets in Sweden. Fair enough, that’s not hurting anyone, and protest is a time-honored way to register one’s disgust with a government or institution or whatever. But now? Yeah, now hashmob-organized DDoS attacks are being orchestrated against… → Read More
Internet security experts, and the people who pretend to be them, often only track hacks and the like when there’s money or personal information involved. You know, stolen credit card numbers, eBay phishing scams, etc. That’s all well and good—“I just want to make sure my money is safe!”—but a study detailing a sample of last year’s Internet hacks, and found that 24 percent of them… → Read More
What a day! While Apple was busy announcing, relatively speaking, nothing at MacWorld, 4Chan, the bad boys of the Internet, went ahead and hacked MacRumors’ live coverage of the show; Twitter freaked out, which is to be expected. Hardly confusing wrechedness. → Read More
Dear school administrators, What’s the best way to ensure that your computer network remains riddled with security vulnerabilities that leave you, your personnel and [someone think of the] schoolchildren in danger? Why, to demonize the student who discovered the vulnerability and alerted you to it, of course. Have him charged with a felony while you’re at it. A student in a Saratoga… → Read More
We’re being told to be afraid of hackers again, only now they’re targeting our cellphones. But we use our cellphones! Security experts at Georgia Tech said that hackers, those faceless but utterly contemptible malcontents, could soon turn their attention toward creating botnets out of cellphones. These botnets wouldn’t then be used to send e-mail and so forth, but rather would be… → Read More
As soon as this story hits Drudge be prepared for all sorts of Chicken Little-related doom and gloom predictions. This ominous photo illustrates the absolute terror we all face. ::cough:: A team of security researchers, an innocent-sounding catch-all description if there ever was one, have discovered a new type denial of service attack that not only does the usual damage, but it also appears to be… → Read More
Kevin Mitnick, the infamous hacker who basically gave script-kiddies the power to lord over dumb journalists and law enforcement folks, was detained after a trip to Bogota where he gave a talk to reporters from El Tiempo. When he landed in Atlanta, customs officials pulled him out of line and searched his bags where they found: → Read More
The very fabric of our democracy came under attack last week when a hacker broke into Republican vice-presidential nominee Sarah Palin’s e-mail account. Federal investigators have since been involved, and are closing in on a possible culprit, a college student at the University of Tennessee. Investigators have tracked an IP address to student housing at The Commons in Knoxville, part of the… → Read More
Not a Russian hacker, just a filthy rich one There’s a reasonably interesting little story in Foreign Policy—I wear a big Napoleon hat when I post—about Russia’s cyber response during last week’s conflict with Georgia. It seems the Russians know a thing or two about Internet trolling, since instead of defacing Web sites and crashing anti-Russia servers, they teamed up… → Read More
In a last ditch effort Gary McKinnon, the UK hacker who allegedly hacked in to the Pentagon, is now taking his case to the European Court on Human Rights. McKinnon feels that his human rights were violated when the U.S. offered him a plea-bargain (something the UK courts to not do) to get a lighter sentence. He felt that by accepting this he would be opting himself out of a fair trial. Of course… → Read More
Could the Mac be the next big “hacker” target? Apparently one corner-office analyst thinks so, and that, in turn, is freaking The Times out. Part of the reason for Apple’s terrific second quarter was because of the record number of Macs sold. More and more Macs out there, we’re led to believe, means that the platform is the next big hacker target. What’s most… → Read More
The good computer hackers are similar to war veterans in that they spend hours talking about how great the scene used to be “back in the day”. I first heard similar stories way back in 1995 but today it is actually somewhat true as the final HOPE conference has now been held, Black Hat is now a corporate event, the good e-zines are long gone and hacking is now associated with Russian… → Read More
Wired recently hosted a sit down with the creators of the cult classic WarGames, discussing early inspiration for the script, the difficulties of selling a movie to studios who didn’t understand the technology it was based on, and how John Lennon, “was kind of a spiritual cousin to Stephen Hawking.” For more about Silicon Valley’s first favorite hacker film, check out Wired’s inside… → Read More
