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Note: The following text is a quote: SPEAR PHISHING E-MAILS TARGET U.S. LAW FIRMS AND PUBLIC RELATIONS FIRMS 11/17/09—The FBI assesses with high confidence that hackers are using spear phishing e-mails with malicious payloads to exploit U.S. law firms and public relations firms. During the course of ongoing investigations, the FBI identified noticeable increases in computer exploitation attempts against these entities. The specific intrusion vector used against the firms is a spear phishing or targeted socially engineered e-mail designed to compromise a network by bypassing technological network defenses and exploiting the person at the keyboard. Hackers exploit the ability of...

Note: The following text is a quote: Department of Justice Office of Public Affairs FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASETuesday, November 10, 2009 Alleged International Hacking Ring Caught in $9 Million Fraud Major Credit Card Processor Victimized in Elaborate Theft of Account Numbers Sergei Tsurikov, 25, of Tallinn, Estonia; Viktor Pleshchuk, 28, of St. Petersburg, Russia; Oleg Covelin, 28, of Chisinau, Moldova; and a person known only as "Hacker 3;" have been indicted by a federal grand jury in Atlanta, Ga., on charges of hacking into a computer network operated by the Atlanta-based credit card processing company RBS WorldPay, which is part of...

This week's 60 Minutes broadcast should make everyone afraid, very afraid, of the real, looming specter of cyberwarfare attacks. As I recently blogged, government agencies are already going full-bore to come up with guidelines to protect federal networks. So when an Admiral goes on national television to say hackers have the ability to take down our power grid, he's doing it to deliver a warning. I was actually poised to turn off the segment, which I happened upon by accident following Sunday's last-minute Giants loss. Half-expecting the usual security for dummies piece, I was surprised to see an unusually detailed...

Had a virus alert yesterday from AVAST. As usually, it allowed me to abort connection and proceed. Cyber Security popups came up on my sceen and thinking it was AVAST prompting me, I ran a program. Turns out it was a fake site trying to get info and now it's embedded in my system. CAN ANYONE HELP? It's trying to block FR as a malicious website.

November 4, 2009: South Korea has confirmed suspicions that Internet based attacks earlier this year came from "the norks" (North Korea). The South Korean NIS (National Intelligence Service) has completed its investigation of the route the July attacks took, and has traced the origin back to the North Korean Ministry of Post and Telecommunications facilities. While there was no apparent damage from the July attacks (which hit government sites in South Korea and the United States), similar attacks have made away with secret data. For example, the South Korean military recently reported that someone hacked into a classified network, and...

A hacker's claim that he compromised the successor to President Obama's campaign Web site appears to be a hoax, according to information that surfaced since the matter came to light early Monday. The kerfuffle started when a hacker and blogger with a history of posting evidence of security vulnerabilities in popular and high-traffic Web sites published evidence indicating that poor security at barackobama.com had exposed internal databases at the site. The hacker, identified only as "Unu," claimed that a security flaw in barackobama.com allows anyone to view the user names and passwords needed to administer the site. With that access,...

WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) -- After interrupting President Barack Obama's address to Congress on health care reform by shouting "You lie!," US Representative Joe Wilson received a formal reprimand from the House of Representatives. His actions also made his online fundraising campaign the target of a distributed denial-of service attack over the weekend, which sent his site and those of about 150 other Piryx (www.piryx.com) web hosting clients offline.

NOTE: The following blog entry is a quote: Blog Details Iranian Hacker: We Work in Cooperation with the Regime Behrouz Kamalian, head of a 15-member Iranian hacker group called "Ashyaneh," stated that the group works in cooperation with most of the government and military organizations in Iran, and that during the Israeli attack on Gaza and on 'Qods Day' (September 18, 2009), the group hacked 1,500 Israeli websites, as well as hundreds of Danish websites in retaliation for insulting the Prophet Muhammad. Source: IRNA (Iran), October 17, 2009 Posted at: 2009-10-18

"Project Grey Goose and University at Albany SUNY to investigate major Power Grid blackouts caused by hackers" SNIPPET: "This is an open call for volunteers who wish to participate in a joint Project Grey Goose / University at Albany SUNY open source intelligence investigation into power grid blackouts caused by hacker attacks. The scope is global and includes the U.S. Interested parties should contact me from their work email address with an expression of interest, a brief bio, and your experience, if any, in SCADA systems in general or the power grid in particular. All respondents will be kept confidential....

