The Surveillance Catalog: Where Governments Get Their Spying Tools The Wall Street Journal has obtained a "trove" of documents from the secretive retail market in surveillance technology sold to world governments, and has created a searchable database for your enjoyment. "Among the most controversial technologies on display at the conference were essentially computer-hacking tools to enable government agents to break into people's computers and cellphones, log their keystrokes and access their data..." E.g., FinFisher installs malware by sending fake software updates for Blackberry and other devices; VUPEN's Exploits for Law Enforcement Agencies "aim to deliver exclusive exploit codes for undisclosed vulnerabilities" in software from Microsoft, Apple and others. [more inside]
posted by mediareport on Nov 20, 2011 - 37 comments

They’re watching. And they can bring you down: Why the world is scared of hacktivists. [Via]
posted by homunculus on Sep 25, 2011 - 94 comments

Enter the Cyber-dragon. "Hackers have attacked America’s defense establishment, as well as companies from Google to Morgan Stanley to security giant RSA, and fingers point to China as the culprit. The author gets an exclusive look at the raging cyber-war—Operation Aurora! Operation Shady rat!—and learns why Washington has been slow to fight back. Related: Michael Joseph Gross goes inside Operation Shady Rat."
posted by homunculus on Aug 6, 2011 - 46 comments

Aaron Barr, of security company HBGary, claimed in the Financial Times to have infiltrated Anonymous and to be collecting information on members of the group. Predictably, Anonymous responded by hacking HBGary's website and replacing its front page, as well as by stealing Barr's research documents on Anonymous (and social networking accounts) and releasing them to the public, along with thousands of internal HBGary emails.
posted by Pope Guilty on Feb 7, 2011 - 199 comments

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

A hacker breaks into the forums of the guild Band of Brothers on the MMORPG Eve, where he discovers an Eve devolper, called t20, is not only a high-ranking member of the alliance, but has been feeding BoB expensive and rare in-game items. CCP, the company who runs EVE, denies any wrong doing, before it is revealed that CCP knew about t20's abuses for over six months. Players are not happy.
posted by Snyder on Feb 12, 2007 - 49 comments

Smash and grab, the hi-tech way. Are the Chinese government responsible for recent sophisticated hacking attempts on such targets as the British parliament and the US Army's Aviation and Missile Command?
posted by Hartster on Jan 19, 2006 - 17 comments

Spam: This Time It's Personal. Andy Markley was really looking forward to a work-free Labor Day weekend far away from his computer. But he made the mistake of checking his inbox before he left for his planned holiday.
posted by lola on Sep 30, 2003 - 32 comments

Here's a simple example of a potentially interesting art project. Fill a Usenet post with words specifically chosen to create art based on Google's search word highlighting. Not sure if it's art or spam, but I am waiting for the first ASCII artist to step up to the plate and do something complex like the Mona Lisa.
posted by willnot on Jul 21, 2002 - 10 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

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

http://www.taleban.com keeps looping back to our own machines at work. At home, it comes up non-existant yet it's showed up in my server logs. network solutions has a listing for it. Anyone else getting bizarre results with this domain?
posted by Zebulun on Sep 13, 2001 - 15 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

Misguided Brazilian script kiddies defaces Netherlands AIDS Fonds (Foundation). And what's even more bizzare is that it appears their "message" roughly translates as "Let us not forget World AIDS Day." Duh... go deface a denialist, idiots.
posted by bkdelong on Dec 1, 2000 - 1 comment

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

Kevin Mittnick is finally being released from prison today, but I wouldn't call what he's getting as being "free". Prohibiting Kevin from touching a computer for 3 years? This isn't like giving a toddler to a ex-con child molester, it's a computer. A person can do a lot of things besides hack into company servers. How does anyone expect Kevin to make the $125 restitution he owes each month, if he can't use a computer or get a job that requires a computer? Now that I think about it, what percentage of decent jobs are completely free of computers?
posted by mathowie on Jan 21, 2000 - 5 comments