Hackers

Amsterdam, The Netherlands, 14 May 2012 – Sogeti Nederland B.V. has just announced the first ever Social Engineering and CTF Challenge (#SSEC2012) in Europe. Hosted at the third annual HITB Security Conference on 24th - 25th May at Okura Hotel in Amsterdam, the challenge will see participants putting their social engineering skills to the test in a series of fact-finding phone approaches aimed at Dutch companies.

Anonymous has been meek and quiet since the great Sabu treachery, failing to even threaten much of anything. But in a new interview, one of the group's last remaining leaders says Anon has a nuclear card up its sleeve.

Christopher "Commander X" Doyon, whose name is public because he's been busted for hacking a California government website, sat for an interview with the National Post. The exchange circles mostly around Doyon's exile in Canada, where he's hoping to dodge the wrath of American feds. But he ends on one particularly ominous and/or laughable note:

Hackers shut down a United States online video company on Wednesday that was being used by Russian activists to stream live video of protests in Moscow, prompting the company’s leaders to launch a Russian-language version of the site.

Members of TeamGhostShell recently published over 150,000 user names, hashed passwords and e-mail addressees stolen from an online education Web site for China's Hangzhou Dianzi University, along with thousands of user names, hashed passwords, e-mail addresses and private forum messages from FXTrader.eu, a European foreign exchange trading site. 

"The group said it attacked the technical university's online education site, which is currently offline, because 'of the hilarious irony,'" writes SecurityNewsDaily's Matt Liebowitz.

Hackers claimed to have breached the systems of the Belgian credit provider Elantis and threatened to publish confidential customer information if the bank does not pay €150,000 (£122,000) before Friday, May 4, they said in a statement posted to Pastebin. Elantis confirmed the data breach on Thursday, but the bank said it will not give in to extortion threats. 

It’s not just malicious apps you need to be wary of infecting your smartphone. Now, navigating to poisoned websites are a threat, too. 

Adding injury to insult, fraudsters have merged the phenomenon of ransom Trojans with banking malware, producing a hybrid that demands money before attempting to steal user logins. 

Noticed by several security firms since the turn of the year, the web drive-by Reveton Trojan tries to coax victims into handing over payments of up to $100 with the warning that they have been found accessing violent and child porn content by the US Department of Justice.

More than 15,000 Australian credit cards worth an estimated $3.75 million in total were salvaged from underground hacker forums in a global police sting.

The cards were held across 36 carding websites that used automated vending carts to sell the accounts in large batches.

The recent arrest of Higinio O. Ochoa III, of Galveston, Texas -- allegedly a member of the Anonymous-linked CabinCr3w --generated considerable amusement (and some unbearably bad puns) when it was reported that the FBI tracked him down using photos he had posted of his girlfriend's breasts (covered somewhat by a bikini top).

Nissan said it found malicious software on its network that stole employee user IDs and hashed passwords, but said no personal information or e-mails appeared to have been compromised.

The car company released a statement on April 20, one week after the intrusion was detected. Jeff Kuhlman, Nissan's head of global communications, said on Thursday that Nissan delayed disclosing the breach sooner in order to cleanse its network of the malicious software and prevent tipping off the hackers.