Hacking seems to be everywhere right now. It's big news. The BBC got hacked on Twitter. Yahoo's email system got attacked by spammers. Even behemoths Apple and Facebook have felt the sting of hackers' digital dabblings.
Who are the humans behind the hacking? Well, sometimes it's organised criminals. Sometimes it's political activists. Occasionally it's government-sponsored attacks.
A major cyberattack against a European spam tracking company this past week appears to have originated from a gang of Russian hackers, The Wall Street Journal reported on Thursday.
Spamhaus, a Geneva-based spam tracking firm, had been the target of a massive distributed-denial-of-service attack, where at one point traffic flowing to the site reached levels of 300 Gbps.
L33tdawg: Online registration closes on the 7th of April, though walk in registrations will still be accepted (do expect to queue for a bit if you choose this option). See you guys in Amsterdam!
A US teenager has been arrested and charged with hacking into the phones of at least eight children and posting naked images to child pornography sites.
Michael William Cook, 17, of Acworth, Georgia was arrested on eight counts of cruelty to children and one count of sexually exploiting children. According to Cobb County Police Sgt. Dana Pierce, Cook was arrested at Harrison High School and is accused of posting photos of his victims, one of whom is as young as 14, to child pornography websites between November 2012 and January 2013.
North Korea is training a team of computer-savvy "cyberwarriors" as the battleground for its cross-border rivalry with the South extends into cyberspace, according to the Associated Press (AP) on Monday.
The German Federal Intelligence Agency (BND) has formed a new unit to defend federal bodies and national industry from online espionage. But it finds it difficult to fill all 130 new positions.
BND chief Gerhard Schindler has briefed a small number of MPs about the plan last week and has received an approval, reports the magazine Der Spiegel.
Energy companies faced more targeted malware attacks in a six-month period last year than businesses in any other field, with hackers sometimes breaking into systems to steal geologic and financial data, according to a Houston network security firm’s research.
Alert Logic is releasing a report Tuesday detailing the incidence of attacks on its customers in different industries and the digital weapons hackers used in their attempts to infiltrate systems from April 1 to Sept. 30 last year. FuelFix examined the report ahead of its general release.
At the beginning of a sunny Monday morning earlier this month, I had never cracked a password. By the end of the day, I had cracked 8,000. Even though I knew password cracking was easy, I didn't know it was ridiculously easy—well, ridiculously easy once I overcame the urge to bash my laptop with a sledgehammer and finally figured out what I was doing.
A top Chinese university collaborated on technical research papers with a People's Liberation Army unit (PLA), allegedly responsible for cyberattacks on Western commercial targets.
According to a report Sunday, Reuters found at least three papers--easily accessible online--on computer network security and intrusion detection, co-authored by faculty members of Shanghai Jiaotong University and the PLA Unit 61398. The army unit was identified as an operational unit actively engaged in cyberespionage by U.S.-based security firm Mandiant last month.
Cyberattacks supposedly originating from China have raised alarms in recent weeks, but U.S. businesses and government agencies should worry as much about Iran and North Korea, a group of cybersecurity experts said.
China and Russia have significantly more sophisticated cyberthreat capabilities than do Iran and North Korea, but the two smaller countries are cause for concern in international cybersecurity discussions, the experts told a U.S. House of Representatives subcommittee last wek.
