Hackers

Social engineering is about hacking the human mind, something that in many ways is significantly easier than finding a new software vulnerability and using it as a gateway into your enterprise. These vulnerabilities, called zero-days, can cost tens of thousands of dollars in the hacker underground – money that can be saved if someone can be conned into installing a computer virus on their own machine. After all, there is no need to go through the effort of picking a lock when you can talk someone into letting you into their home. 

News Corporation boss Rupert Murdoch says he is preparing to "hit back" at what he describes as the "lies" directed towards his business and the BBC and the Australian Financial Review both alleged that News Corp has been involved in sabotaging its pay television competitors. 

The EU Civil Liberties Committee has backed a draft law that would update existing EU legislation on cyber attacks which would see any cyber attack on any IT system treated as a criminal offense punishable by at least two years in prison. 

A psychiatrist who once said Gary McKinnon would likely commit suicide if deported to the US to face charges of hacking into Nasa and the Pentagon has now apparently changed his tune and is saying the 46-year old is fit for extradition. 

In a 2009 evaluation commissioned by the McKinnon family, Professor Declan Murphy had warned "If Mr McKinnon is deported to the US, he will require - in my opinion - continual observation on a one-one basis during that time period, and for the rest of his incarceration. If this does not happen, he is likely to make a serious attempt at suicide."

"LulzSec Reborn" surfaced this week with a new collection of hacks. F-Secure's Chief Research Office Mikko Hypponen strongly doubts this is the same group, as does the company's Security Advisor, Sean Sullivan.

When a former Australian army communications expert, Vittorio Lalli-Cafini, started work at a small business in Perth called the Mod Shop in 2003, his boss told him to figure out a way to hack into a company called Foxtel.

A hacker has gained access to the databases of Skeptical Science, a site that focuses its efforts on the issue of global warming and uploaded its entire user database to a Russian website. 

It’s uncertain at this time if the hacker managed to decrypt the passwords attached to the user accounts, but as a precaution customers are being advised to change them. 

Shawn Henry, who is preparing to leave the FBI after more than two decades with the bureau, said in an interview that the current public and private approach to fending off hackers is "unsustainable.'' Computer criminals are simply too talented and defensive measures too weak to stop them, he said. 

Richard Clarke, a former cybersecurity and cyberterrorism advisor for the White House, was a U.S. government employee for 30 years: between 1973 and 2003. He worked during the times of Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton, and even George W. Bush. 

Clarke now wants to warn us, urgently, that we are being failed again, being left defenseless against a cyberattack that could bring down our nation’s entire electronic infrastructure, including the power grid, banking and telecommunications, and even our military command system.

The BBC has accused News Corporation company NDS of paying computer hackers to crack and freely distribute keycodes that would allow pirates to clone the pay-TV smartcards of a Sky rival.

BBC Panorama, first screened on the evening of 26 March, claims that the firm, itself a manufacturer of smartcards, hired hacker Lee Gibling to expand his website The House of Ill-Compute (aka THOIC), and discover and post the codes needed to open up pay-TV company On Digital's smartcards to cloning.