SNIPPET: "After the 4 July DDoS attacks, wrongly attributed to North Korea, it’s wise to treat reports of DPRK security hacks with some caution. Nevertheless, The Korea Times reports the following: Classified Info on Dangerous Chemicals Hacked Hackers stole classified information on dangerous chemicals in their raid on the South Korean army computer network in what was believed to be an attack by North Korea, Yonhap News Agency reported Saturday, quoting government officials." SNIPPET: "The Sydney Morning Herald adds more information: A North Korea cyber warfare unit hacked into a South Korean military command earlier this year and stole some...

Microsoft sends biggest patch on record Tue Oct 13, 2009 4:03pm EDT SEATTLE (Reuters) - Microsoft Corp issued its biggest software patch on record on Tuesday to fix a range of security issues in its programs, including the yet-to-be-released Windows 7 operating system. In a monthly update sent to users of its software, Microsoft released 13 security bulletins, or patches, to address 34 vulnerabilities it identified across its Windows, Internet Explorer, Silverlight, Office and other products. It said six of the patches were high priority and should be deployed immediately. The patches -- which update software to write over glitches...

The FBI on Wednesday announced that it had charged 53 defendants, the largest number ever charged in a cybercrime case, following a multinational investigation into a phishing scheme that operated in the United States and Egypt. Thirty-three of the 53 defendants named in the indictment have been arrested, the FBI said, and several others are being sought. The investigation, dubbed "Operation Phish Phry," began in 2007. Authorities in Egypt have charged 47 defendants linked to the phishing operation. Phishing is a form of social engineering that attempts to convince Internet users, via e-mail or other means, to provide online credentials...

"...In other words, after you've blithely downloaded a plug-in that shares your computer's Internet connection and processing power with other, unknown computers, Octoshape might choose to alter just what it's doing, how it's doing it, or the extent to which it is using your computer, remotely updating the software on your machine to change it, and /they're not going to tell you/. Oh, they'll make a revision to the license agreement available on their website, sure – but when was the last time you actually read all of the details of any software agreement, much less reviewed revisions to the...

“MI5 hiring Asian teenagers to fight cyber terror” London, September 21, 2009 First Published: 00:09 IST(21/9/2009) Last Updated: 02:44 IST(21/9/2009) SNIPPET: “MI5 head Jonathan Evans has told his staff that the recruits were essential to combat cyber terrorism which has been traced to China, Russia and Pakistan — the hackers have also intercepted messages from terrorists in Belmarsh maximum security prison, the newspaper said. In a report to Lord West, the Security Minister, Evans has revealed that during the summer over 1,000 hits were made on computers in Whitehall. Other targets have been air traffic control, power stations and the...

Cyber criminals have created a highly sophisticated Trojan virus that steals online banking log-in details from infected computers. The Clampi virus, which is spreading rapidly across hundreds of thousands of computers in Britain and the United States, infects computers when users visit websites that host a malicious code. Once on the computer, the virus sits unnoticed until the user logs on to bank, credit card or other financial websites. It then captures log-in and password information and sends it to a server run by the attackers. They can then tell the compromised computer to send money to accounts that they...

The shadowy internet group known as Anonymous has hacked into the prime minister's website to protest over proposed internet censorship reforms. An Attorney-General's Department spokesperson confirmed to ninemsn the Prime Minister's website was taken down at 7.25pm last night, but said the site was operational again "within minutes". "Visitors to the site received a service unavailable error," the spokesperson said in a statement. "There was no unauthorised access to site infrastructure." The Australian Communications and Media Authority's website was also affected. A message posted on the Inquisitor website by Anonymous stated that the action was in response to a federal...

Security: A Senate bill lets the president "declare a cybersecurity emergency" relating to "nongovernmental" computer networks and do what's needed to respond to the threat. Didn't they just collect our e-mail addresses?We wish this was just a piece of the fictional "Dr. Strangelove" that fell to the cutting-room floor, but it's not. It is a real piece of disturbingly vague legislation sponsored by Sens. Jay Rockefeller, D-W.Va., Bill Nelson, D-Fla., and Olympia Snowe, R-Maine. Senate Bill 773 would grant the administration emergency powers (where have we heard that before?) in the event of a cyberemergency that the president would have...

