MetaFilter posts tagged with hackers and security

ClimateGate?

Who_Am_I — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 16:14:02 -0800

The University of East Anglia's Climatic Research Unit suffered a security breach this week. Hackers made off with thousands of email correspondences between some of the world's top climate scientists, and posted them to the Internet¹.

Tony Hake has posted an article at The Examiner, highlighting what he feels are the most egregious examples of scientists manipulating and hiding data to support the established theories about Climate Change. Some of the scientists involved counter that the quotes are taken out of context, and that "People are using language used in science and interpreting it in a completely different way".

¹ I'm not going to link to them, but the Examiner article mentions where to get them.

Neurosecurity

homunculus — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 20:29:23 -0800

Neurosecurity: security and privacy for neural devices. "An increasing number of neural implantable devices will become available in the near future due to advances in neural engineering. This discipline holds the potential to improve many patients' lives dramatically by offering improved—and in some cases entirely new—forms of rehabilitation for conditions ranging from missing limbs to degenerative cognitive diseases. The use of standard engineering practices, medical trials, and neuroethical evaluations during the design process can create systems that are safe and that follow ethical guidelines; unfortunately, none of these disciplines currently ensure that neural devices are robust against adversarial entities trying to exploit these devices to alter, block, or eavesdrop on neural signals. The authors define 'neurosecurity'—a version of computer science security principles and methods applied to neural engineering—and discuss why neurosecurity should be a critical consideration in the design of future neural devices." [Via Mind Hacks]

Sears Wants To Hack Your Computer

ikkyu2 — Thu, 03 Jan 2008 18:52:19 -0800

Online communities to become more 'all-encompassing.' If you join the SHC community on Sears.com, all web traffic to and from your computer thereafter will be copied and sent to a third party marketing research firm - including, for example, your secure sessions with your bank! The Sears.com proxy will send your logins and passwords along with a cleartext copy of all the supposedly secure data. But wait, it gets better: you can only view the true TOS once the proxy has already been installed. Hey Matt, you're lagging behind - this is the future of online community-building! [Via.]

Herding Zombies

dersins — Fri, 07 Oct 2005 11:03:09 -0800

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."

A new twist on paying for Internet porn

Samuel Farrow — Mon, 29 Dec 2003 06:52:27 -0800

A new twist on paying for Internet porn Although no mention of porn in the CNN story. Anyone ever been threatened like this?

arnab — Fri, 03 May 2002 23:01:15 -0800

Competition to "reverse engineer" mystery program.
Another cool thingy from the HoneyNet Project; they're inviting people to convert a binary file into its original source. So, who's participating?

Lanternjmk — Mon, 11 Mar 2002 08:25:04 -0800

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.

thebwit — Sat, 23 Feb 2002 18:17:48 -0800

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.

dglynn — Wed, 09 Jan 2002 22:53:51 -0800

Hackers: Computer Outlaws A TLC show(that I'm 3/4 through) that seems to actually use reliable sources to discuss not just cracker behavior, but also the creative side of hackers, pointing out the developments attributed to some hackers. Now Markoff and Mitnick. Not a bad little show....

headlemur — Sat, 22 Dec 2001 12:40:41 -0800

FBI warns Microsoft XP users "The FBI is urging computer users to unplug and don't play when it comes to addressing serious security flaws found in Microsoft's new Windows XP program." "Microsoft admitted this week that there are several serious glitches in the new software. " Really?

bkdelong — Thu, 20 Dec 2001 10:30:40 -0800

Microsoft's newest version of Windows.... billed as the most secure ever, contains several serious flaws that allow hackers to steal or destroy a victim's data files across the Internet or implant rogue computer software. The company released a free fix Thursday.

A Microsoft official acknowledged that the risk to consumers was unprecedented because the glitches allow hackers to seize control of all Windows XP operating system software without requiring a computer user to do anything except connect to the Internet.

crankydoodle — Fri, 14 Dec 2001 14:45:28 -0800

"MS releases mother of all IE security patches" Per the article: Microsoft has released a cumulative patch for Internet Explorer which the firm says is a "critical" security precaution against crackers which should be applied "immediately". Time to update/upgrade boys and girls. :)

fleener — Thu, 29 Nov 2001 13:58:26 -0800

Hackers: a report on the Internet's vulnerabilities Anyone see the original broadcast of this PBS "Front Line" special? Any good? It airs again Nov. 29, 2001.

o2b — Thu, 29 Nov 2001 09:27:24 -0800

AirSnort. The dangerous app with the unlikely name allows users to snatch data being passed over wireless networks, eventually capturing passwords to the network.

trioperative — Thu, 15 Nov 2001 07:22:22 -0800

Dark Address Space leaves some 100 million hosts completely unreachable from portions of the Internet.

thescoop — Tue, 25 Sep 2001 14:22:27 -0800

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.

bkdelong — Mon, 21 May 2001 08:09:44 -0800

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.

borgle — Sun, 25 Mar 2001 17:27:41 -0800

Up to 20% of the internet vulnerable to a virus. There is a new Linux worm virus. Apparently, it steals passwords, installs and hides other hacking tools on infected systems, and then uses those systems to seek other servers to attack. Sys admins are advised to run a check on their servers and upgrade their BIND version.

Steven Den Beste — Fri, 09 Mar 2001 10:20:11 -0800

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.

solistrato — Mon, 06 Nov 2000 11:45:26 -0800

Do as we say, not as we do.

bkdelong — Thu, 02 Nov 2000 13:19:09 -0800

AIPAC Hacked, Credit Card numbers exposed. This morning the Web site of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee was defaced by Doctor Nuker of the Pakistan Hackerz Club. I didn't think anything of it which was why I missed getting the mirror the first time around. Apparently this is a pretty large organization according to my co-worker, a former Washingtonite. It's the biggest American Jewish lobbying organization in the US from what I hear... which is going to piss people off when they realize their credit card information was leaked in the defacement.

m.polo — Wed, 20 Sep 2000 11:20:15 -0800

Apparently, the conventional wisdom is not quite right. The SDMI's Executive Director says they have "thousands of entries" in their contest to hack the various proposed digital music security schemes. As I pointed out recently in a similar context, the "Linux community" and the population of computer literate, financially motived, non-OS-sectarian hackers are far from being one and the same...

mathowie — Sun, 10 Sep 2000 18:30:08 -0800

Western Union's site is down, as hackers have accessed their "secure" database. Western Union's only suggestion so far is to tell all customers to cancel their credit card accounts. Is anything really secure on the internet? Do you trust amazon to hold your credit card numbers, Wells Fargo to keep your checking account private, and Kozmo employees not to pilfer your credit card numbers for fun?

Steven Den Beste — Wed, 19 Apr 2000 16:30:28 -0800

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.)

mathowie — Sat, 12 Feb 2000 09:37:03 -0800

The Discovery Channel has a pretty good "Hackers Hall of Fame" but of course they get hacking/phreaking/cracking all munged up. There's a brief bio and short synopsis of activities for each person.