Skype, once a feisty startup, now a wholly owned subsidiary of Microsoft, has been taking a beating in the press for the past week or so. Most of the negative press has been based on innuendo, partly driven by the company’s boilerplate responses to inquiries by tech reporters.
The media pressure started last Friday at Slate, where Ryan Gallagher wasn’t satisfied with the stock answers and wrote this speculative post:
The newly founded hacker collective NullCrew has been very busy in the past few days. After they hacked the systems of ASUS and the ones of a South African ISP directory, they turned their attention to Yale University.
From the databases of the educational institution, the hackers obtained the details of around 1,200 students and members of the staff.
Internet service provider AAPT has confirmed hackers have stolen customer data in a protest against proposed laws which would allow people's web histories to be stored.
AAPT CEO David Yuile told Fairfax Media the security incident occurred at 9:30pm on Wednesday. He says the ISP is investigating the breach and will contact affected customers.
Citizenlab has released a detailed analysis of the activities of a trojan in which the experts conclude that the malware is most likely closely related to FinFisher, a commercial spyware tool developed by a company called Gamma International. The trojan targeted political activists in Bahrain and included sender names such as that of an Al Jazeera correspondent and subject lines like "Torture reports on Rabil Najaab".
A new hacking group appears to be targeting Wall Street, in sympathy with the waning Occupy Wall Street movement.
Perhaps as proof of its potency, the group, known as Team GhostShell, has released what it said was information from 50,000 user accounts for an online jobs board that focuses on Wall Street, ITWallStreet.com. The group made 12 links available on various web sites, which ended up quickly deleting the links.
Hackers claiming to have stolen 40GB of data from one of Australia's largest internet service providers are threatening to publish part of the cache in protest against the nation's proposed data retention laws.
The group was involved in the defacement of Queensland Government websites this week and claimed to be associated with Anonymous.
As governments around the world finally get around to updating surveillance laws to let them 'snoop' through your online correspondence, Skype is keeping its cards close to its chest.
Hackers have reported that Skype has made some changes to its architecture that will allow it to be more easily jacked into for nefarious purposes or monitoring crime suspects' communications.
Hackers have posted more than 8 million passwords and email addresses obtained from Gamigo, a free gaming site based out of Germany.
Gamigo was initially hacked in March. At the time, the site required all registered users to create new passwords. Hackers posted the personal information earlier this month on a password-cracking forum called Insider Pro, according to Forbes.
The annual BlackHat conference in Las Vegas prides itself as "the best and biggest event of its kind, unique in its ability to define tomorrow's information security landscape."
But this year's event has kicked off with a giant security boo-boo. (This wasn't the sort of mistake to make at any time, let alone to an international army of geeks - paying geeks, at that! - who are in the process of heading to your event.)
The head of the Australian Secret Intelligence Service (ASIS) has warned IT security challenges "pose one of the biggest threats of the decade", as the security landscape makes covert intelligence operations more difficult for agents.
Director-general Nick Warner said this week that despite the Federal Government spending "considerable resources" on boosting intelligence-gathering capabilities for ASIS and other Australian authorities, use of the internet and closed networks to collect information had become dangerous for the spy agency's staff.