Hackers are becoming more organised as a new pool of talent coming from eastern European countries – Russia in particular – becomes available, writes CIARA O’BRIEN A number of attacks involving Russian hackers has hit the headlines in recent weeks. The most recent was the charging of Albert Gonzalez, a former US government informant who has already been jailed in connection with hacking cases. He is accused of stealing 130 million credit and debit card numbers. Two unnamed Russian co-conspirators were also charged in relation to the theft, said to the biggest case of identity theft seen yet. Mr Harbison,...

Three Indicted in Largest Corporate Identity Theft Case in History Monday, August 17, 2009 DEVELOPING: Three men have been indicted in New Jersey in an identity theft case that the Justice Department is labeling as the largest in history. Authorities say more than 130 million credit and debit card numbers were stolen in a corporate data breach involving five different companies. This is a developing story. Please click refresh for updates.

SNIPPET: "One of the Chinese bloggers that I follow reported that Uyghur separatists have defaced a handful of Chinese .gov.cn sites. The hacker(s) are known as “Spy HackerZ” and their handy work can be found with a simple google search for “spy hackerz” site:gov.cn. There are eight results all from different local government sites. The Spy Hackerz use the defacements as opportunities to voice their opinion about perceived injustices. The sites’ admins have apparently been notified because the defacements are either removed or the sites are presently down. I grabbed this screenshot from the ‘iron circle’ blog:"

Last week, Twitter was vexed by a DDoS attack that took it offline for a few hours. In that case, Russian hackers were suspected. This week's DDoS attack, however, may have different origins -- and they could be related to the attacks that took out a few U.S. and South Korean government sites last Fourth of July, according to AVG's chief of research. The latest attack hit the site in waves. "We're currently experiencing another wave of Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks against our system," Alex Payne, platform lead at Twitter, wrote on the service's Web dev blog on...

A TSG investigation unmasks the leader of Pranknet and the miscreants behind a year-long wave of phone call criminality AUGUST 4--At 4:15 AM on a recent Tuesday, on a quiet, darkened street in Windsor, Ontario, a man was wrapping up another long day tormenting and terrorizing strangers on the telephone. Working from a sparsely furnished two-bedroom apartment in a ramshackle building a block from the Detroit River, the man, nicknamed "Dex", heads a network of so-called pranksters who have spent more than a year engaged in an orgy of criminal activity--vandalism, threats, harassment, impersonation, hacking, and other assorted felonies and...

http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3179840 As some of you may have noticed, recently the Republican Party has begun cracking down on the "birthers", realizing that openly supporting the most crazy members of your party is, well, problematic for appealing to non-crazy people. This, of course, leads to even more crazy, as they turn on their leaders for hiding the "truth". It's a drat shame to let all this crazy go to waste, when properly cultivated and raised it could be so much more. So welcome to the first FreeRepublic Infiltration Contest! We're going to infiltrate freerepublic as agents provocateur. This can take several forms;...

Scofflaws could hack the smart cards that access electronic parking meters in large cities around the United States, researchers are finding. The smart cards pay for parking spots, and their programming could be easily changed to obtain unlimited free parking. It took researcher Joe Grand only three days to design an attack on the smart cards. The researchers examined the meters used in San Francisco, California, but the same and similar electronic meters are being installed in cities around the world. "It wasn't technically complicated and the fact that I can do it in three days means that other people...

Terrorists groups could soon use the internet to help set off a devastating nuclear attack, according to new research. The claims come in a study commissioned by the International Commission on Nuclear Non-proliferation and Disarmament (ICNND), which suggests that under the right circumstances, terrorists could break into computer systems and launch an attack on a nuclear state – triggering a catastrophic chain of events that would have a global impact.

