Practically every industry these days needs to be prepared for some kind of cyber threat, but the nature of the attacks and how the hackers carry out their assaults is ever-changing. Two news stories that popped onto my radar this week point to the different kinds of potential hacks that might occur, and both have to do with the transportation industry.
Some hackers’ idea of New Year revelry involves hacking a website, defacing it, making bold claims, and declaring noble intentions.
The PrivateX hacking group hijacked anew the website of the Philippine Nuclear Research Institute, diverted visitors to their "message" on Pastehtml.com and and called for intensified information security in the country.
Hackers reportedly plan to fight back against Internet censorship by putting their own communications satellites into orbit and developing a grid of ground stations to track and communicate with them.
The news comes as the tech world is up in arms about proposed legislation that many feel would threaten online freedom. According to BBC News, the satellite plan was recently outlined at the Chaos Communication Congress in Berlin. It's being called the "Hackerspace Global Grid."
Steve Troughton-Smith (@stroughtonsmith) and another iOS hacker known as @themudkip have now managed to port full-resolution iOS applications to a second generation Apple TV.
Yesterday, we told you how the pair had managed to port iOS apps to an Apple TV, and included a video of the hack in-action within our article. However, though this was an incredible achievement, an issue with the hack was that iPhone apps appeared as pop-up windows, and were quite small compared with the HDTV screen.
Anonymous cyber hackers allegedly invaded the servers of the Indian embassy office in Paris and walked away with loads of official documents last month. The hackers later posted all the files, including a proposal to rope in Airbus for the indigenous manufacturing of civilian aircraft and visits of senior bureaucrats, ministers and intelligence officials to France, on a website to show how vulnerable the servers are.
To the average person, Mark Russinovich is as obscure as the fourth Osmond brother. But to IT folks, Mark is every bit a hero as Wozniak, Gates or Ken Olsen.
Mark is also an example of Microsoft's thick skin. Where some take criticism personally, I've found Microsoft to be eminently even-handed. Heck, the company still talks to me!
The Sony PS Vita has just released in Japan, and hackers are already closing in on a way to jailbreak the brand new next-gen Sony PS Vita handheld.
The infamous hacker SKFU is already hard at work trying to crack the Sony PS Vita, and you have to believe that it is only a matter of time before the job of done and homebrew applications are running on the handheld.
Things just got a little bit easier and possibly closer to legal for hackers trying to bring Apple's digital personal assistant Siri to iOS devices other than the iPhone 4S, according to a prominent iOS hacker.
A recent update for iOS 5.01 (build 9A406) specifically for the iPhone 4S makes it possible to explore the device's filesystem unhindered using a Mac or PC, according to several tweets from iPhone Dev Team member Musclenerd.
Japanese game developer Square Enix said on Thursday that servers containing data on 1.8 million customers had been hacked, but said the extent of the damage was not yet known.
The producer of hit titles such as Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest pulled down the Square Enix Members service shortly after discovering evidence of an intruder, said a spokeswoman.
Dutch certificate authority Gemnet has taken its site offline following the discovery of a system breach.
Parent company KPN said that the certificate authority had temporarily suspended its web operations following a breach which allow outside attackers to access the Gemnet web server.
