Facebook

Just over six months ago, well-known hacker George Hotz, a.k.a. Geohot, joined the straight and narrow and got a day-job at Facebook.

However, word has it that he's already gone. Business Insider reported today that Hotz left Facebook and is back to hacking in his free time.

This time, though, it's legal hacking. Last Saturday, Hotz attended a Backplane hackathon, according to Business Insider. Backplane is a social startup that heralds famous investors like Google's Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt and pop-star Lady Gaga.

A new phishing attack that's spreading through Facebook chat modifies hijacked accounts in order to impersonate the social network's security team.

The attackers replace the profile picture of compromised accounts with the Facebook logo and change their names to a variation of "Facebook Security" written with special Unicode characters, said Kaspersky Lab expert David Jacoby in a blog post.

A hacker calling himself Hannibal has published login information for thousands of Arab Facebook users.

"Emails and passwords for the social network Facebook have been published on Pastebin," writes The Inquirer's Chris Martin. "Hannibal claims he has more than 30 million credentials of Arab users that he will publish regularly."

"The hacker backs Israel and said, 'State of Israel, not to worry, you're in the hands of the world's best hacker that I am. I will continue to support the government of Israel will continue to attack the Arab countries,'" Martin writes.

A new strain of cybercrime Trojan is targeting Facebook users by taking over their machines and shaking them down for cash.

Carberp, like its predecessors ZeuS and SpyEye, infects machines by tricking punters into opening PDFs and Excel documents loaded with malicious code, or attacks computers in drive-by downloads. The hidden malware is designed to steal account information, and harvest credentials for email and social-networking sites.

If you’re a parent with a child who has a Facebook account, do you know his or her password? It turns out that some 72 percent of parents do in fact know how to access their offspring’s account on the social network.

The findings come from Lab42, a market research company which surveyed 500 social media users between December 9 and December 12, 2011:

As expected, Facebook today started to release information about the Koobface worm (its name is an anagram of “Facebook”) and those behind it. The update comes almost a year since Facebook’s last post about the infamous piece of malware. After more than three years and numerous hours of working closely with industry leaders, the security community, and law enforcement, Facebook has announced its social network has been free of the virus for over nine months.

Here's a nasty little Null Byte. An open redirect vulnerability was found in both Facebook and Google that could allow hackers to steal user credentials via phishing. This also potentially allows redirects to malicious sites that exploit other vulnerabilities in your OS or browser. This could even get your computer flooded with spam, and these holes have been known about for over a month.

Whenever I see another "cyberchallenge" getting play in the press, I think our priorities are screwed up.

The cyber bandits who nicked 45,000 Facebook user names and passwords with a computer worm Thursday got less than they bargained for.

A "majority" of the credentials stolen by the thieves were "out of date," according to a statement Facebook released to the media Friday. When pressed on the point by ZDNet blogger Emile Protalinski, a Facebook spokesperson acknowledged that "more than half" of the purloined data contained invalid logins or old or expired passwords.

Facebook has opened registration for its second annual Hacker Cup where programmers around the world fight for highly coveted title of champion.

Registration officially began on Wednesday, December 4, with the first of qualification rounds scheduled on January 20 at 16:00.