Months after Google said that Chinese hackers were targeting the Gmail accounts of senior U.S. government officials, attempts to hijack Gmail inboxes continue, a researcher said Thursday.
"Once compromises happen and are covered in the news, they do not disappear and attackers don't give up or stop. They continue their business as usual," said Mila Parkour, an independent security researcher based in Washington, D.C., on her Contagio Malware Dump website.
Read full article: http://bit.ly/qXLgMfIn an old Soviet-era aircraft museum at Finowfurt, a small town just north of Berlin, hackers have gathered this week for the Chaos Communication Camp 2011, hosted by Germany's oldest hackers, the Chaos Computer Club.
From August 10-14, attendees live in thousands of tents next to the grass-covered hangars and in amongst the rusting planes in the fields, they came to indulge all their usual computer urges, and then go a little further.
Read full article: http://bit.ly/py4fwaAfter the biggest crisis of his premiership David Cameron talks about how to fix a broken society, and the contagion of despair in Britain's bleakest neighbourhoods.
What kept you? That's the first thing I want to ask David Cameron, as I sit down opposite him on the mid-morning train from Euston to Manchester. On Monday night, I say, I took refuge with my children in a friend's house in Hackney, a few hundred yards further away from the boiling disorder, far enough to feel safe; and, as I watched the scenes of conflagration and looting unfold on-screen, I did ask out loud: where is our Prime Minister?
Read full article: http://bit.ly/ndYJelPolice are using computerised facial imaging technology to identify and arrest rioters and looters who wreaked havoc across Britain's major cities.
Specialist officers at Scotland Yard match images from CCTV and even high-powered cameras on helicopters with pictures stored in the computerised files of people who had been arrested or charged.
Read full article: http://bit.ly/mSrSPuThe decision by BART officials to interrupt wireless service at several downtown San Francisco stations Thursday in an attempt to disrupt possible protest plans has drawn criticism.
The transit agency interrupted wireless service for several hours in response to a possible planned protest that was spurred by the fatal shooting of 45-year-old Charles Hill by BART police July 3.
Read full article: http://bit.ly/o6TVlEAn international group of hackers threatened Saturday to wage a cyberwar against BART in retaliation for the agency's decision to cut cell phone service to prevent a separate protest last week.
The activist group, known as Anonymous, also called for a nonviolent protest Monday evening at BART's Civic Center Station.
Members of the Anonymous group have claimed responsibility for disrupting Tunisian and Libyan government websites to coincide with street protests.
Read full article: http://bit.ly/q018C4Read full article: http://bit.ly/nN2RFr
For as long as there have been computers, there has always been a small minority who tried to hack, crack, code and script their way around the inner workings, making electronics and computers do things that they weren't designed for.
Hacking isn't by any means a new thing, as some of its roots can be traced back to WWII when the Allied forces decrypted the Nazi Enigma machine. It was said that the German war-time system of messaging couldn't be cracked, but through hard work, the Americans managed to do just that.
Read full article: http://bit.ly/oWKjOUThe shadowy protest group known as Anonymous is planning a protest for rush hour on Monday at the Civic Center BART station, following a false start Thursday that prompted transit officials to shut down underground cell service to prevent protesters from communicating about police locations.
The group's website says the newly scheduled action is again aimed at the shooting deaths of unarmed men by BART police, and that protesters will be wearing blood-stained shirts Monday "for remembrance to the blood that is on the hands of the BART police."
Read full article: http://bit.ly/nkT9XT
The latest version of Mac OSX Lion is the most secure operating system Apple has ever shipped – far more resistant to malware, with fewer operational flaws or other characteristics easily exploited by hackers than five years ago, according to a report presented at last week's Black Hat conference by Alex Stamos of San Francisco-based security consultancy iSEC Partners.
That would make OSX Lion much more secure than any Macintosh product available five or more years ago, when threats to Macs were so rare many users thought they could do without antivirus.
http://bit.ly/r9mZgeThat's the latest development in a new style of hacking sweeping across the Web, according to research by website security firm Armorize.
"The misuse of numerous small sites is making the Internet a much more dangerous place," says Alena Varkockova, lab analyst at antivirus firm Avast. "Even the unimportant sites can do big harm when misused."
Read full article: http://bit.ly/nEOYL1According to a study -"Second Annual Cost of Cyber-Crime" that Ponemon Institute recently conducted, costs of cyber-crime for businesses have grown 56% since 2010 and they inflict both government and enterprises.
