Attention Geeks and Hackers: Uncle Sam's Cyber Force Wants You! [more inside]
posted by homunculus on Jun 5, 2008 - 29 comments

Interesting "New Yorker" article about online extortion via DDoS attacks. Call me naive and underinformed, but I had little understanding of how this works. "In the most common scenario, the bots surreptitiously connect hundreds, or thousands, of zombies to a channel in a chat room. The process is called “herding,” and a herd of zombies is called a botnet."
posted by dersins on Oct 7, 2005 - 34 comments

A new twist on paying for Internet porn Although no mention of porn in the CNN story. Anyone ever been threatened like this?
posted by Samuel Farrow on Dec 29, 2003 - 18 comments

Don't be fooled by fake blogger.com. Crackers are after your Blogger password.
posted by hoder on Jul 30, 2003 - 15 comments

While trying to pull up a favorite website I find the USG (Unix Security Guards), a group of so called pro Islamic hackers, have shut the site down. It's all well and good to be protesting the Middle East conflict by interrupting a night of jolly surfing, but why a rock and roll website? Damn hacktivist groups.

Good job punks!
posted by oh posey on Oct 5, 2002 - 12 comments

Hackers target Cell Phones With the connectivity of cell phones to the internet, hackers have begun to target cell phones, programming prank calls, placing calls to wherever and erasing the software in the phone.
posted by Lanternjmk on Mar 11, 2002 - 7 comments

How to hack grey matter A big security loophole with grey matter powered sites is out there. It lets anyone have the username and password to these sites. Luckly there is a fix for it which can be found here.
posted by thebwit on Feb 23, 2002 - 20 comments

Dark Address Space leaves some 100 million hosts completely unreachable from portions of the Internet.
posted by trioperative on Nov 15, 2001 - 2 comments

As usual, when it's the U.S. turn, they play by different rules How come Russian and Scandinavian hackers can be charged under U.S. law for activities done in their home countries, yet when an American company gets a very reasonable request (IP tracking that it is done for web banners anyway) from a judge overseas, the U.S. grabs the free speech / local law argument.
posted by magullo on Nov 8, 2001 - 23 comments

Silicon Valley backs Senate bill that would allow companies to report computer network attacks to the government without having to worry about the public finding out. The reasoning: it would encourage more companies to report the problems and help the government track down the culprits. A similar bill is in the House.
posted by thescoop on Sep 25, 2001 - 3 comments

A coalition of 13 nations declares war on those nations who are implicated in this attack. (There's nothing more dangerous than 300 angry teenagers.)
posted by Steven Den Beste on Sep 14, 2001 - 25 comments

Attrition: Evolution. Attrition.org has decided to cease updating their archive of Web defacement mirrors. The reasons being the total lack of appreciation on some part as well as the shear volume of mirrors per day, and the fact that it sucked up what little personal lives the staff already had. Fear not, however, statistics and commentary will still be around - just based on the Alldas mirror and stay tuned for the rebirth of their more informative sections like Errata and Security.
posted by bkdelong on May 21, 2001 - 0 comments

One million credit card numbers stolen! News at 11! The FBI has gone public with a rather dry account of a huge organized attack on ecommerce sites, exploiting security flaws in NT which Microsoft fixed and offered patches for nearly two years ago.
posted by Steven Den Beste on Mar 9, 2001 - 5 comments

They bagged the kid who was responsible for all those Denial-of-Service attacks a couple of months ago. He's Canadian.

Here's an interesting legal question: could the US extradite him? The crimes were committed in the US, but he was in Canada at the time he did it, since he worked through the Internet. Whose laws apply?

(By the way, I've seen no indication that the US is considering extradition; I was just curious whether they could extradite him.)
posted by Steven Den Beste on Apr 19, 2000 - 18 comments

Cyber Patrol hacker sells out for one dollar < I made my political point and just don't want further annoyance... ...Mattel initiated legal action in e-mail subpoenas in mid-March and Skala and Jansson removed cphack from their sites, but not before urging computer activists to copy and distribute it.... ...Nevertheless, some mirror site operators think open source software protections make the issue moot. The court cannot impose an Internet ban because cphack was released under the GNU General Public License... > perhaps you've seen this--the final decision will be interesting with repect to free speech and the GNU GPL. something to watch anyhow.
posted by greyscale on Mar 28, 2000 - 3 comments