Hackers

The official website of Senate Majority Leader Vicente "Tito" Sotto III was hacked by a group claiming to be Anonymous Philippines past midnight on Tuesday, January 8.

Upon loading titosotto.com users are greeted with a pop-up message that says, "Defaced by #pR.is0n3r." When readers click through, they are greeted by an animated Anonymous Philippines logo, with a message criticizing RA 10175 or the Cybercrime Prevention Act of 2012.

In a case U.S. officials say is the first of its kind, a Chinese businessman pleaded guilty Monday to selling stolen American software used in defense, space technology and engineering — programs prosecutors said held a retail value of more than $100 million.

The sophisticated software was stolen from an estimated 200 American manufacturers and sold to 325 black market buyers in 61 countries from 2008 to 2011, prosecutors said in court filings. U.S. buyers in 28 states included a NASA engineer and the chief scientist for a defense and law-enforcement contractor, prosecutors said.

An unidentified Canadian law firm reportedly lost "a large six-figure" sum over the holidays last month when its bookkeeper was tricked into providing an online password to its trust account to Internet fraudsters.

We’ve seen some interesting ideas to thwart cybercrime in our time – for example Kaspersky’s supposedly ‘unhackable’ operating system comes to mind – and most of them inevitably involve the use of super-complex algorithms, ciphers and other encryption methods.

So given this technological trend, it’s a bit of a surprise to learn that a number of companies are now turning to far cruder methods in order to protect their data – using the age old art of deception to confound would be hackers.

Running traditional desktop apps on Windows RT may be one step closer to reality, thanks to a vulnerability that a hacker claims lets you run any desktop app on the ARM version of Windows.

A hacker called 'clrokr' recently detailed the Windows RT exploit, which requires manipulating a part of Windows RT's system memory that governs whether unsigned apps can run. Clrokr says the exploit was possible thanks to a vulnerability in the Windows kernel that was ported to Windows RT.

In central Romania, nestled at the foot of the Carpathian mountains, is the city of Râmnicu Vâlcea. Its Facebook page claims a population of more than 92,500 residents, and according to French newspaper Le Monde, it boasts a dubious distinction related to online crime. Nicknamed “Hackerville,” Râmnicu Vâlcea is being called the international capital of Internet theft.

Bob Nystrom is the author of the first programming language that automatically deletes your code if it doesn’t behave the way it’s supposed to. He calls his creation Vigil because it exhibits “supreme moral vigilance.”

“When a Vigil program is executed, Vigil itself will monitor all oaths,” Nystrom writes in his description of the new language. “If an oath is broken, the offending function…will be duly punished. How? Simple: it will be deleted from your source code.”

McAfee predicted in its 2013 Threat Report that Anonymous would decline in importance this year. If this is an example of what Anonymous has planned for 2013, we hope McAfee is wrong.

KnightSec, a hacking group affiliated with the “Anonymous” collective, posted a YouTube video (embedded) on Wednesday. That video shows teenager Michael Nodianos basking in the "glory" of the gang rape of a 16-year-old girl by his high school football player teammates.

The continuing saga of The War Z’s misfortune – er – continues, although this time the game’s not making headlines for the actions of its creators. Over the past few days The War Z’s servers have been subjected to a variety of attacks, as hackers target the game for whatever reason it is that hackers attack anything. They’re bored, I guess.

High-tech telephones common on many workplace desks in the U.S. can be hacked and turned into eavesdropping devices, researchers at Columbia University have discovered.

The hack, demonstrated for NBC News, allows the researchers to turn on a telephone’s microphone and listen in on conversations from anywhere around the globe. The only requirement, they say, is an Internet connection.