British police arrested a 19-year-old man in England on suspicions that he was linked to cyber attacks on the CIA, Britain’s anti-organised crime agency and Sony Corp.
As part of international efforts to catch the culprits behind a string of high-profile hacks, London’s Metropolitan Police, working with the US FBI, said they arrested the teenager in the town of Wickford, close to London.
The raid was linked to recent attacks on the websites of the US Central Intelligence Agency and the British police Serious Organised Crime Agency (SOCA), which targets organised crime in Britain and overseas, police said.
The suspect’s computer was being examined for data linked to Sony, whose websites have also been attacked.
The US Sergeant at Arms Office confirmed yesterday that the Senate’s website had been hacked this past weekend and that it had ordered a review of all Senate computer sites.
“Although this intrusion is inconvenient, it does not compromise the security of the Senate’s network, its members or staff,” a Sergeant at Arms Office official said. “Specifically, there is no individual user account information on the server supporting senate.gov that could have been compromised.”
Google says China-based hackers were responsible for a spate of phishing attacks on Gmail users. —
Google has become a “political tool” vilifying the Chinese government, an official Beijing newspaper said today, warning that the US Internet giant’s statements about hacking attacks traced to China could hurt its business.
The tough warning appeared in the overseas edition of the People’s Daily, the leading newspaper of China’s ruling Communist Party, indicating that political tensions between the United States and China over Internet security could linger.
Last week, Google said it had broken up an effort to steal the passwords of hundreds of Google email account holders, including US government officials, Chinese human rights advocates and journalists. It said the attacks appeared to come from China.
The Chinese Foreign Ministry rejected those accusations, and the party newspaper warned Google against playing a risky political game.
A sophisticated hacking attack, which experts say is the largest of its kind ever seen, has managed to insert malicious code into website
More than one million website pages have been hit by a sophisticated hacking attack that injects code into sites that redirect users to a fraudulent software sales operation.
The so-called “mass-injection” attack, which experts say is the largest of its kind ever seen, has managed to insert malicious code into websites by gaining access to the servers running the databases behind the Internet, according to the technology security company that discovered it.
Websense, which first found evidence of the attack earlier this week, has called it ‘LizaMoon,’ after the site to which the malicious code first directed its researchers.
Newspaper fronts reporting on the documents released by the whistle-blowing website WikiLeaks are seen in New York, November 29, 2010.
British police arrested five young men yesterday as they and US authorities conducted searches as part of a probe into Internet activists who carried out cyber attacks against groups they viewed as enemies of the WikiLeaks website.
“The arrests were related to recent ‘distributed denial of service’ (DDoS) attacks by an online group calling themselves Anonymous,” London police said in a statement.
In the United States, the Federal Bureau of Investigation said that agents executed more than 40 search warrants as part of its investigation and that the attacks were facilitated by software the group made available for free on the Internet.
Kristina Svechinskaya has been dubbed 'the world's sexiest computer hacker' after helping plot a $3million computer scam.
The Russian femme fatale has been compared to former Russian spy Anna Chapman for her role in helping to mastermind a multi-million pound bank fraud scheme.
The 21-year-old was arrested in New York this month for her role in a internet fraud ring who used computer viruses to steal more than $3 million from US bank accounts
World's sexiest computer hacker: Kristina Svechinskaya is accused of using the Zeus Trojan software to attack thousands of people's accounts
Information: The video gave a brief rundown of the Islamic beliefs, while the instructions told the government to introduce a law to prevent people insulting religion.Hacked: Islamits targeted Denmark's KFC website and left an educational video about their religion, as well as instructions to the Danish government
Denmark's KFC website has been targeted by Islamist hackers.
The hackers decided to gain access to the fast food site and post an educational video about their religion on the page.
They also left instructions to the Danish government to introduce a new law to punish people who publicly insult religion.
The hackers implied in their demands that if the law is not introduced, the hacking of Danish websites will continue.
While it is not clear why the KFC site in particular was chosen, some have speculated it is because of the lack of security on the webpage.
The hackers left a slightly cryptic message on the site, which read: 'If your Gov. don't make rules for Punishing anyone Insult Religions in the name of (Freedom of Speech ! ) or ( Freedom to Insult ) :)
'So, take this rule of Hacking ! in the name of
'[ Hacking is a Knowledge and the Knowledge is Free ! ] It means [ Hacking Anyone I want !!!!]
