By Steve Huff 10/02/12 10:22am

Hack Hack Hack Hack It Apart

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Hackers ‘Team GhostShell’ Leak 120,000 Records From 100 Major Universities

Team GhostShell returned late Monday with Project WestWind: a leak of 120,000 records from 100 major universities around the world.

Team GhostShell is the hacking group behind Project Hellfire, which launched in August this year. Project Hellfire lifted 1 million accounts from 100 websites around the world, compromising data from the CIA and from Wall Street.

The hacked data leaked in Project WestWind does indeed appear to come from a who’s who of major learning institutions. They include Harvard, Cambridge, Princeton, Tokyo University, Cornell and New York University.

In their Pastebin announcement, Team GhostShell said Project WestWind was a serious effort to jump-start a dialogue on the state of higher education today. Apparently this hack wasn’t pranksterism for the lulz, but hacktivism for the greater good: Read More

By Steve Huff 10/01/12 10:23am

Hack Hack Hack Hack It Apart

Screenshot from http://zone-h.org/archive

White House Admits it Was Targeted by Hackers

In response to a right wing website’s allegation they sustained a cyber attack from Chinese hackers, the White House has admitted to Politico that the attack occurred. However, the Obama Administration insists no data was stolen and classified systems were not compromised.

An unnamed official told Politico that the attempted hack was essentially an isolated incident in which a staffer received an email carrying a malware attachment. To be clear, everything is cool now and rogue Chinese hackers won’t be taking control of the suitcase containing nuclear launch codes any time soon: Read More

By Steve Huff 9/29/12 8:09pm

Hack Hack Hack Hack It Apart

Chinese flag

Chinese Hackers Targeting Major Energy Companies

Telvent, which provides services that facilitate remote control and monitoring of large sections of the energy industry, may have recently fallen prey to Chinese hackers. While notifications about the Sept. 10 systems intrusion were distributed by Telvent Canada, Ltd., the cyber attack was “sophisticated” and targeted operations in the U.S. and Spain as well as Canada.

Security experts believe the culprits are a group of Chinese hackers who have attacked Western companies in the past.

Krebs on Security explains more about the hack: Read More

By Steve Huff 9/24/12 12:42pm

Hack Hack Hack Hack It Apart

pakcyberarmy

The Pakistan Cyber Army May Be Coming For Your Small Business Website

Protests against anti-Muslim “film” Innocence of Muslims have been violent and continue in several countries, but they have not yet exploded into sustained military conflict. However, religiously motivated hackers are waging active war online. While DDoS (Directed Denial of Service) hits against large, well-known sites owned by financial instutions may have been sponsored by Iran, independent Muslim hackers appear to be targeting a slew of small websites with wickedly effective full-blown hacks and defacements.

A hacker calling himself Sizzling Soul and claiming membership in a hacker collective dubbed the Pakistan Cyber Army has taken down more than 80 sites in the name of the Prophet. Many of of those sites remain under his control and are displaying his message: Read More

By Steve Huff 9/14/12 11:55am

Security

This guy is everywhere now. (Image Devdsp on Flickr

Your New Password May Be Located in the Palm of Your Hand

If nothing else, hackers’ exploits in the last couple of years have revealed the frailty of the password protection system. With that in mind, Intel Labs has developed a biometric device and software that could essentially turn the patterns of veins in our palms into biological bar codes. On Thursday Sridhar Iyengar, Intel’s director of security research, revealed the system to an annual Intel Developer Forum: Read More

By Steve Huff 9/11/12 2:07pm

Hack Hack Hack Hack It Apart

GoDaddy, back up and running (Screengrab)

Attention, Attention-Seeking Hackers: GoDaddy is Calling You a Liar

GoDaddy has issued a statement saying the outage that took down several thousand websites for a good portion of the day on Monday was caused not by any sort of hack or Directed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack, but “internal network events that corrupted router data tables.” TechCrunch posted GoDaddy Interim CEO Scott Wagner’s statement about the outage. Mr. Wagner acknowledged the outage and wrote: Read More

By Kelly Faircloth 9/10/12 8:11am

Linkages

What, like we're going to Google a picture of her? (Photo: Wikipedia)

Booting Up: The Beautiful But Deadly Emma Watson Edition

Warby Parker just raised [adjusts glasses] a $37 million round, reportedly led by General Catalyst Partners. [Fortune]

Toys “R” Us plans to sell its own tablet for the kiddies. [Wall Street Journal]

If you search “Emma Watson” online, there’s a good chance you’ll land on malware. Also, you may very well be kind of a creep. [Boston Globe]

Turns out even Google Fiber can’t magic away racial and economic fault lines. [New York Times]

Shit, remember the movie Sneakers? Oh, for the days when hackers had to leave their lairs! [Slate]

By Steve Huff 9/07/12 11:57am

Privacy is Dead

cryptoparty

Have Yourself a Merry Little CryptoParty

“CryptoParty” sounds like an event involving strangers in balaclavas and Guy Fawkes masks sipping cocktails and staring unblinkingly at each other.  That might be fun, but a CryptoParty is really, according to this wiki, a gathering of “Interested parties with computers and the desire to learn to use the most basic crypto programs.” CryptoParties are practical efforts to assist private citizens in learning how to combat what many activists contend is a creeping Orwellian surveillance state in developed countries worldwide.

In a post published a few days ago, the  Australian edition of SC Magazine elaborated: Read More