Meet the men who spy on women through their webcams - "If you are unlucky enough to have your computer infected with a RAT, prepare to be sold or traded to the kind of person who enters forums to ask, "Can I get some slaves for my rat please? I got 2 bucks lol I will give it to you :b" At that point, the indignities you will suffer—and the horrific website images you may see—will be limited only by the imagination of that most terrifying person: a 14-year-old boy with an unsupervised Internet connection."
posted by madamjujujive
on Mar 10, 2013 -
172 comments
"During his civil lawsuit against the People's Republic of China,
Brian Milburn says he never once saw one of the country's lawyers. He read no court documents from China's attorneys because they filed none. The voluminous case record at the U.S. District courthouse in Santa Ana contains a single communication from China: a curt letter to the U.S. State Department, urging that the suit be dismissed. That
doesn't mean Milburn's adversary had no contact with him." [
China Mafia-Style Hack Attack Drives California Firm to Brink]
posted by vidur
on Nov 28, 2012 -
12 comments
"
Hackers of the world are uniting and taking direct action against our common oppressors - the government, corporations, police, and militaries of the world" says LulzSec
(previously) in their latest release,
Chinga La Migra. "
We are releasing hundreds of private intelligence bulletins, training manuals, personal email correspondence, names, phone numbers, addresses and passwords belonging to Arizona law enforcement. We are targeting AZDPS specifically because we are against SB1070 (previously) and the racial profiling anti-immigrant police state that is Arizona."
#antisec is a new track from nerdcore rapper
ytcracker (previously)
posted by finite
on Jun 23, 2011 -
47 comments
People who use Sony
don't make very good passwords. "None of this is overly surprising, although it remains alarming. We know passwords are too short, too simple, too predictable and too much like the other ones the individual has created in other locations. The bit which did take me back a bit was the extent to which passwords conformed to very predictable patterns, namely only using alphanumeric character, being 10 characters or less and having a much better than average chance of being the same as other passwords the user has created on totally independent systems."
[more inside]
posted by -->NMN.80.418
on Jun 7, 2011 -
142 comments
Sony's PlayStation Network and Qriocity have been down since April 20 2011 due to an illegal intrusion. Today
Sony announced that user data - birthdate, user name, password, e-mail address, possibly credit card information, and more - has been compromised for its
69 million users, exposing them to identify theft amongst other things.
[more inside]
posted by Foci for Analysis
on Apr 26, 2011 -
285 comments
Computer security vendor RSA, maker of two-factor authentication SecurID,
has been hacked by unknown parties. In an
open letter to it customers RSA Executive Chairman Arthur W. Coviello, Jr. calls the attack the work of an Advanced Persistent Threat, meaning a highly skilled, well-funded group acting deliberately & precisely to achieve a specific goal. RSA's clients include many Fortune 100 companies, US Government, Military & Intelligence Community organizations.
posted by scalefree
on Mar 17, 2011 -
118 comments
An anonymous hacking outfit called "Gnosis" has
infiltrated Gawker Media,
hijacking the front page and
leaking the company's internal chat logs, source code, and content databases along with the usernames, email addresses, and passwords of over 1.3 million users (including Gawker staff). The attack, which was motivated by
what the group describes as the "outright arrogance" with which the company's bloggers
taunted anonymous imageboard 4chan (semi-previously), affects every site in the Gawker network, including Gizmodo, Kotaku, Lifehacker, Jezebel, Deadspin, Jalopnik, and io9. While most of the leaked passwords are encrypted, more than 200,000 of the simpler ones in the torrent file have been cracked, and the links between account names and email addresses are in plaintext for all to see. Since
the integrity of Gawker's encryption methods remains in doubt, it is recommended that anyone who has ever registered an account on any Gawker property change their passwords immediately, especially if the same log-in information is used for other services.
posted by Rhaomi
on Dec 12, 2010 -
312 comments
Andrew Shane Huang is a 35 year old hardware hacker, known to some as
bunnie, and others as that guy who
hacked the Xbox and went on to
write a book about it.
