Over months, Venezuelan TV soap opera writer Leonardo Padron built a Twitter following of about 250,000 people by posting more than a dozen messages a day, many of them skewering President Hugo Chavez.
On Aug. 29, Padron issued a typical shot: "Chavez knows of the immense death toll that there is in this country, so why such indifference to the subject of insecurity?"
The home page of Harvard University is functioning normally after it was defaced Monday morning by activists in support of the embattled regime in Syria.
"We took down the site for several hours in order to restore it," a statement from the Cambridge, Mass. college said. "The attack appears to have been the work of a sophisticated individual or group." But considering defacements have been commonplace on the web for more than a decade, some experts questioned whether the attack could be considered advanced.
Hackers today released personal information for Goldman Sachs Chief Executive Officer Lloyd Blankfein.
The document, posted to the Pastebin Web site, includes the CEO's age, recent addresses, details of litigation he has been involved in, as well as registration information for businesses, but no sensitive information such as financial data.
Hackers on Monday compromised MySQL.com, the official website for the popular open-source MySQL database, to distribute malware to visitors, according to security researchers.
The hack caused those who visited the site on Monday morning to be redirected to a domain that attempted to install malware on their machines via the Black Hole exploit pack, Wayne Huang, CEO of web application firm Armorize, said in a blog post Monday. The site appeared to be cleaned by 3 p.m. EST, according to reports.
Harvard University's home page was hacked earlier today in what was described as a "sophisticated" attack that briefly defaced the site with a message accusing the U.S. of supporting the uprising against Syria's president.
Accompanying an image of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad was a message that said "SyRiAn ELeCTronic ArMy WeRe HeRE," according to a screenshot captured by the BBC. The defacement included an anti-U.S. diatribe that accused the U.S. of supporting a "policy of killing" in Syria, the BCC reported:
The same group that hacked NBC News' Twitter account on September 9 and sent tweets about a bogus attack on Ground Zero apparently grabbed hold of USA Today's Twitter feed today and fired off a clutch of messages.
The taunting tweets from someone claiming to be The Script Kiddies asked if Twitter had the courage to suspend the group again and encouraged Twitter users to vote for the next account to be hacked. "Fox News, Wal-mart, Unilevel, Pfizer, NBC and now USA Today. who's next? Vote now!" read one of the tweets.
Adobe on Wednesday patched six vulnerabilities in Flash Player, including one it admitted is already being exploited by attackers. That vulnerability, identified as CVE-2011-2444, shares some traits with an earlier Flash flaw that was used to target Gmail accounts in June.
Adobe labeled CVE-2011-2444 as a cross-site scripting (XSS) vulnerability, a class of bugs often used by identity thieves to steal usernames and passwords from vulnerable browsers. In this case, browsers were not directly targeted; rather, attackers exploited the ubiquitous Flash Player browser plug-in.
Software used to breach the security of a Japanese maker of sensitive weapons systems contained simplified Chinese characters, making it difficult for those who don't speak the language to carry out the hack, Japan's biggest daily newspaper reported.
Online, in print, on TV, and on the radio, report after report claims that malicious hacking is "more sophisticated than ever before." The media seemingly wants the world to believe it's besought by impossible-to-stop uberhackers with supersophisticated tools and skills.
Researchers have discovered a serious weakness in virtually all websites protected by the secure sockets layer protocol that allows attackers to silently decrypt data that's passing between a webserver and an end-user browser.