Notably the study finds that cyber-crime has the potential to cause severe damage to the end-product of an organization, as it discovered a mean cost of $5.9m due to such crime for the total 50 firms polled.
What types of information are exposed when Anonymous and affiliated hacker groups publish your organization's data? A research team has done a careful study of AntiSec's most recent dump of data from law enforcement agencies--and for the individuals whose data was involved, the news is not good.
Identity Finder, a maker of identity protection and data leak prevention tools, this week released a detailed analysis of the 10-gigabyte confidential data cache of 70 U.S. law enforcement agencies that was published recently by the AntiSec movement.
Read full article: http://bit.ly/pJBiym
Jonathan Oliveras of Brooklyn, N.Y., recently pleaded guilty to one count of wire fraud and one count of aggravated identity theft in relation to a credit card fraud operation.
"According to the indictment, Oliveras purchased so-called credit card dumps (the contents of the magnetic strips) from Russian hackers and wrote the data to blank cards using specialized equipment," writes Softpedia's Lucian Constantin. "Stolen information corresponding to 2,341 credit cards was found in his possession at the time of his arrest. The cards had registered 4,400 fraudulent charges totaling $770,674."
Read full article: http://bit.ly/pg9aa8Last month, Korea University obtained a permission to establish the Department of Cyber Security. This department will receive thirty students a year, offering a full-time scholarship. The graduates will serve in the army as officers but military training or uniforms are not required. It is already attracting huge attention from high school students who dream to be hackers.
This department is also drawing attention from other countries. Professor Im Jong-in had an interview with the Washington Post. Korea suggested a new model for fostering cyber warriors. Traditionally, Korea set up educational institutes based on American models, but this time, Korea University is playing a leading role.
Read full article: http://bit.ly/qfSxv4Security researchers pointed out the vulnerability of industrial-control systems, such as programmable logic controllers and other units, during the recent Black Hat security conference in Las Vegas.
SCADA (Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition) systems are used to run power plants, manufacturing processing, petrochemical production and other critical infrastructure. At the Black Hat conference in Las Vegas, SCADA systems kept popping up in various panels as researchers discussed various ways they were vulnerable.
Read full article: http://bit.ly/pDJbc2From WikiLeaks to the Chinese attacks on U.S. government information infrastructures, cyber attacks are becoming more prevalent and threatening every day. The most lucrative target of these attacks remains America, but the rest of the international community is not immune to hacking either: It is only a matter of time before we see a coordinated hacking attempt at Germany, France, or Britain.
The defense establishment in Washington has every right to concern itself with IT protection, but a better solution will incorporate U.S. security efforts in a supranational framework to minimize the impact of hacking attacks that have the potential to bring entire states to their knees.
Read full article: http://bit.ly/nwqedA
Recent cyber security attacks using sophisticated malware (think Stuxnet) and social engineering techniques have raised the bar for defenders. Cyber Styletto pivots off these cyber events to educate and entertain. It is written as fact-based fiction.
Read full article: http://bit.ly/qMcDooNearly half the cyber-attacks hitting Chinese systems, whether they are botnets, Trojans or Web attacks, originate abroad, and the United States is the source for the largest share, Chinese officials said.
Close to 493,000 Trojan attacks hit Chinese systems in 2010, with nearly half originating from outside the country, China's National Computer Network Emergency Response technical team said Aug. 10, according to a report from thestate news service Xinhua. Of the 221,000 attacks identified as originating from outside China, 14.7 percent came from the United States and 8.8 percent from India, CNCERT officials said.
Read full article: http://bit.ly/pqIp3KNearly half the cyber-attacks hitting Chinese systems, whether they are botnets, Trojans or Web attacks, originate abroad, and the United States is the source for the largest share, Chinese officials said.
Close to 493,000 Trojan attacks hit Chinese systems in 2010, with nearly half originating from outside the country, China's National Computer Network Emergency Response technical team said Aug. 10, according to a report from thestate news service Xinhua. Of the 221,000 attacks identified as originating from outside China, 14.7 percent came from the United States and 8.8 percent from India, CNCERT officials said.
Read full article: http://bit.ly/oa3FWRThere were over 8,000 cyber attacks on the Commonwealth Games' ticketing and scoring systems in October last year but these were repelled, National Security Advisor Shivshankar Menon said here Thursday while underlining the need to strengthen cyber security.
