No one who has seen it forgets the "Twilight Zone" episode about a town in Ohio that lives in terror of a 6-year-old born with godlike powers. One man who opposes the boy finds himself turned into a jack-in-a-box for thinking "bad thoughts." If the "hacktivist" collective known as Anonymous has something in common with a willful, dangerous child, then Aaron Barr is the adult who got in trouble for thinking bad thoughts.
A StopBadware & Commtouch survey of 600 website owners who suffered a website breach found that:
Nine months ago, Pwned List was created to answer a simple question for users: Is your account among the millions whose credentials have been spilled onto the web?
Head over to PwnedList.com, type in your email address or username, and the site will check it against a database that has now grown to 12 million compromised credentials collected from crawling public sites where hackers post stolen data.
While 2011 could be considered the “year of the hacker,” government efforts prevented cyberattacks from having any major effect on Defense Department systems, Gen. Keith Alexander, head of U.S. Cyber Command, told a House subcommittee on Tuesday.
A report by China's National Computer Network Emergency Response Technical Team and Coordination Center claimed that cyber attacks on the country from foreign hackers has surged in 2011, rising to 8.9 million computers affected from 5 million the previous year.
It said Japan was the source of most attacks at 22.8 percent, followed closely by the United States, 20.4 percent, and the Republic of Korea, 7.1 percent. The report also found that 11,851 Internet protocol addresses based overseas had controlled 10,593 Chinese websites last year.
Alleged LulzSec hacker Ryan Ackroyd who appeared before Westminster Magistrates' Court last Friday has been released on bail under the condition that he would not access the internet or possess any device that could do so.
University College of London student, Shah Mahmood, along with Yvo Desmedt, Chair of Information Communication Technology, has discovered what they're labelling as a “zero day privacy hole” in Facebook.
The vulnerability which they call “deactivated friend attack” was presented at the IEEE International workshop on security and social networking in Switzerland. They say the attack works like this:
A Russian programmer has once again taken top honours at Facebook's annual Hackers Cup - the third annual code-off took place on Saturday.
Facebook had flown in 25 of the brightest programming minds from around the world after approximately 8000 people from 150 countries competed in a 72 hour qualification round in January. The 25 finalists were from China, Germany, Japan, Poland, South Korea, Russia, Taiwan and Ukraine as well as the United States. As with last year, the elite group did not include any women.
A hacker (most likely from South America) going by the name of UR0B0R0X claims to have compromised over 20 different companies including Apple, CBS, Sony and Warner Bros.
In a posting on pastebin.com, the hacker has revealed database details of what he's calling “film production and high prestige” sites. Data leaked includes usernames, passwords and e-mail addresses (which appear to be legitimate), however as the passwords are hashed, there is no way to verify if the logins are valid.
