McAfee, the computer security company, has issued a fresh warning to the world’s corporations and other large organizations. The firm has warned that hackers now have these bodies fully in their sights, and that a combination of the de-centralization of the workplace (thanks to to proliferation of mobile devices and the like) and the move to the cloud means in-house security technicians have… → Read More
That didn’t take long. Yesterday, we reported that hacker @koush had successfully made the Xoom moddable by installing his ClockworkMod Recovery ROM manager. At that point root access was not achieved, but, no less than a day later he made it happen. → Read More
In a move that will surely only help move more Windows Phone 7 handsets, Microsoft have met with the team behind the WP7 Jailbreak, Chevron, and the results appear to be positive.
Writing on their blog yesterday, Rafael Rivera, Chris Walsh, and Long Zheng have revealed what they can (outside of the NDA they voluntarily signed) about the 2 days of meetings, and are “genuinely excited” about what… → Read More
Darn shame that none of us thought to attend the Chaos Communication Congress in Berlin. Why cover fun stuff, right? Thankfully PSGroove made it out there, and came away with video of a video game console security discussion. The Wii has been “broken” (hackable, in other words) pretty much since Day One; the Xbox 360 has been hackable for a few years now (JTAGing is the way to go these days)… → Read More
KrebsOnSecurity has a fascinating look at ATM skimmers. After approaching a Russian skimmer “salesperson,” Brian Krebs asked about the latest and greatest in skimmer technology. His recommendation? A GSM-based SMS transfer system that blows out the contents of your card’s magnetic stripe whenever you swipe it. Because it’s inexpensive to build and install, you can even… → Read More
China Telecom, alleged to have hijacked all that Internet traffic back in April, has denied any wrongdoing. Meanwhile, the Chinese government has not commented on the matter. Hmm… → Read More
Reminds me of that Penny-Arcade strip… → Read More
This is probably a case of where the idea is sound but humans will no doubt muck everything up. Thirty-three states here in the good ol’ U.S. will allow military and overseas citizens to vote via the Internet beginning with the mid-term election in November. This is being done in part to ensure that overseas voters’ votes, you know, count. I don’t know how many of y’all have ever lived overseas… → Read More
There’s a trend that’s been disturbing me lately. When the topic of modding or jailbreaking comes up — say, in the wake of the iPad announcement, or Sony’s restrictive PS3 update — there is an outcry. Who am I to tell Apple what’s best for their devices? How can I in good conscience urge others to void their warranties or break license agreements? And why should… → Read More
Pretty much spot-on, this. There’s an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal that argues that Americans should badger Congress and the president, asking them to hold off on doling out stimulus dollars to electronic medical record systems that don’t have appropriate privacy safeguards in place. As it stands, electronic medial records aren’t exactly sealed—insurance companies can peek at them, as… → Read More
At what point do you stop trying to track and prosecute cyber-criminals? Obviously, you can’t let criminals run around willy-nilly, but when you look at the resources involved in bringing those guys to justice—and are you really nabbing the right guys in the first place?—it’s worth at least talking about. Is fighting cyber-crime about as futile as fighting the war on drugs? → Read More
Google was attacked by hackers in China. Microsoft reports that they’re the target of hackers all day, every day. Now Intel is stepping forward, and admitting in their annual 10-K filing that they were the target of a sophisticated attack. Intel observes that it might be industrial espionage, or it might be “hackers seeking to harm the company.” It makes you wonder how many attacks on smaller… → Read More
The Chinese hacker saga continues, with some pretty huge news having emerged in the past few hours. U.S. authorities have identified, so they think, the sole person responsible for the underlying code used on attacks on Google and others. He’s a “freelance security consultant” in his 30s, and he was able to take down almighty Google by exploiting a previously unknown hole in Internet Explorer. → Read More
Last week I met Gever Tulley, author of the provocatively-titled “Fifty Dangerous Things You Should Let Your Kids Do.” The book grew out of a 2007 TED talk about why embracing and exploring danger ultimately lessens it. (See! Good things do come out of TED. Let the TED-TechCrunch healing begin!) The book doesn’t advocate playing in traffic, but it does extol the virtues of things like… → Read More
I’ve been led to believe that Club Mate (pronounced: ma-tay) is the drink in the international hacker community. Being a fan of the international hacker community—and by “hacker” I don’t mean stupid idiots who DDOS Web sites for lulz, but rather people who enjoy tinkering with the world around them—I decided to buy a case. → Read More
Please turn your attention to Rolling Stone, where an article about a blind, lonely phreaker is currently tearing up the charts. That is to say, it’s an article worth your time, certainly better than refreshing drudgereport.com for the thousandth time in a day. → Read More
Here’s an updated statement that T-Mobile just released regarding the possible breach of servers that may or may not have occurred over the weekend. “Following a recent online posting that an alleged hacker apparently accessed T-Mobile servers, the company is conducting a thorough investigation and at this time has found no evidence that customer information, or other company… → Read More
Researchers from the University of California, Santa Barbara, have published a report after taking over a massive botnet called Torpig aka Sinowal. The malware network was able to collect 56,000 passwords and hour as well as 70GB of financial and personal data.