'If your People can behave and Learn how to Respect , act rationally and stop to Insult Other Religions
'under the name of ( Freedom to Insult ) or ( Freedom of Speech )
'Then the Rule of Hacking will be stopped
'Finally , I would like to remind also with the decree which the Human Rights Agency in the United Nations adopted on the 12th of April 2005. This decree insisted on the ban of distortions and vicious attack against religions and especially Islam; which had been strongly attacked in the last few years !
'Don't worry .. No files deleted .. Just my Index* has been added to your lame bOx ;)
It is not clear if the hacker posted anything on Mr Obama's Twitter page
President Barack Obama talks on the phone en route to George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia, in this handout picture taken on March 19, 2010
A Frenchman who police say hacked Twitter accounts belonging to US President Barack Obama and celebrities could face jail.
The unemployed 25-year-old was arrested on Tuesday after an operation lasting several months, conducted by French police with agents from the FBI.
The 25-year-old is said to have hacked into the micro-blogging website, by simply guessing users' passwords.
The suspect reportedly targeted other celebrities, including Britney Spears.
After being questioned by police, he was ordered to appear at court in the central French city of Clermont-Ferrand on 24 June.
Hacking into a database in France is a crime which can carry a two-year jail term.
The suspect, who used the pseudonym "Hacker Croll", had no specialist training, Adeline Champagnat, head of the French central office against online fraud, told Reuters news agency.
He gained access to Twitter accounts by simply working out the answers to password reminder questions on targets' e-mail accounts, according to investigators.
An unemployed Frenchman has been arrested for targeting the Twitter accounts of President Barack Obama and singer Britney Spears, French police said on Wednesday.
Captain Adeline Champagnat, a senior member of the police cyber crimes unit, said the 25-year-old man gained access to passwords of Twitter administrators and used them to try to break into the accounts of U.S. politicians and stars.
"He didn't get as far as their personal accounts. But he had gained control of Twitter," she told Reuters Television in an interview.
She said the FBI had tipped off the French police in July last year that one or more people were trying to get access to Twitter and had gained control of the social network.
That enabled them to create and delete accounts and steal confidential information.
The hacker, who went by the online name of HackerCroll, is under arrest in the central French town of Clermont Ferrand.
He was known to have carried out minor internet fraud but in this case was driven by the thrill of the challenge and appeared to be more interested in the private life of his victims than on obtaining sensitive data, Champagnat said.
"His aim wasn't to make money. It was simply to show that he was able to access accounts of Twitter members. And the best proof of that is that he did screen grabs of certain confidential data which he tried to post on blogs that are reserved for pirates or hackers," she said.
She said several FBI agents were currently in France to help their French counterparts carry out searches.
"The collaboration was very good with the FBI and it's always very good with the FBI, because there's a real exchange of information. It's good cooperation to arrest the offender," she said.
Iranian hackers brought down micro-blogging website Twitter for around two hours this morning.
The attack took place at around 6am and left the site's estimated 30million users unable to send messages or post 'tweets'.
The main Twitter homepage had been replaced with a black and red screen featuring an image of a green flag.
The page carried the message: 'This site has been hacked by the Iranian Cyber Army.
The site reappeared around two hours later, with staff telling users: 'We are working to recovery from an unplanned downtime and will update more as we learn the cause of this outage.'
It is believed that Twitter's DNS records were hijacked in the attack meaning that users who were trying to visit the site were actually redirected to the new page.
The DNS, which stands for Domain Name System, connects the name of a website, in this case twitter.com, to the servers which hold its contents.
A short statement was issued on the company's blog. The site reappeared around two hours later, with staff telling users: 'We are working to recovery from an unplanned downtime and will update more as we learn the cause of this outage.'
It is believed that Twitter's DNS records were hijacked in the attack meaning that users who were trying to visit the site were actually redirected to the new page.
The DNS, which stands for Domain Name System, connects the name of a website, in this case twitter.com, to the servers which hold its contents.
A short statement was issued on the company's blog.
Hackers targeted the University of East Anglia¿s Climatic Research Unit, pictured, and published sensitive emails on the internet
One of the world’s leading climate change research centres has been accused of manipulating data on global warming after thousands of private emails and documents were leaked.
