Hackers

An analysis of the hacking communities in Eastern Europe and Asia has concluded that citizens of the former Soviet bloc are still top dogs at cracking complex systems.

"While East Asian hackers dominate cybersecurity-related headlines around the world with high-profile intrusions and advanced persistent threats (APTs), it would be a mistake to conclude that these attackers are the sole or greatest criminal threat to the global internet today," said Trend Micro's VP of cybersecurity Tom Kellermann, in the report.

Scores of hackers are expected to gather for JailbreakCon in South San Francisco Conference Center on September 29th.

Jailbreaking, the process of circumventing Apple’s restrictions in iOS, has become a cultural phenomenon in recent years. In response to the mainstream interest in jailbreaking and everything it has to offer, JailbreakCon gathers the greatest hackers, developers, and users together in one place to learn and share new ideas.

The re-emergence of the hacktivist movement appears to have thrown a spanner in the works for those in the InfoSec industry charged with data breach trend analysis.

There has been a series of massive data breaches over the last 16 months - each of which compromised more than a million identities. During the same time, much smaller incidents occurred in which only a handful of records were stolen.

One of the subdomains for the University of Technology, Sydney (UTS) fell victim to an attack over the weekend, with hackers going by the names Apollo and 0day defacing the site sub-site and dumping user information.

The two hackers left a message for the system administrators telling them to fix their security and to "hire some staff who actually know what they are doing."

Bark. Bark. Bark. Bark. Bark. Bark.Bark. Bark. Bark. Bark. Bark. Bark.

That's the sound of Rode Dog, an app designed by sixth-grader Victoria Walker in collaboration with David Grau, a creative director and designer at WLDG, an interactive agency in Santa Ana. All that barking is designed to get you to stop texting and driving.

Thanks to an 11th-hour donation, Hacker Dojo in Mountain View will likely live to fight another day.

The self-styled community center for up and coming startups was in a battle against the clock to raise $250,000 for a series of city-mandated upgrades to the warehouse space it occupies at 140 S. Whisman Road. Hacker Dojo has until Dec. 27 to complete the work, which includes installing a fire sprinkler system and ADA-compliant restrooms, or face possible closure.

Using a pair of zero day vulnerabilities, a team of security researchers from U.K.-based MWR Labs hacked into a Samsung Galaxy S3 phone running Android 4.0.4 by beaming an exploit via NFC (Near Field Communications).

The team -- Tyrone Erasmus, Jacques Louw, Jon Butler and Nils (yes, that Nils) -- carted off a $30,000 cash prize as part of the EuSecWest mobile Pwn2Own hacker contest.

Apple unleashed iOS 6 on the world today, and as with any new iOS release, the update temporarily kills jailbreaking. A public jailbreak for iOS 6 will be released eventually, but it will likely take months. Until then, the latest jailbreak-friendly version of iOS is 5.1.1.

If you’re jailbroken on iOS 5.1.1, should you bother with updating to iOS 6 before the new jailbreak comes out? Here’s why you should, and here’s why you shouldn’t.

How long would it take a determined attacker to hack into Apple's iPhone device from scratch?

That was the intellectual challenge that drove a pair of Dutch researchers to start looking for an exploitable software vulnerability that would allow them to hijack the address book, photos, videos and browsing history from a fully patched iPhone 4S. The hack, which netted a $30,000 cash prize at the mobile Pwn2Own contest here, exploited a WebKit vulnerability to launch a drive-by download when the target device simply surfs to a booby-trapped web site.

What first began as a small gathering for computer security enthusiasts in 2002, the Hack In The Box Security Conference series  (HITBSecConf) has since grown into a must attend event in the calendar of security professionals from around the globe. Next month, HITBSecConf will celebrate it’s 10th year anniversary (8th - 11th October) where it will unleash the latest expansion to it's ever popular Capture The Flag (CTF) competition, dubbed Fallout Apocalypse.