On-board diagnostics (OBD) security bypass kits, replete with reprogramming modules and blank keys, are reportedly enabling low-intelligence thieves to steal high-end cars such as BMWs in a matter of seconds or minutes.
According to The Register, the $30 bypass tools are being shipped from China and Eastern Europe in kit form to unskilled criminals.
One of the best things about the many Android-powered eReaders on the market today is that they are very hackable. Android as the background operating system allows users to unlock the devices and install all manner of apps that the manufacturer probably never intended. One of those hackable eReaders is the Nook Simple Touch.
Someone with the Twitter handle @AnonymousOwn3r made a grab for 15 minutes of fame last week by claiming responsibility for taking down the network for Internet's largest registrar, GoDaddy.
GoDaddy discredited that claim. "The service outage was not caused by external influences," CEO Scott Wagner said in a statement. "It was not a 'hack' and it was not a denial of service attack (DDoS). We have determined the service outage was due to a series of internal network events that corrupted router data tables."
Two Romanian men have admitted to participating in an international conspiracy that hacked into credit-card payment terminals at more than 150 Subway restaurant franchises and stole data for more than 146,000 accounts. The heist, which spanned the years 2009 to 2011, racked up more than $10 million in losses, federal prosecutors said.
Cosmo is huge -- 2 metres tall and 91 kilograms the last time he was weighed, at a detention facility in Long Beach, California on 26 June. And yet he's getting bigger, because Cosmo -- also known as Cosmo the God, the social-engineering mastermind who weaselled his way past security systems at Amazon, Apple, AT&T, PayPal, AOL, Netflix, Network Solutions, and Microsoft-- is just 15 years old.
He turns 16 next March, and he may very well do so inside a prison cell.
Joshua Schichtel on Thursday received a 30-month prison sentence after pleading guilty last year to creating a botnet that infected 72,000 computers.
According to the U.S. Department of Justice, 30-year-old Schichtel sold access to botnets, which are networks of thousands of malware-infected computers, to scammers, who would contact Schichtel and pay him to install the malware on computers that comprised the botnet.
The U.K.'s Home Office will decide by Oct. 16 whether to block the extradition to the U.S. of Gary McKinnon, who has admitted to hacking into U.S. government computers, McKinnon's attorney said on Thursday.
McKinnon, 46, of north London, was indicted in 2002 at the U.S. District Court in Virginia for hacking into 97 military and NASA computers between February 2001 and March 2002.
"Hackerspace." At first, that term might bring to mind an image of rows of Internet wizzes staring intently into their screens, coding illegally. But there is more to the term "hacker" than its unfortunate computer-criminal stereotype. A hacker is actually anyone who takes things apart and re-purposes them in cool new ways: that includes programmers and computer-science experts, but also people who turn old printer motors into DIY musical instruments, computer engines into robot parts, strings of recycled Christmas lights into public-art pieces.
Sometimes a hack has unexpected outcomes. Today, a hacker who claims to have obtained Mitt Romney’s tax returns is demanding a ransom of $1 million in Bitcoins. The hacker probably didn’t expect to improve the market for Bitcoins overall, but that’s exactly what happened, as the value of Bitcoins spiked about 6 percent today, from $10.40 per Bitcoin to about $11 per Bitcoin at the end of the day.
Cambodia is the latest country to come under sustained attack from computer hackers after police in the tiny Southeast Asian country arrested one of the founders of The Pirate Bay file-sharing website last week.
