This weekend, a group of hackers claiming solidarity with Anonymous performed a huge data dump of 1 million records. Speaking for Team GhostShell, black hat hacker DeadMellox evoked a metal vibe, writing, “All aboard the Smoke & Flames Train,” before listing targets of the dump. Read More
Looks like the Iranian nuclear facility at Natanz is, at the very least, 0 for 2 against cyber attacks. First came Stuxnet, which wreaked havoc with the equipment used to purify uranium. And now–at least, if a recent report (via VentureBeat) is true–they are dealing with a malware infestation involving sudden, late-night AC/DC.
F-Secure chief research officer Mikko Hypponen received the following email from someone who claimed to be an Iranian nuclear scientist: Read More
Remember back in the mid-2000s, when everyone used to get those annoying “YOUR COMPUTER IS INFECTED” pop-up ads for anti-virus software? (For that matter, remember pop-up ads?) Like anyone with an ounce of Internet savvy was going to download software marketed via sketchy pop-ups.
Well, get ready for a blast from the past, warns cybersecurity blogger Brian Krebs, because that same tacky, spammy tactic may now be coming to your mobile device.
Mr. Krebs tells the tale of one security consultant, who was doing a little dining-while-browsing, when suddenly, Read More
MySocialCloud was still in relatively early stages last year when Stacey Ferreira, now 20, saw a tweet from investor and Virgin Group founder Richard Branson, which read, somewhat cryptically: “Enjoy intimate cocktails with me in Miami on June 15th – $2,000 to charity,” and including an email address to contact for more details. It was the perfect chance to pitch her startup, she thought. Read More
Turns out lots of people don’t know the difference between legitimate LinkedIn emails and spam.
In the wake of last week’s massive password breach, the site sent users whose passwords had been hacked emails with instructions for resetting those compromised passwords. But, according to the spam fighters over at Cloudmark, a good number of the people who received them just chucked them into the junk bin:
This was a real email from Linkedin telling people whose password had been compromised how to protect their account. Over four percent of the people receiving this email, thought it was spam and sent it straight to the bit bucket. If Linkedin sends out 6.5 million emails, then a quarter of a million people are congratulating themselves on avoiding spam, and still have a compromised Linkedin password.
For the last time, people: Change your passwords. But also maybe LinkedIn might want to throttle back on the non-essential emails, so people stop assuming their messages are worthless?
(h/t Computer World)
What if you had such a staunch following on Facebook that posting a link resulted in so may clicks that the ISP thought you were staging a DDoS attack? That’s what happened to George Takei, who is best known for playing fan favorite Mr. Sulu in the Star Trek films and series.
Mr. Takei has over two million Facebook fans. An average post receives thousands of comments, likes and shares, numbers that would have most social marketers foaming at the mouth. He shares tons of memes, weird news articles and videos, and is apparently also fond of Sulu-themed LGBTQ merchandise, as that’s where he ran into trouble with one paranoid ISP. Read More
The relationship between Anonymous and the recording industry could not be described as copacetic. Nor is this likely to improve things: Wired reports that a band of affiliated coders is building its own open social music platform. Naturally, it is named Anontune.
This is just the latest in a series of sites and applications built either by Anonymous or by coders claiming to represent Anonymous. Last month it was an OS; yesterday came word of AnonPaste, an alternative to text-sharing site Pastebin. Just this morning, social networking alternative Anonybook accidentally sent a boob shot to Gawker. Read More
Cybercrime! We’re basically living through the digital equivalent of Prohibition, right? Well, a couple of researchers would like to quash everyone’s mental images of Scarface but with credit-card databases instead of blow. Having run the numbers, researchers Dinei Florêncio and Cormac Herley took to the New York Times opinion page to trumpet their doubts: Read More
Speaking to a cyber-security professionals in San Francisco, F.B.I. director Robert Mueller named what the feds see as America’s emergent number 1 threat: cyber-terrorism. Mr. Mueller first sounded this warning note in testimony given in January to the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence.
In his remarks at the R.S.A. Conference Thursday, the A.P. reports Mr. Mueller listed losses to cyber-criminals: “We are losing data, we are losing money, we are losing ideas and we are losing innovation,” he said. Mr. Mueller also told attendees that together they “must find a way to stop the bleeding.” Read More
The Federal Bureau of Investigation may yank several crucial domain name servers (DNS) offline on March 8, blocking millions from using the Internet. The servers in the FBI’s crosshairs were installed in 2011 to deal with a nasty worm dubbed DNSChanger Trojan. DNSChanger can get an innocent end-user in trouble; it changes an infected system’s DNS settings to shunt Web traffic to unwanted and possibly even illegal sites.
DNSChanger oozed out of Estonia and may have fouled up as many as a half-million computers in the United States. The feds’ temporary fix to keep the worm from propagating was to replace infected servers with clean surrogates. Read More
