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.
posted on Jan 3, 2008 - View this thread

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 on Oct 7, 2005 - View this thread

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

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?
posted on May 3, 2002 - View this thread

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 on Mar 11, 2002 - View this thread

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 on Feb 23, 2002 - View this thread

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....
posted on Jan 9, 2002 - View this thread

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?
posted on Dec 22, 2001 - View this thread

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.
posted on Dec 20, 2001 - View this thread

"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. :)
posted on Dec 14, 2001 - View this thread

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.
posted on Nov 29, 2001 - View this thread

AirSnort. The dangerous app with the unlikely name allows users to snatch data being passed over wireless networks, eventually capturing passwords to the network.
posted on Nov 29, 2001 - View this thread

Dark Address Space leaves some 100 million hosts completely unreachable from portions of the Internet.
posted on Nov 15, 2001 - View this thread

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 on Sep 25, 2001 - View this thread

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 on May 21, 2001 - View this thread

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.
posted on Mar 25, 2001 - View this thread

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 on Mar 9, 2001 - View this thread

Do as we say, not as we do.
posted on Nov 6, 2000 - View this thread

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.
posted on Nov 2, 2000 - View this thread

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...
posted on Sep 20, 2000 - View this thread

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?
posted on Sep 10, 2000 - View this thread

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 on Apr 19, 2000 - View this thread

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.
posted on Feb 12, 2000 - View this thread

Uncle Sam wants YOU to solve the internet's problems. President Clinton announced yesterday that, due to a complete lack of knowledge about the internet, it will cost $2 billion in 2001 to develop anti-hacker secuity. Plus they intend on subsidizing college costs for computer science majors that agree to work for the government. Hey if he'd give me just one million dollars, I'd be able to pay off my school costs and hunt down hackers personally, like Boba Fett.
posted on Feb 11, 2000 - View this thread

Do you, a, have problems getting to Yahoo? Yahoo was unreachable for much of the morning, and it turns out that it was apparently due to hackers. I saw estimates that the loss of 3 hours worth of traffic meant about 58 million lost page views. How many dollars is that?
posted on Feb 7, 2000 - View this thread

Last night Kevin Mitnick was on 60 minutes (the gist of the interview is quoted here), and I have to say he came off as an utterly harmless geek. He was an information junkie that enjoyed the challenge of cracking firewalls. He never profited from his activities and the affected companies made up their monetary losses. It's a shame he was forced to waste away in prison instead of offer his security expertise to the affected companies.
posted on Jan 24, 2000 - View this thread