Finding the hidden key to the Xbox was
an enjoyable distraction while he worked on getting his PhD in Electrical Engineering from MIT as
part of
Project Aries. Since then, he has
written for (and
been written about) in
Make Magazine, has
giving talks on the strategy of hardware openness and
manufacturing practices in China, as experienced with the development of the opensource
ambient "
internet-based TV" called
Chumby. When he's not busy on such excursions, bunnie writes about
hacking (and more specifically,
Chumby hacking),
technology in China, and even
biology in exquisite detail on
the bunnie studios blog (
previously).
[more inside]
posted by filthy light thief
on Jun 17, 2010 -
36 comments
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]
posted by homunculus
on Jul 8, 2009 -
22 comments
This is an ironic tale of the consequences of inept application of cryptographic tools.
Or is it? Dan Egerstad, a Swedish hacker, gained access to hundreds of computer network accounts around the world, belonging to various embassies, corporations and other organizations. How did he do it?
Very easily: by sniffing exit traffic on his
Tor nodes.
[more inside]
posted by Anything
on Dec 4, 2007 -
27 comments
"To tell the truth ... I'm sorta surprised they haven't caught me yet," The Washington Post ran an interesting interview with a botmaster, a young man who made serveral thousands of dollars a month installing XXX spyware on machines that he controlled. He installed the software on the machines of people he did not know by hacking into them remotely. The lenghty article included a partial photo of the botmaster along with vauge descriptions of the small midwestern town where the man lives, and was published with the understanding that the man's identity would be kept secret.
Someone should have told that to the person that manages photos at the Washington Post. An estute reader over at
Slashdot was able to locate some extra information stored in the picture's metadata including the photographer and the location the picture was taken, Roland, Oklahoma, a town of less than 3000 people. Whoops.
posted by daHIFI
on Feb 21, 2006 -
56 comments
GMail not-so-safe Mail. So apparentley GMail has a major exploit that's been discovered by an Israeli hacker.
"Using a hex-encoded XSS link, the victim's cookie file can be stolen by a hacker, who can later use it to identify himself to Gmail as the original owner of an email account, regardless of whether or not the password is subsequently changed." And so the fun with GMail begins..
posted by mrplab
on Oct 29, 2004 -
9 comments
Know what time it is, Kidz?
It's U.S. Department of Justice Time!
On today's show, we'll learn why
Hacking is REAL BAD, and give you a chance to find out if you are a
good cybercitizen. Next, we'll meet
Axel, the talking drug dog, and his friends
the Bomb Dog Bunch! Then, we'll check in on the ATF, for some
cool science fair ideas.
And finally, just for you kids with crooks or international terrorists for parents, here's a nifty
PDF coloring book (
Native American version also available).
posted by eatitlive
on Feb 25, 2003 -
11 comments
This is some scary stuff.
Life in prison for malicious hacking? We can't keep rapists and murderers away from society for very long but now hackers & crackers could be jailed for life? And on top of that the FBI can monitor internet packets without a warrant?
If you enjoy your freedom from gov't surveillance, it looks like it's time to start using
PGP.
posted by mathowie
on Jul 16, 2002 -
21 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
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 by bkdelong
on Dec 20, 2001 -
60 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
You too can be a felon! Last year, the SDMI Foundation made a
public challenge to see if
anyone could crack 6 proposed protection mechanisms for digitally-encoded music. All six turned out to be feeble and all six fell. Since then, the SDMI Foundation has been relying on lawyers to cover up for the incompetence of their engineers. They're trying to suppress this article, so everyone reading this has a duty to make and store a copy of it. (Everyone should also own at least one copy of DeCSS. I have the 442-character C version printed on the back of my personal card.)
posted by Steven Den Beste
on Apr 21, 2001 -
15 comments
Vulnerabiity in OpenPGP You don't even need to crack the key, just get hold of it, modify a few bytes, and presto, sign away from other persona. The issue here is
signing, not encrypting. The implications are evident when you think of internet voting, tax filing, etc., but it is still a victory for open cryptography, where peer review can find serious flaws.
posted by pecus
on Mar 22, 2001 -
2 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
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 by mathowie
on Jan 24, 2000 -
1 comment
