Hackers

Hackers have been hard at work in Indonesia, defacing web sites left right and center in protest at the treatment of a local hacker who defaced the president’s web site earlier this month and could now face a 12 year jail term.

Internet café worker Wildan Yani Ashari, 22, was cuffed by police last Friday just over a fortnight after he replaced the home page of president Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono (SBY) with the message: “This is a PayBack From Jember Hacker Team”.

Bugs in “plug and play” networking technology expose tens of millions of devices to attack by hackers, researchers with a security software maker have said.

The problem lies in computer routers and other networking equipment that use a commonly employed standard known as Universal Plug and Play (UPnP), which makes it easy for networks to identify and communicate with equipment, reducing the amount of work it takes to set up networks.

The digital video recorders of several CCTV video cameras are vulnerable to attacks that create a means for hackers to watch, copy or delete video streams, according to security researchers.

The researchers added that unless systems are properly firewalled, security flaws in the the firmware of the DVR platform also create a jumping-off point for attacks aimed at networks supporting these devices. The hackable CCTV devices from an estimated 19 manufacturers all use allegedly vulnerable firmware from the Guangdong, China-based firm Ray Sharp.

ViaForensics researcher Sebastian Guerrero recently released a report in which he describes a number of ways attackers could turn your boring, humdrum printer against you. According to his findings, potential vulnerabilities range from having to reset your printer (annoying) to the breach of encrypted documents (terrifying).

Anonymous, a group of self-described Internet vigilante hackers took control of a government website on Saturday morning.

They left behind a manifesto demanding reform to the American justice system and threats to the free flow of information. They also protested the treatment of recently deceased founder of Reddit, Aaron Swartz who was accused by the government of hacking into an MIT computer.

A group of hackers that are infecting web servers with rogue Apache modules are also creating backdoors to Secure Shell (SSH) services in order to steal log-in credentials from administrators and users.

The hackers are replacing all of the SSH binary files on the compromised servers with backdoor-equipped versions that are designed to send the hostname, username and password for incoming and outgoing SSH connections to attacker-controlled servers, security researchers from web security firm Sucuri said in a blog post.

The National Police Agency said Thursday it will promote communications with ethical hackers as part of efforts to better combat cybercrime and cyber-attacks.

The agency hopes the move will enable it to collect more information on such crimes, including the use of viruses to remotely control computers. This is the agency's first organized effort to promote relations with ethical hackers, although some investigators have formed such relationships on their own.

If you can't beat 'em, hire 'em.

The firm that runs a community college website was so impressed with a student accused of hacking the portal it offered him a job. Skytech Communications, which manages the Dawson College website, made the offer to Ahmed Al-Khabaz after his expulsion came to light this week.

Last time Anonymous plunged into MIT's servers, it was to set up a small memorial for Aaron Swartz. Today the whole homepage is defaced, and it's really just incoherent.

Where to begin? The defacement says LulzSec and Sabu are behind the attack, which is of course impossible.

In the early days of 2011, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology learned that it had an intruder. Worse, it believed the intruder had been there before.

Months earlier, the mysterious visitor had used the school's computer network to begin copying millions of research articles belonging to JSTOR, the non-profit organisation that sells subscription access to universities.