Darren Kitchen spent this weekend walking around the SXSW festival with an unobtrusive but relatively evil red box attached to his backpack: it impersonated Wi-Fi networks in hopes of convincing laptops, phones and other wireless devices to connect to it.
Hackers claim to have stolen 40,000 plain text credit card from porn website Digital Playground.
The lifted details included names, CCV numbers and expiration dates.
Hackers from the group the Consortium say they also looted the personal information on 72,000 users. They said they rooted four of the site's servers which gave access to corporate emails. "We did not set out to destroy them, but they made it too enticing to resist," the hackers wrote on a defacement. "So now our humble crew leaves lulz and mayhem in our path."
Jeremy Hammond, one of the five hackers arrested two days ago in the crackdown on key members of LulzSec and Anonymous, is no stranger to the law and has been described by his mother as "genius with no brain".
Court documents released earlier this week show that the 27-year-old Chicago native was arrested several times over the past few years for hacking activities, protests, mob action and other charges. The picture that emerges of Hammond is of an individual committed to a variety of activist causes with little concern about their potential consequences.
At the large public housing project in New York City where he lived, outsiders knew him as a quiet family man. But federal prosecutors say Hector Xavier Monsegur was an internet saboteur known as Sabu.
During the Arab spring, prosecutors say he hacked into government websites in Tunisia, Yemen and Algeria. He helped coordinate attacks on credit card companies after they refused to accept donations to Wikileaks. Then, they said, he added another layer to the subterfuge by informing on his accomplices after he was caught by the FBI last spring.
The Internet is already buzzing about the Hack in the Box (HITB) conference that will take place in Amsterdam between May 21 and May 25. Among the interesting subjects presented at the event, there are also the flaws discovered by a Polish security researcher in digital satellite TV set-top-boxes and Digital Video Broadcasting (DVB) chipsets.
The trail to the New York apartment where a hacker named "Sabu" of LulzSec and Anonymous fame was arrested last June can be traced back to a former Anonymous participant who turned against the group over its WikiLeaks activities.
Sabu, whose name is Hector Xavier Monsegur, pleaded guilty to computer hacking charges in August and spent the last six months working as an informant for the FBI. The undercover operation led to hacking-related charges being filed against four alleged cohorts in the U.K., Ireland, and Chicago yesterday.
Did the FBI know in advance of the Stratfor hack, but let it happen in order to gather evidence?
Soon after the news broke yesterday (March 6) about the arrest and cooperation of turncoat Anonymous and Lulzsec hacker Hector Xavier Monsegur, known online as "Sabu," the Justice Department released chatroom transcripts that imply the FBI knew in advance of the devastating attack in December upon the Austin, Texas geopolitical analysis firm Strategic Forecasting, Inc.
The Vatican Website apparently is the latest victim of the hacker group Anonymous, reportedly taken down March 7 in protest of everything from the Catholic Church’s doctrine and tenets to the sexual abuse of children by priests.
The Vatican’s Website, at www.vatican.va, was down for a while March 7, though appeared to back up and running by 5 p.m. ET. A Vatican spokesman confirmed with the Associated Press that the site was down, but declined to speculate on the cause.
At last year’s CanSecWest Pwn2Own hacker contest, Google Chrome was the only browser left standing. This year, Chrome was the first to fall, thanks to an impressive exploit from a team of French hackers.
VUPEN, the controversial company that sells vulnerabilities and exploits to government customers, deliberately took aim at Chrome this year to send a simple message: no software is unbreakable if hackers have enough motivation to prepare and launch an attack.
Considering Anonymous’ disparate nature, and no central authority calling the shots, it’s a surprise this group has not turned on each other already. Antivirus firm Symantec reports that associates of the group are finding themselves victims of denial-of-service software that has been infected by a Trojan horse.