"There were 8,000 attacks on the ticketing, timing and scoring systems and we managed to tackle them all," Mr. Menon said at the Prem Bhatia Memorial Lecture here.
The Federal Bureau of Investigation is planning to test agents about their understanding of the bureau's surveillance guidelines, a move coming more than a year after the Justice Department discovered widespread cheating on the exam.
Testing covering the recently amended Domestic Investigations and Operations Guide is to commence in the "coming weeks," according to the Main Justice blog.
The Justice Department's inspector general concluded last year that a "significant number" of the 14,000 agents cheated on the required, open-book test given in 2009.
The United States and Russia have for several years been engaged in a high-level diplomatic "reset" of their relationship, complete with a physical "reset" button; now, that "reset" has been extended to the Internet.
The current goal of a better working relationship with Russia is much like the goal pursued by the US during the Cold War: making sure that the two countries did not misinterpret each other's actions in such a way as to start an unnecessary conflict. While such relationships used to be about understanding troop movements or missile positioning, the two countries are now just as concerned with Internet actions.
"Both the US and Russia are committed to tackling common cybersecurity threats while at the same time reducing the chances a misunderstood incident could negatively affect our relationship," said Howard Schmidt, US Cybersecurity Coordinator, in a statement yesterday.
HACKERS AT DEFCON 19 were given a taste of their own medicine by pranksters from Anonymous and Lulzsec, according to a recent posting on the Seclists security disclosure web site.
The security conference that took place last week is a way for hackers and crackers to show off new techniques and flaws and flex their collective muscles, but it seems that a less than obvious experiment was also taking place.
"While most were enjoying libations or talks a very interesting event was taking place at the conference. We're all familiar with the hostility of WiFi and GSM networks at DEF CON, however, this year the most hostile network on earth was not 802.11; it was CDMA and 4G!," reads the introduction to thedisclosure made by a poster called Coderman.
El colectivo ha anunciado que se encuentra desarrollando una nueva "arma" como alternativa mejorada a los DDoS. Al parecer, la medida adoptada se debe a los arrestos de los que han sido objetos varios individuos asociados a sus acciones, todos ellos derivados al defecto en el uso del LOIC que no permite ocultar la identidad del usuario. RefRef sería el nombre de esta nueva herramienta.
En el comunicado afirman que estará lista para el mes de septiembre, momento en el que comenzarán a operar con la misma. RefRef utiliza un enfoque muy diferente a los DDoS en las webs, mientras estos últimos se centran en los paquetes TCP y UDP, RefRef se basa en un nivel mucho más sofisticado diseñado para atacar a los servidores de los sitios por detrás,se trata de "agotar la propia capacidad de procesamiento del servidor". SegúnAnonymous:
leer el artículo completo: http://bit.ly/nVb7ZI
David Cameron has promised to introduce stronger police powers in response to the riots. A range of measures could include restrictions on Twitter and other social media services.
In an emergency Commons statement, the Prime Minister said that extended police powers would be considered, such as the ability to demand that suspected criminals remove face masks.
Mr Cameron promised that offenders would pay for their crimes after the riots, many of which were organised through social media services and mobile messaging systems.
Read full article: http://bit.ly/qgUWna
Budgetary and cultural barriers are the biggest impediments to collaboration among the military services said Brig. Gen. Gregory Brundidge, director of command, control, communications and warfighting integration, U.S. European Command.
"We're programmed inside the beltway to think about money and to think about our tribes," said Brundidge Aug. 9, while speaking at an AFCEA NOVA event in Vienna, Va. "'I've got to give up money to some joint thing.' That's uncomfortable for some folks."
Read full article: http://bit.ly/rrZm5eThe Democratic governor of California has named a Republican to be the state chief information security officer.
Gov. Jerry Brown on Thursday tapped Army Col. Keith Tresh, 49, of Sacramento as director of the Office of Information Security at the California Technology Agency. Tresh had been chief information officer of the California National Guard since 2006, after serving in a number of different posts from 1993 to 2005.
Read full article: http://bit.ly/r1GlX0THE HACKTIVIST GROUP Anonymous has issued a rather thinly veiled threat to the Government about its proposed plans to shut down social networking during times of social unrest.
Fresh from his holidays, UK Prime Minister David Cameron set about making himself look like a powerful and reassuring leader. He failed, and perhaps while scrabbling towards credibility he decided that perhaps the best thing to do would be to tackle social neworking, since he thought that caused the riots and looting that have recently beset cities and towns all across the UK.