The researchers found that most users reused passwords for multiple sites and that the malware was able to steal credit card numbers and… → Read More
Pwn2Own, a sort of Gray Hat extravaganza, is going to be cracking browsers and phones for the third year in a row this March. It’ll go from the 18th to the 20th and thousands of dollars in prizes. Many will enter, few will pwn. → Read More
Wired’s Brian X. Chen twittered to the world that Apple was suing his publication over his video tutorial teaching us Luddites how to hack netbooks to run Mac OS X. As Giz points out, Apple isn’t likely to sue them, but, rather, send over a cease and desist order. It’s all pretty trivial if you ask me. → Read More
Datel and Sony Computer Entertainment Europe clearly don’t like each other very much. How do we know this? SCEE has taken Datel to court over its as yet unreleased “Lite Blue Tool,” which has been renamed the Max Power Digital. The device would let users hack, in a sense, the PSP. Sony didn’t care for this very much, and is now in lawsuit mode. → Read More
My fellow Americans: tomorrow’s the big day, Election Day, wherein we are able to exercise our right to wait in line all day at a fire house or elementary school, rubbing shoulders with “neighbors” and trading pleasantries about what we think about that Obama fellow. It should be fun. Yet, our voting system stinks. Not only that, but our voting system could be vulnerable to fraud, and… → 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
http://vimeo.com/moogaloop.swf?clip_id=2069634&server=vimeo.com&show_title=1&show_byline=1&show_portrait=0&color=&fullscreen=13G Baseband Tool from iphonedev on Vimeo. The wizards at the iPhone-Dev Team have just about cracked the iPhone baseband which means carrier unlock is almost upon us. What does this mean? Sadly, not much. The iPhone is still physically –… → Read More
http://vimeo.com/moogaloop.swf?clip_id=2007855&server=vimeo.com&show_title=1&show_byline=1&show_portrait=0&color=&fullscreen=1Compromising Electromagnetic Emanations of Keyboards Experiment 1/2 from Martin Vuagnoux on Vimeo. Two doctoral students have produced what is probably the most fascinating hack (or whatever you want to call it) of the year. Using custom… → Read More
Whoops. Fox News is reporting that the World Bank is smack-dab in the middle of what “may be the worst security breach ever at a global financial institution.” It’s not really clear what exactly has happened but it is clear that this isn’t the first time that the bank has had problems with its cyber security and that some of the more serious past intrusions have come from IP addresses… → Read More
http://www.g4tv.com/lv3/29183 Yes, that evil “hacker” who broke into Sarah Palin’s e-mail account was indicted yesterday. Politics aside, it was a pretty dumb thing to do, especially posting the e-mails online after the fact. To that end, here’s renowned computer security consultant (and former HACKEROMG) Kevin Mitnick giving his opinion on the whole matter on G4′s Attack of… → Read More
Hey script kiddies, next time you steal some unsuspecting person’s password, you’d better be prepared to do five years in prison. That’s what the kid who “hacked” Sarah Palin’s Yahoo e-mail account faces, now that he’s been indicted by a federal grand jury. The kid, now identified as David Kernell, a 20-year-old student at the University of Tennessee, has been… → Read More
The dream of a short — and I mean really short — boot cycle is getting closer to reality. As it stands, though, even these experienced IT guys had to chop quite a lot off from already lean systems in order to hit their goal of CPU and drives idle after only 5 seconds. And on an Eee PC, no less. I’m not the most informed guy on Linux boot processes, but it sounds like they really… → Read More
The following is the first entry in my BAFTA-winning series, “Privacy, piracy and the dark side of the Internet.” It’ll be slightly above average. Beauty queen turned vice-presidenial nominee Sarah Palin had her Yahoo! e-mail account broken into last week. (Who uses Yahoo! e-mail?) It was a heinous crime, right up there with the Lindburg baby, and one that exposed her horribly boring… → Read More
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Disrupt Europe: Berlin Hackathon
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