Hackers

 The two hackers who last month announced plans to reveal details concerning how to hack a Toyota Prius and Ford Escape have gotten together with Andy Greenberg from Forbes to demonstrate the technique and just how much trouble they can cause once they have hijacked a vehicle’s computers.

In the video below, Chris Valasek and Charlie Miller get into the backseat of a Prius with a dismantled dashboard and ask Greenberg to start driving. The two hackers are giddy in the backseat as they cycle through a series of attacks that trigger various functions of the car.

Volkswagen recently won a court case that stopped computer scientists from publishing an academic paper revealing the secret codes used to start luxury cars including Porsches, Audis, Bentleys and Lamborghinis.

The victory, however, will make carmakers more vulnerable to hackers because company engineers will have less information available to help them design more secure in-car systems.

A lot of what the general public knows about hackers is perpetuated by Hollywood myth and urban legends. Whether you picture a pixie-cut Angelina Jolie surfing through cyberspace or a nameless, faceless foreigner spamming from a dim basement, most people probably don’t know much about the life of a traditional “Black Hat” hacker — someone who uses their hacking skills to make money or mischief, as opposed to helping companies and other organizations reinforce their security.

It turns out that the best Black Hat hackers run their operations just like any other business.

The UK's Internet Watch Foundation (IWF) has reported a rise in hacks where users watching adult content are redirected to another site hosting the images, potentially as a way to distribute malware.

The flaw in the encryption technology used in some -- not all -- SIM cards, one which could allow a hacker to take over a mobile device, has been fixed in a clever fashion. Karsten Nohl of Security Research Labs in Germany, speaking at the Black Hat Security Conference on Wednesday, said that at least five carriers had closed the hole by using the same vulnerability to hack into their own SIMs and rewrite the software.

Chinese hackers thought to be linked to the country's government were caught breaking into a United States water plant — without realising it was a decoy set up by a security researcher.

The MIT Technology Review said the project by Trend Micro security researcher Kyle Wilhoit shows the attacks, which took place in December last year by means of an infected Word document, represent "the most significant proof" of people actively trying to exploit vulnerabilities in industrial control systems (ICS).

The U.S. government's efforts to recruit talented hackers could suffer from the recent revelations about its vast domestic surveillance programs, as many private researchers express disillusionment with the National Security Agency.

Though hackers tend to be anti-establishment by nature, the NSA and other intelligence agencies had made major inroads in recent years in hiring some of the best and brightest, and paying for information on software flaws that help them gain access to target computers and phones.

Law-enforcement officials in the U.S. are expanding the use of tools routinely used by computer hackers to gather information on suspects, bringing the criminal wiretap into the cyber age.

Federal agencies have largely kept quiet about these capabilities, but court documents and interviews with people involved in the programs provide new details about the hacking tools, including spyware delivered to computers and phones through email or Web links—techniques more commonly associated with attacks by criminals.

THE GOOGLE CODE developer website is being used by hackers to spread malware, security firm Z-Scaler has warned.

According to Z-Scaler security researcher Chris Mannon who reported uncovering the ploy, cyber crooks are using the Google Code website as a fresh twist on their usual attack strategies.

The Twitter feed of ThomsonReuters, the global news and financial data company appears to be the latest media company to fall victim to a hijacking by the Syrian Electronic Army.

The Twitter account in question, @ThomsonReuters, has been suspended in the last several minutes. The attack appears to have taken place in the last hour. The attackers managed to Tweet links to at least seven images, mostly pro-Assad political cartoons. Buzzfeed has captured all of them here, but they’re not exactly funny, so click cautiously.