Hackers

One person's funny can be another person's annoying, tasteless, intrusive and even scary.

In the case of one Ohio family, it can be all of the above.

U.S. Secret Service Agent Matt O’Neill was growing nervous. For three months, he’d been surreptitiously monitoring hackers’ communications and watching as they siphoned thousands of credit card numbers from scores of U.S. retailers.

Most every day O’Neill was alerting a credit card company or retailer to an online heist. The result was predictable: the companies canceled hijacked credit and debit cards and the aggravated hackers’ customers began complaining that the stolen card numbers weren’t working as promised.

The Omani News Agency has claimed hackers were responsible for publishing offensive photographs of recently re-elected Algerian President Abdelaziz Bouteflika on its website.

The ONA website was not working on Sunday morning following the embarrassing incident in which the faces of North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un and Mohamed Abdelaziz, head of the Polisario Front and President of the Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic, were superimposed on the profile headshot of Bouteflika, media agencies have reported.

The Keen, a top hacking team which took down Windows 8.1. Adobe Flash in just 15 seconds and Apple’s Safari Mac OS X Mavericks system in only 20 seconds during a Pwn2Own Vancouver event in March, has divulged the identity of its members, a Chinese newspaper reported on 13 April 2014.

“50 percent of us are the top scoring students in the national college entrance examination. 50 percent are majored in mathematics, and 50 percent are from Microsoft,” said Lv Yiping, key member of the Keen and co-founder and chief operating officer of the team’s Shanghai-based parent company.

A 19-year-old student has been arrested for allegedly exploiting the Heartbleed vulnerability to steal taxpayer data from as many as 900 Canadians, authorities said Wednesday.

The arrest of Stephen Arthuro Solis-Reyes by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police marks the first time authorities anywhere have publicly levied charges in connection to the malicious exploitation of a defect in the widely used OpenSSL cryptography library.

For those who don't feel the urgency to install the latest security fixes for their computers, take note: Just a day after Heartbleed was revealed, attacks from a computer in China were launched.

The software bug, which affects a widely used form of encryption called OpenSSL, was announced to the world April 7 at 1:27 p.m. New York time, according to the Sydney Morning Herald. That sent companies scrambling to fix their computer systems -- and for good reason.

Russia and Brazil are hacking Facebook, and the social network is paying them to do it.

Facebook paid out US$1.5 million to security researchers worldwide last year as part of its Bug Bounty programme, and the two emerging markets were responsible for reporting some of the most critical threats, according to a report Facebook released this week.

Hackers have been busy causing service interruptions, breaching databases, and defacing hundreds of Ukrainian and Russian websites, as the crisis between the two countries plays out in cyberwarfare.

The attacks have similarities to the resistance movement that sprung up among German-occupied countries during World War II, which took many forms including sabotage, espionage, armed confrontation and counter-propaganda.

Brazilian hackers are threatening to disrupt the World Cup with attacks ranging from jamming websites to data theft, adding cyber warfare to the list of challenges for a competition already marred by protests, delays and overspending.

In a country with rampant online crime, a challenging telecommunications infrastructure and little experience with cyber attacks, authorities are rushing to protect government websites and those of FIFA, soccer's governing body.

Through my tenure as a student at the University of Maryland from 2000 to 2004, my social security number also doubled as my student identification number. I'd use this number and a password whenever I logged into the college's online management system, Testudo, which I did for everything from course selection and monitoring grades to signing up for basketball tickets. (Go Terps! 2002 National Champs whooo!) I vaguely recall having the option to change my student ID number to something else, but neither I nor anyone I knew ever went to the trouble of doing so.