Remember last summer, when all anyone could talk about was hacktivists? For a while there, we were living in a William Gibson novel, with hackers wreaking havoc and corporate types running scared. Well, so far, this June is shaping up a little differently, with a wave of state-sponsored attacks straight Read More
As we’ve noted before, Anonymous isn’t always the calvary you want riding to your rescue. It seems that Pirate Bay agrees: Forbes reports the download hub has asked the hacker collective to please stop with the hack attacks on their behalf, thanks very much. Read More
Anonymous and its ilk continue to scare the bejesus out of the Internet. Judging from this research report from cyber security firm Bit9, IT pros are braced for all kinds of hacktivist havoc.
The firm surveyed 1,861 IT and security pros, the majority from organizations bigger than 500 employees. 64 percent expect to face cyber attacks in the next six months, and 61 percent point to Anonymous and its hacktivist fellow travelers as the most likely attackers. More generally, a solid two-thirds of respondents believe we’re really seeing an uptick in the rate of attacks, thanks to more hackers, stronger state-sponsored efforts, and so forth. They’re not exactly pulling that out of thin air, either. For one thing, attacks on financial companies tripled year-over-year in the first quarter of 2012. 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
Occupy Wall Street, or occupy Wall Street’s servers? A new report from Florida-based security firm Prolexic says financial services companies were targeted in three times as many attacks in the first quarter of 2012 compared to the first quarter of 2011. “This quarter was characterized by extremely high volumes of malicious traffic directed at our financial services clients,” said Neal Quinn, Prolexic’s vice president of operations, said in a statement.
Bad news for Wall Street. Good news for Prolexic. 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
Signal hacking, which probably reached its Zenith with the infamous and surreal “Max Headroom” hack of a Chicago TV broadcast in 1987, may be making a bit of a comeback with the advent of WiFi enabled Smart TVs. That’s one possibility suggested by the WiFi hack of a South Carolina Best Buy that displayed “extremely, extremely pornographic” images on several 55-inch TVs in the store’s display.
Gloria Berg, who was in the store with her children at the time, complained to the manager. In an interview with a local TV station, Mrs. Berg told of the the manager’s interesting response to her concerns: Read More
When NASA’s computers get infected, government officials don’t mess around.
In a 62-page indictment unsealed in the Southern District of New York today, a number of parties, including Preet Bharara’s office, the New York office of the FBI, and NASA’s Inspector General brought charges against six Estonian nationals and one Russian national for a “massive and sophisticated” Internet fraud scheme.
The clickjackers infected 4 million computers in more than 100 countries with malware, including at least 500,00 computers in the U.S. that belonged to NASA, educational institutions, businesses and non-profits. Read More
Corporate execs and governments with secrets to hide may lay awake at night fretting about the possibility that Anonymous will hack their systems and expose their secrets.
But there are things that keep Anonymous up at night as well . . . Like, say, Los Zeta, the powerful Mexican drug cartel.
According to Forbes, a Mexican newspaper called Milenio, says that Anon has cancelled “OpCartel”: its plan to expose a cache of information about Los Zeta. Read More
The hacker collective Anonymous has released another video and with it, another declaration of war–this time on the New York Stock Exchange. A serious attack on the NYSE’s infrastructure would devastate global trade, but Anonymous’s exact aim is unclear. However, the hacker collective is planning to overwhelm the exchange’s public-facing website, NYSE.com, in a DDOS attack.
In its typically-articulate message, Anonymous expresses solidarity with the protesters gathering in a park two blocks from Wall Street. Read More
