Employing obscenity in passwords–either for the personal amusement or just to feel alive for once in your sorry life–is a longstanding tradition hearkening back to the AOL dialup days of yore when “b00b!es” was your password of choice. But cellular overlord AT&T has no use for either your filthy mind or adorable nostalgia: as Twitter Read More
Notice that your Internet’s been a little slow lately? A cyber fight between an anti-spam group and a Dutch Internet company has spiraled so far out of control that it’s threatening the infrastructure of the Internet and clogging connectivity for everyday web users, including those–gasp–trying to access Netflix. Read More
It’s hard being the Department of Homeland Security. Foreign agents are constantly trying to slip inside the D.H.S.’s computer systems. But America’s hotshot hackers either go for the private sector ($$$) or somewhere you can go on the offensive, like the N.S.A. (which, let’s face it, sounds super-badass).
So, according to the New York Times, the agency, desperate for recruits, is now making like a college football program and hunting for recruits at high school hacking competitions. Read More
Mystery hacker Guccifer has been terrorizing America’s political elite by hacking into their email accounts and proving that even former presidents aren’t really that great at their newfound painting hobby. Now, The Smoking Gun reports that Guccifer has begun targeting Silicon Valley. Ugh, guess that means tech really is cool now. Read More
Even as Guccifer goes on a tear, releasing Hova’s credit reports and Hillary Clinton’s emails, our friends in South Korea are having some computer problems of their own. Earlier today (in the middle of the afternoon, Seoul-time), computer networks at two of the country’s banks and three TV stations shut down out Read More
Andrew Auernheimer, better known by his pseudonym “weev,” was sentenced today to 41 months in prison for exploiting an AT&T security flaw that allowed him to collect and publish the email addresses of 114,000 AT&T iPad owners. He alerted AT&T to the flaw before sending the dataset to Gawker, which published it, leading to an FBI investigation. Read More
Matthew Keys, the 26-year-old social media editor at Reuters who was indicted by the Department of Justice yesterday for collaborating with the hacktivist collective Anonymous, has been suspended from Reuters with pay. Now, reporters are working to cobble together details of his checkered online past. Read More
Power-Twitterer and Reuters deputy social media editor Matthew Keys has been indicted by the Justice Department. He stands accused of “conspiring with members of the hacker group ‘Anonymous’ to hack into and alter a Tribune Company website.”
A journalist handing over his ex-employer’s log-in info to Anonymous, combined with the fact that the vandalized “Tribune Company website” happens to have been the homepage of the Los Angeles Times, is so juicy that overworked assistants all over Hollywood are probably cobbling together pitches to turn Keys into the next Bradley Manning.
Before Reuters, Mr. Keys worked as a web producer for the Tribune Company-owned TV station KTXL FOX 40, in California. The DOJ says that in December 2010, after being “terminated” by Fox 40, he: Read More
Perhaps it’s just the breathless rhetoric everyone uses, but cyber spying sounds exciting. Chinese hackers nosing around New York Times reporters’ emails? That’s the stuff of thrillers! However, the Los Angeles Times discovered a blog kept by a young man once employed as a grunt in China’s hacker army, and it sounds just as bad as the most mind-numbing office job you ever had.
For one thing, you don’t get the usual perks of being a hacker (i.e., the option to work from home pantsless, Cheetos close at hand): Read More
If you’re a computer-savvy college student, one way to illustrate that your university wifi network is terribly insecure is to write letters to the dean expressing your concerns. Another way is to simply hack the network and have all traffic redirect to gay porn. Read More
