Why would hackers target the Department of Energy (DOE)?
The obvious answer is to steal nuclear secrets, since the agency's National Nuclear Security Administration department is in charge of managing and safeguarding the country's nuclear arsenal. According to security experts, the agency's laboratories, where the most sensitive work takes place, have long been targeted by attackers.
Several U.S. media outlets experienced a massive wave of cyberattacks allegedly coming from the Chinese military over the last few months. While some newspapers have claimed that their networks are now safe, the Wall Street Journal may still be a victim of the online onslaught.
The newspaper's owner Rupert Murdock tweeted today, "Chinese still hacking us, or were over weekend."
PKNIC, the domain registrar of Pakistan’s .pk domains has been reportedly hacked again this morning. A hackers group named PakBugs has claimed that they have successfully penetrated PKNIC servers and gained control of around 23,000 domains which included some of the most popular pakistani websites like Daily Jang, The News, Express News and ProPakistani etc. At the time of this writing, these sites were back to normal because the owners of the domains again changed back the DNS servers back to original ones.
A Dutch citizen who was arrested and extradited from Romania was sentenced to 12 years in prison for a computer hacking and credit card fraud scheme that victimized people around the world, announced U.S. Attorney Jenny A. Durkan.
David Benjamin Schrooten, 22, also known in the hacking world as ‘Fortezza’, pleaded guilty in November 2012 to Conspiracy to Commit Access Device Fraud and Bank Fraud, Access Device Fraud, Bank Fraud, Intentional Damage to a Protected Computer, and Aggravated Identity Theft.
In an effort to bolster its defenses against cyber attacks, Japan held its first government-sanctioned hacking contest, which culminated February 3 in Tokyo.
According to a report on NHK, Japan's national broadcaster, Masahiro Uemura, an official with the Ministry of the Economy, Trade and Industry, said these kinds of contests are common in other countries and are used to develop a domestic pool of cyber security experts. He added that Japan has a shortage of experts and is looking for ways to foster them.
Amazon is inexplicably down for us. When we navigate to amazon.com we’re getting a series of errors. Initially the page only read “Http/1.1 Service Unavailable”, but we’ve been getting the failure page above, as well as straight-up browser fails.
Update: Amazon is back. But why did it go down in the first place?
China has dismissed accusations that it had hacked into the system of the New York Times, in a cyber-attack the paper linked to its expose of the wealth amassed by the family of Premier Wen Jiabao.
The New York Times earlier announced it had fallen victim to hackers and said they were possibly connected to China’s military.
Apple software hackers unveiled a website late Wednesday where the latest untethered jailbreak is expected to be released soon.
An elite team of hackers has been working for months to develop an untethered jailbreak for iOS 6, Apple's latest operating system, which would allow users to customize their phones and install applications not vetted by Apple.
Hackers have embedded a video statement on the homepage of a US government agency in response to the death of digital activist Aaron Swartz. Aaron Swartz who hanged himself in his Brooklyn apartment.
The statement – purportedly from hacktivist collective Anonymous – said Aaron Swartz had died because he “faced an impossible choice” and had been forced into “playing a game he could not win.”
The FBI recently announced that hacker Karen "Gary" Kazaryan, 27, has been arrested and charged with 15 counts of computer intrusion and 15 counts of aggravated identity theft. Kazaryan allegedly hacked into victims' e-mail, Facebook and Skype accounts, then changed the passwords to lock the users out.
