hacks and cracks
Anonymous Unfurls ‘Operation Titstorm’
Several Australian government websites were slowly recovering Wednesday hours after the online prankster group, Anonymous, unleashed a massive distributed denial-of-service attack to protest the country’s evolution toward internet censorship. The group, which has brought down Scientology’s websites and undertaken a host of other online pranks, dubbed the attack “Operation Titstorm” to protest the government’s move to require the filtering of pornography hosting adult actors if they appeared under age. Other violent material targeting children is also to be censored.
Continue reading »Hackers Steal Millions in Carbon Credits
Credit card numbers are so passe. Today’s hackers know the real powerhouse data to steal is emission certificates. That’s exactly what hackers went after last week when they obtained unauthorized access to online accounts where companies maintain their carbon credits, according to the German newspaper Der Spiegel .
Continue reading »Microsoft Learned of IE Zero-Day Flaw Last September
Microsoft was aware months ago of a critical security vulnerability well before hackers exploited it to breach Google, Adobe and other large U.S. companies but did not patch the hole completely until Thursday. The software giant had intended to release a patch for the flaw in February — more than four months after learning about it –but had to speed up that plan and role it out this week in the wake of news that Google and others had been hacked through the flaw, the world’s largest software maker acknowledged Thursday.
Continue reading »Alleged Ponzi Mastermind Stanford Pwned in Antigua
In early 2008, while federal investigators were busy looking into disgraced financier Robert Allen Stanford for his part in an alleged $8 billion fraudulent investment scheme , Eastern European hackers were quietly hoovering up tens of thousands of customer financial records from the Bank of Antigua, an institution formerly owned by the Stanford Group. According to a fraud investigator with firsthand knowledge of the break-in, the hackers responsible infiltrated a component of the Stanford Group’s network by exploiting vulnerabilities in the company’s web servers and databases. On the condition of anonymity, the investigator shared with this author files recovered from the breach, which were stored in plain text for at least several weeks on a website controlled by the attackers.
Continue reading »TJX Hacker ‘Will Never Commit Any Crime Again’
Confessed hacker Albert Gonzalez’s turn as a Secret Service informant led him down a dark path of obsession, culminating in the largest identity-theft spree in history. Frances Gonzalez Lago, Gonzalez’s sister wrote his sentencing judge that her brother’s work as an informant for the agency between 2003 and and 2008 seemed to act as a reward for his obsession with computers. “All this seemed okay at the time, but psychologically it was feeding an obsession that in the end would become my brother’s downfall,” she told the court.
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