Starting last Tuesday, 14 subdomains of NASA went down.
One of them, dedicated to the Kepler mission that searches for habitable exoplanets, had an announcement posted that read, "Down for Maintenance: The requested webpage is down for maintenance. Please try again later."
Earlier today, a report in Brazil's daily Globo newspaper claimed that the National Security Agency has been spying on electronic communications and telephone calls originating from the country for the past decade. The Globo story was co-authored by The Guardian's Glenn Greenwald — the journalist who first broke news of sophisticated (and highly classified) US surveillance programs with the help of former NSA contractor Edward Snowden.
More than 4.5 million DSL modems have been compromised as part of a sustained hacking campaign in Brazil, with the devices spreading malware and malicious web address redirects.
The attacks focused on a vulnerability in modem firmware that was largely ignored by users and the security community, security vendor Kaspersky said, allowing attackers to enter modem configuration settings and change the DNS server used to browse the internet.
These days if you are a hardened political revolutionary, you’re just as likely to be a computer geek as someone who gets shoved around by cops at a street protest.
That’s largely thanks to the rise of Anonymous, a brand of hacktivism that has also taken Brazil by storm over the last year.
Hackers from the Anonymous Movement group fought out a day-long attack against websites of Brazil's Banco Itau SA on Monday, shutting down service on several occasions, and threatened more action during the week.
"Attention sailors: target hit! The http://www.itau.com.br is sinking! TANGO DOWN!" the group proclaimed via Twitter and on Facebook, under the AnonBRNews feed.
An attack on several Brazilian ISPs has exposed large numbers of their subscribers to malware attacks when they attempt to visit Hotmail, Gmail, and other trusted websites, security researchers have warned.