Hackers targeted the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit and published the files, including some personal messages, on the internet.
Among the most damaging is one which appears to suggest using a ‘trick’ to massage years of temperature data to ‘hide the decline’.
The CRU, which plays a leading role in compiling UN reports and tracks long-term changes in temperature, has repeatedly refused to provide detailed information about the data underlying the temperature records.
It is thought that this could have triggered the theft. Climate change sceptics claim that some of the leaked messages discuss ways of manipulating data that fails to comply with the establishment view that climate change is real and is being driven by man.
The email suggesting ‘hiding the decline’ is purported to be from Phil Jones, the unit’s director.
He denied trying to mislead, telling the TGIF digital newspaper he had no idea what he meant by the phrase.
‘That was an email from ten years ago,’ he said. ‘Can you remember the exact context of an email you wrote ten years ago?’
Another message has been interpreted as an attempt to control the publication of research carried out by sceptical scientists.
One way of doing this would be by loading the panel of researchers who review papers ahead of publication with experts who are ‘on-message’.
Talk of a figure being ‘shoehorned’ into a report from the UN’s International Panel of Climate Change appears in another of the documents.
Although the data was stored on the university’s computer system, the email exchanges also involve experts from other institutions around the world.
A spokesman for the University of East Anglia said: ‘We are aware that information from a server used for research information in one area of the university has been made available on public websites.
‘Because of the volume of this information we cannot currently confirm that all of this material is genuine.
‘This information has been obtained and published without our permission and we took immediate action to remove the server in question from operation.
‘We are undertaking a thorough internal investigation and we have involved the police in this inquiry.’
The Met Office collaborates with the East Anglia unit on a variety of research projects, including global temperature records.
Spokesman Dave Britton said the two organisations had to turn down numerous Freedom of Information requests because they did not hold the copyright to the data.
‘There is a feeling we are hiding something,’ he said. ‘But we are not, we just can’t release the data.’
He said that is was unclear whether some of the documents had been tampered with, adding: ‘We are not concerned about the robustness of the science we are pushing but we are worried about it being interpreted out of context.’
3 Charged for Hacking
Three alleged members of the hacker gang Kryogeniks were hit with a federal conspiracy charge Thursday for a 2008 stunt that replaced Comcast's homepage with a shout-out to other hackers.
Prosecutors identified Christopher Allen Lewis, 19, and James Robert Black Jr., 20, as the hackers "EBK" and "Defiant" -- known for hijacking Comcast's domain name in May of last year.
The prank took down the cable giant's homepage and Web mail service for more than five hours and allegedly cost the company over $128,000.
Visitors to Comcast.net had been redirected to a simple page reading "KRYOGENIKS EBK and DEFIANT RoXed COMCAST sHouTz To VIRUS Warlock elul21 coll1er seven."
A third man, Michael Paul Lebel, 28, was also charged with helping the duo, though his alleged handle "Slacker" was not credited in the defacement message.
As described in the indictment, the hackers got control of the domain with two phone calls, and an e-mail was sent to the company's domain registrar, Network Solutions, from a hacked Comcast e-mail account.
That gave them entry to the Network Solutions control panel for Comcast's 200 domains, according to the indictment.
In an interview the day after the attack, Defiant and EBK told Wired magazine's Threat Level that they didn't initially set out to redirect the site's traffic. Instead, they merely changed the contact information for the Comcast.net domain to Defiant's e-mail address; for the street address, they used a false address using crass language.
Then, the hackers said, they contacted Comcast's original technical contact at his home number to tell him what they'd done. It was only when the Comcast manager scoffed at their claim and hung up on them that EBK said it was decided to take the more drastic measure of redirecting the site's traffic to servers under the hackers' control.
"I was trying to say we shouldn't do this the whole damn time," Defiant said last year.
"But once we were in," added EBK, "it was, like, [expletive] it."
The indictment also says that the hackers phoned the Comcast official at home.
In the interview last year, the hackers expressed some shock about the attention the attack garnered.
"The situation has kind of blown up here, a lot bigger than I thought it would," said Defiant, who said he was 19 years old and his first name was James. "I wish I was a minor right now because this is going to be really bad." RELATED POSTS:-