Before reading this, I suggest you watch the documentary Freedom Downtime, made by the folks at 2600. Go ahead, the whole thing is on Google Video. Kevin Mitnick has signed a book deal with Little, Brown and Company, giving him the opportunity to refute the outrageous claims made against him—really, he could start a nuclear war by whistling into a telephone?—while making a few dollars… → Read More
The Last HOPE is entering its final day today, and Gearfuse of all sites (!) is doing a genuinely passable job of covering it. That lanyard up there is the show’s entrance badge, the same one with built-in RFID that makes tracking attendees a cinch. If you’re anywhere near the Hotel Pennsylvania (34th Street & 7th Avenue in Manhattan), you really ought to attend. → Read More
On last night’s Off The Hook, 2600 Magazine’s weekly radio show, tech journalist Steven Levy, whose wife apparently threw out a MacBook Air a few months ago, gave a pretty great interview touching on all sorts of subjects. Hackers, Google, the open source movement, etc. Definitely worth a listen, as every edition of Off The Hook is. Levy will be speaking at next week’s HOPE… → Read More
Virgin Music sent 800 letters to “file-sharers” warning them that if they don’t read the pamphlet on being a good copyright user their broadband could be shut off. Did Virgin have any power over user’s broadband? No, but it’s always nice to get a letter in the mail, isn’t it? The addressees were collected by the UK’s BPI and sent out to discourage folks… → Read More
A student in Coto de Caza, California has done what each and every one of us has only dreamed of doing; he broke into his school’s computers and changed his grades. Gather ‘round children, and I’ll tell ye of the time that your old buddy Doug failed his fourth grade geography test. See, I mistakenly labeled Pennsylvania as New York and all hell broke loose as I filled in the remaining states… → Read More
This kind of sucks. After all the ballyhoo yesterday regarding Firefox 3 and it’s 8.4 million downloads comes word of the first vulnerability in the browser, a zero day attack (see update here) that would allow an attacker to trick a user into executing their code, which could wreak all kinds of havoc on a computer. The details of the hole aren’t given, so hacker types can’t take… → Read More
Look out, it’s Comcast Hackers attacking! A group of ne’er-do-wells defaced Comcast’s portal last night, pwning the landing page for many of its Internet subscribers who are too dumb to figure out how to set their own home page. The attack was more than cosmetic, as it disrupted the @comcast.com email addresses of many users, as well as many hosted email accounts. It should be… → Read More
Remember back in the early days of the Internet people were worried that “hackers” could break into their computers and cause permanent hardware damage, and those of us in-the-know would be all, “pshaw! Can’t happen” about it? As it turns out, a new attack method called a PDOS (permanent denial-of-service) can do just that. It’s going to be demonstrated this… → Read More
When I was 14, I was busy reading Stephen King and, ummmm, touching myself. A team of five kids in Spain, however, have spent the last two years hacking 21,000 web pages. The youngest pair started at 14 and just got caught after police in Barcelona, Burgos, Malaga, and Valencia worked together to bring down this insolent ring of rapscallions. Why were they caught? The kids defaced the website of… → Read More
According to Jonathan Zittrain, the Internet is being locked down by unhackable devices. In a Reuters interview, Zittrain, an Internet law expert, believes that devices like the iPhone and PCs are changing the way people use and “hack” the Internet, reducing our freedom while stealing from us the opportunity to create new and novel applications. He calls them “tethered… → Read More
A flaw in MS’s IIS is allowing hackers to install malicious code on website visitor’s machines. The exploit, VML MS07-004, allows for SEO poisoning and can serve up data via Javascript and send browsers to other websites. Interestingly enough they’ve used the exploit to infect the United Nations main page, dumping SEO noise into the HTML and potentially sending users to a website… → Read More
[photopress:jerks.jpg,full,left]I’m all for griefing, I really am. Messing with institutions needs to be done, even if they’re virtual, even if they’re fun MMORPGs. No, especially if it’s with gamers. But leave the disabled alone, please. Hackers used JavaScript to cause panicky, flashing, multi-colored images to flash on a message board that cause people with epilepsy to… → Read More
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