Anonymous has added police brutality to the long list of thingsthey dislike. It's quite a common occurrence these days. Something controversial or unjust happens and Anonymous adds an accused party to its public list of potential hacking targets.
Security awareness seems to be a hot topic these days on the web, with developers making apps and devices that can hack networks and machines with just a few clicks. But these applications aren't only exploiting security flaws in systems and networks, they're being used by amateur and wannabe hackers who want to have a little fun, but don't want to learn how to actually "hack" anything.
Firesheep offers these wannabe hackers instant access to people's account information when on a public Wi-Fi connection. Newstweek gives web pranksters the ability to alter online news articles and images that web surfers on the same network are viewing. FaceNiff lets Android owners hijack unencrypted login credentials from users on the same Wi-Fi network. And now there's Anti, or the Android Network ToolKit, which lets anyone with an Android device pwn people, networks and machines—
Read full article: http://bit.ly/nxMwBEAn Old Forge man accused of hacking into a woman's email account and posting a nude picture of her to her Facebook page was sentenced to a minimum of six months in prison on Wednesday.
David Sica, 25, of 613 Hickory St., Old Forge, turned himself in to the Lackawanna County district attorney's office in December after an investigation found he had hacked a woman's email account and posted the photos of her to her page.
Read article here: http://bit.ly/nCHJlKThe United States has remained the world's only global superpower since the collapse of the Soviet Union, but as the threat transitions away from being exclusively what the military likes to call "kinetic" war to include cyberwarfare, its ability to transfer its superiority into the new battlespace is being called into doubt.
In a gloomy, and at times clouded, essay in The Diplomat, Jeffrey Carr author of Inside Cyber Warfare: Mapping the Cyber Underworld, says that the U.S. will lose a cyberwar because the Pentagon fundamentally misunderstands the nature of the internet.
Read full article: http://bit.ly/qpAn8TOn the heels of McAfee's report of "Operation Shady Rat," a security research company has released a tool to help organizations determine whether their networks were compromised during the attack.
The tool, called Shady Rat Checker, checks IP addresses against those found on the "Shady Rat" command-and-control server. If an IP is found (see screenshot below), it essentially means the network is already compromised and possibly sending data to servers managed by malicious hackers.
Read full article: http://bit.ly/nYraTvIn the fight to protect consumer information in the digital age, Murrieta's Congresswoman Mary Bono Mack, R-Palm Springs, is seeking more information about the McAfee, Inc.'s report titled "Revealed: Operation Shady RAT."
The report, released Aug. 2, summarizes McAfee's findings regarding a widespread global hacking campaign taking place over the past five years.
Dmitri Alperovitch, McAfee's vice president of threat research, identifies 71 compromised parties, including U.S. government agencies, the International Olympic Agency, United Nations, international trade organizations and others.
"I would like to caution you that what I have described here has been one specific operation conducted by a single actor/group," Alperovitch wrote in the report.
Read full article: http://bit.ly/qLNXbcWhile Anonymous plots the destruction of Facebook and Lulzsec remains on the lam, another hacker (or group of hackers) decided to kick it old school by planting malware on a computer system at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. The security breach exposed the social security numbers of thousands of students, faculty, and staff, and if that's what the party responsible was after, the numbers could end up on the underground market.
UWM head Tom Luljak feels confident there was an ulterior motive, and says there isn't evidence any of the personal data data, which included both names and SS numbers, was even viewed, let alone stolen.
(NaturalNews) It is perhaps the biggest story of the year in terms of fundamental food rights, and yet with very few exceptions, old media (traditional newspapers and news outlets) has outright refused to even cover the story. In fact, NaturalNews has learned from an inside source at the NY Times that the newspaper has an editorial prohibition against using the term "raw milk" in print.
Instead, NYT uses the term "unpasteurized milk" which implies that somehow the milk is "incomplete" unless it is pasteurized. In its coverage of the issue, NY Times is almost universally in favor of processed (pasteurized) milk and strong government regulation, refusing the recognize the rights of private individuals to own shares of cows, goats or other farm animals and then enjoy the benefits of that private ownership.
Politically motivated hacking crew TeaMp0isoN has teamed up with Anonymous in an attempt to storm the music charts.
The hacktivists fancy themselves as music moguls with plans to release a song by an unspecified artist that they are nonetheless convinced is bound to storm the charts. Proceeds of the unknown song – due to released via iTunes and YouTube – will go to charity.
Read full article: http://bit.ly/qnJsH9
