Hackers

Thirteen suspects have been indicted in New York on a gas station skimming scheme that netted them more than $2 million, according to court documents.

The skimming devices, placed on card readers at gas station pumps throughout the southern U.S., recorded credit and debit card data, as well as PINs, which the thieves then used to withdraw more than $2 million from ATMs. They then tried to launder the money through at least 70 different bank accounts, according to the district attorney’s office in New York County.

In addition to compromising some of Microsoft's social-networking accounts, the Syrian Electronic Army also accessed a "small number" of employee e-mail accounts, the company confirmed Wednesday.

The hacking group, which has taken responsibility for an array of breaches in the past couple of years, tweeted three e-mails over the weekend that appeared to originate from Microsoft employee Outlook Web Access accounts. The screenshots posted by the group included conversations among employees regarding recent compromises of Microsoft-owned Twitter accounts.

 Microsoft's official Xbox support Twitter and the official Microsoft news Twitter accounts have been hacked today by the Syrian Electronic Army, marking the most recent in a long line of attacks against social media accounts by the organization.

The SEA, a collection of computer hackers in support of the Assad regime (amidst a bloody civil war), have recently engaged in a string of defacements against various social media pages and websites belonging to such organizations as VICE, the New York Times, and others.

Anonymous defaced MIT's SSL-enabled Cogeneration Project page on Friday night, displaying a page that called viewers to “Remember the day we fight back.” “The day we fight back” references a protest planned for February 11 in opposition to surveillance and remembering Internet activist Aaron Swartz. The protest is backed by the EFF, Demand Progress, reddit, and Mozilla, among other big players in Internet culture.The defacement no longer appears on the site, but cogen.mit.edu was down as of Saturday morning.

Russian hackers have seized 54 Turkish million citizens’ ID data because Turkey’s political parties and the country’s Supreme Election Committee (YSK) share voters’ personal information, a prominent research company manager has said.

A Department of Energy network breach earlier this year that allowed hackers to download sensitive personal information for 104,000 people was the result of a decade-old patchwork of systems, some that hadn't installed critical security updates in years, according to a federal watchdog.

Matthew Keys, the former social media editor for Reuters, who was accused in March for helping Anonymous hack the Los Angeles Times, hosted a live conversation with someone who claimed to be a leader of the Syrian Electronic Army, the mysterious pro-Assad hacker collective known for high-profile attacks on Twitter, The Guardian and New York Times.

Thirteen people recently pled guilty to charges related to their involvement in DDoS attacks against PayPal in December 2010. The attacks were launched in response to PayPal's refusal to accept donations for WikiLeaks (h/t The Register).

The 13 are Christopher Wayne Cooper, Joshua John Covelli, Keith Wilson Downey, Mercedes Renee Haefer, Donald Husband, Vincent Charles Kershaw, Ethan Miles, James C. Murphy, Drew Alan Phillips, Jeffrey Puglisi, Daniel Sullivan, Tracy Ann Valenzuela and Christopher Quang Vo.

In August, as members of the G20 were preparing to meet to discuss exactly what could be done to address Bashar al-Assad's chemical weapons attack in Syria, a mysterious group of Chinese hackers spied on the computers of five European foreign ministers, using the G20 summit as bait to hack them.

The cyber espionage operation was narrowly targeted and used phishing emails with malicious attachments that had titles referring to the Syrian crisis, such as "US_military_options_in_Syria," according to computer security firm FireEye, which uncovered the campaign.

Thirteen people have pleaded guilty to charges they were involved in a 2010 cyberattack on PayPal for the eBay unit's refusal to process payments for WikiLeaks.

The hacktivist collective claimed responsibility for engineering the December 2010 distributed-denial-of-service attack in retaliation for the online payment processing company's suspension of an account linked to WikiLeaks after the document-leaking organization released a large number of classified documents.