On Thursday the Syrian government shut down nearly all Internet traffic into and out of the country, a sign that the government of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad has grown wary of external scrutiny. Many activists fear it is also a sign that Syria plans a vicious crackdown on rebels who seek an end to Assad’s regime. Read More
The Argonne National Laboratory’s Vulnerability Assessment Team specializes in assessing security weaknesses. They examine physical devices like locks, seals, security tags–and voting machines. How easy is it to hack certain brands of voting machine? Turns out Argonne’s Roger Johnston discovered it was way too easy to hack the touchscreen Diebold Accuvote-TSX. That’s a little alarming, since versions of this machine will be used to cast up to 9 million votes on Tuesday, November 6th. (You know, tomorrow.)
In an article in Popular Science magazine, Mr. Johnston explained that he used a “man-in-the-middle” hack on one of the Diebold machines, simply attaching a small microprocessor that allowed him to essentially interfere with whatever the voter intended to do. Worse still, Mr. Johnston says you can do this with pretty much any voting machine, because as far as he knows, most of them are not encrypted. One thing, however, works against any would-be voting machine hacker’s malevolent, vote-stealing intentions: Read More
A Chinese hacking crew dubbed the Comment Group has been romping through corporate America’s computer networks for a few years now. The extent of the breaches wasn’t clear until Bloomberg published an in-depth report Sunday detailing in part how soft drink giant Coke was hacked in 2009 and didn’t tell.
The deep hacking of sensitive data from Coke’s systems destroyed a $2.4 billion acquisition deal with China Huiyuan Juice Group, which would have been the largest deal of its kind at the time: Read More
Hackers from outside the United States recently penetrated the website for South Carolina’s Department of Revenue and reportedly made off with 3.6 million Social Security numbers and 16,000 unencrypted credit and debit card numbers.
South Carolina has a population of approximately 4.5 million, meaning the compromised Social Security numbers could affect most of state.
South Carolina’s governor held a press conference about the breach on Friday: Read More
Recently Cody Brocious discovered that the program controlling Onity brand hotel room door locks was weak enough he could crack it and open any room secured with one. Building on Mr. Brocious’s work, ethical hacker Matthew Jakubowski has taken hotel room lock hacking into James Bond territory, hiding his own lockpicking device inside an innocuous Dry Erase marker.
Mr. Jakubowski refers the curious hacker or technologically sophisticated burglar to Mr. Brocious for the fine details regarding the actual hacking of the locks and then describes creating his “Hotel Pen Test Pen” in detail. He has also uploaded a video of his pen unlocking a hotel door lock purchased on eBay, which you can watch below. Read More
Large protests against austerity measures have roiled Spain as demonstrators rallied across Madrid on Tuesday. The protests were spawned by economic woes and have targeted politicians and government facilities.
They climaxed Tuesday night with protesters surrounding the Spanish congress building in action dubbed “Occupy Congress.” Clashes with police ensued, resulting in multiple arrests and fueling the wrath of Anonymous.
The hacktivists issued a press release expressing their solidarity with the Spanish occupiers and announcing a “Operation Spain” in support of their efforts.
Anonymous said the livestreams of “the horrendous brutality on the part of the Spanish National Police” against the protesters prompted the hackers to remove “from the Internet the web site of the Spanish National Police located at www.policia.es.” They say the site will be kept offline as “long as we continue to watch scenes of brutality.”
Anonymous won’t stop there, though: Read More
If your notion of a DIY project is “rosettes” crafted from duct tape, prepare to have your mind blown. A redditor with the username DBrizzle spent the last eight months hacking on a portable Xbox 360, and the results are rather magnificent.
DBrizzle took apart an old Xbox 360 slim and transformed it into a portable laptop-like device with a functioning Xbox 360. The device opens and closes like a laptop, and measures only a little over two inches when closed. The whole thing cost him about $520, which is about twice what an Xbox 360 currently costs. But getting to play the new Borderlands 2 somewhere other than a darkened room? Priceless. Read More
Romanians Iulian Dolan and Cezar Iulian Butu have confessed in the U.S. District Court in New Hampshire to multiple counts related to credit card fraud via hacking.
Under the leadership of another Romanian, Adrian-Tiberiu Opera, the men trawled the Internet for vulnerable point-of-sale programs, which apparently included applications linked to credit card payments at 150 Subway restaurants. The scam lasted two years and vacuumed up more than $10 million in profits. Citing court documents, Read More
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
Manhattan’s district attorney has slapped Gucci hacker Sam Chihlung Yin with up to six years in state prison for hacking the corporate network of Gucci American, Inc. In a press release from the office of Cyrus R. Vance, Jr., the D.A. noted that Mr. Yin pleaded guilty in mid-July to one felony count of computer tampering in the first degree and 10 felony counts of “criminal possession of computer related material.”
Mr. Vance’s announcement regarding Mr. Yin’s sentence included a quote from the D.A. that could be read as a none-too-veiled warning to anyone else tempted to follow the former Gucci network engineer’s example: Read More
