Hackers

Weaknesses in the technology that allows smartphone users to pinpoint themselves on a map, or check into restaurants and bars using apps such as Foursquare, could allow those users to be tracked remotely.

Ralf-Philipp Weimann, a researcher at the University of Luxembourg, reported this finding at the Black Hat computer security conference in Las Vegas yesterday. He believes that the complex mechanism by which phones get location fixes likely also hides vulnerabilities that could allow the mechanism to be used to install and run malicious code on the device.

The newly founded hacker collective NullCrew has been very busy in the past few days. After they hacked the systems of ASUS and the ones of a South African ISP directory, they turned their attention to Yale University.

From the databases of the educational institution, the hackers obtained the details of around 1,200 students and members of the staff.

Internet service provider AAPT has confirmed hackers have stolen customer data in a protest against proposed laws which would allow people's web histories to be stored.

AAPT CEO David Yuile told Fairfax Media the security incident occurred at 9:30pm on Wednesday. He says the ISP is investigating the breach and will contact affected customers.

A hacker attack that leads to planes dropping from the sky is the stuff of every cyberwar doomsday prophesy. But some security researchers imagine a less sensational, if equally troubling possibility: Hundreds or thousands of aircraft radioing their approach to an air traffic control tower, and no way to sort through which are real and which are ghost plane signals crafted by a malicious hacker.

A new hacking group appears to be targeting Wall Street, in sympathy with the waning Occupy Wall Street movement.

Perhaps as proof of its potency, the group, known as Team GhostShell, has released what it said was information from 50,000 user accounts for an online jobs board that focuses on Wall Street, ITWallStreet.com. The group made 12 links available on various web sites, which ended up quickly deleting the links.

Police in South China have detained a gang of hackers they believe are responsible for attacks on 185 government websites.

Police in Jieyang, Guangdong province, said the case is the biggest of its kind in recent years.

Hackers claiming to have stolen 40GB of data from one of Australia's largest internet service providers are threatening to publish part of the cache in protest against the nation's proposed data retention laws.

The group was involved in the defacement of Queensland Government websites this week and claimed to be associated with Anonymous.

Researcher Charlie Miller is looking to spur exploration into the security of near-field communication (NFC) hardware.

The Accuvant Labs research consultant showed attendees at the Black Hat conference a pair of demonstrations in which an attacking device could access a targeted handset and remotely execute files via NFC connections.

Gen. Alexander will not be fair game for fed-spotting contest

The hacker community is the ultimate moral gray.  While many hackers engage in malicious activities on a daily basis, and routinely violate U.S. local, state, and federal laws, they also have been vital over the last two decades in protecting consumers.  In the 1990s corporations recklessly stored data using poor practices which threatened to allow personal financial information to fall into the hands of truly malicious individuals. 

ew things are as scandalous at computer-hacker conferences as the presentations that don’t happen.

Hackers face constant legal threats for their discoveries. So when someone plans to disclose an important security hole, but is forced to cancel the talk because of legal pressure, the episode is almost always mythologized. It’s remembered as another skirmish between “white hat” hackers who are trying to make technology safer, and companies and governments that want to protect their parochial interests.