* Mac expert shows how hackers can steal encrypted data * Demonstrates method at conference for security experts LAS VEGAS, July 29 (Reuters) - A Mac security expert has uncovered a technique that hackers could use to take control of Apple Inc (AAPL.O) computers and steal data that is scrambled to protect it from identity thieves. Prominent Mac researcher Dino Dai Zovi disclosed the software flaw at the Black Hat security conference in Las Vegas, one of the world's top forums for exchanging information on Internet threats. About 4,000 security professionals are in attendance, including some who are really hackers....

SNIPPET: "In theory at least, the Wild West days of Internet telecommunications are over. Based upon the inventions articulated in his five-patent suite, inventor Harry Emerson III, has mapped out a union between our secure and venerable telephone system - (Plain Old Telephone Service; a.k.a., POTS) - and the hyper-evolving, media-rich Internet which is so famously not one bit secure. As it evolves, he believes this next generation telecommunications system, dubbed IronPipe™, will have huge implications for national security as well as tremendous new revenue opportunities for the carriers and supply chains which serve them."

South Korea's state intelligence organization said Friday it has discovered that a wave of cyber attacks carried out earlier this week into key government and private websites in South Korea and the United States was launched from computers in 16 countries, Yonhap News Agency reported. The National Intelligence Service made the report to a closed-door meeting with members of a parliamentary intelligence committee, Yonhap quoted committee members as saying. North Korea was not among the 16 countries, which include South Korea, the United States, Japan, and Guatemala, Yonhap said. The cyber attacks have been traced to 86 Internet Protocol addresses...

The powerful attack that overwhelmed computers at U.S. and South Korean government agencies for days was even broader than initially realized, also targeting the White House, the Pentagon and the New York Stock Exchange. Other targets of the attack included the National Security Agency, Homeland Security Department, State Department, the Nasdaq stock market and The Washington Post, according to an early analysis of the malicious software used in the attacks. Many of the organizations appeared to successfully blunt the sustained computer assaults. The Associated Press obtained the target list from security experts analyzing the attacks. It was not immediately clear...

The flagship system designed to protect the U.S. government's computer networks from cyberspies is being stymied by technical limitations and privacy concerns, according to current and former national-security officials. The latest complete version of the system, known as Einstein, won't be fully installed for 18 months, according to current and former officials, seven years after it was first rolled out. This system doesn't protect networks from attack. It only raises the alarm after one has happened. A more capable version has sparked privacy alarms, which could delay its rollout. Since the National Security Agency acknowledged eavesdropping on phone and Internet...

PORTLAND, Ore. – Hackers defaced the home page of the Oregon University System, posting a caustic message telling President Barack Obama to mind his own business and stop talking about the disputed Iranian election. Attempts to access the university system's Web site were automatically redirected to another page, where readers viewed a message said to be from Iran that asserted there was no cheating in the election. That message was up for 90 minutes before university system technicians intervened Wednesday morning.

For 90 minutes this morning, hackers upset with President Obama’s vocal stance on the disputed Iranian election made their voice known. A message telling President Barack Obama to mind his own business and not to comment on Iran’s election was posted. A spokeswoman for the university, Diane Saunders, said hackers allegedly broke through the school’s computer defenses via a third-party software application that had not been properly updated. It afforded the hackers the ability to access the computer and address the president in the unflattering way: “Hey Stupid Fly Catcher Obama!”, according to the AP. Note: The phrase “Stupid Fly...

Neda Soltani’s Death Inspires New Site A hastily created Web site called NedaNet has formed in honor of a young woman, Neda Soltani, who was killed during a Tehran protest. The site’s founder, Eric S. Raymond, created the page to serve as a jumping-off point for hackers who want to help Iranian citizens. “Our mission is to help the Iranian people by setting up networks of proxy servers, anonymizers and any other appropriate technologies that can enable them to communicate and organize — a network beyond the censorship or control of the Iranian regime,” the site says. A video widely...

A recent computer intrusion that forced the FBI to shut down its computer network and disrupted FBI operations was traced to an e-mail containing malicious code that originated in China, according to FBI officials. The forced shutdown of the network affected one significant FBI operation -- the May 20 arrest of homegrown terrorism suspects in New York, said officials who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the matter. "The Chinese shut down our network," said one FBI official familiar with assessments of the attack.

NEWARK, N.J.—An Indictment was unsealed today against three individuals who allegedly hacked into the telephone systems of large corporations and entities in the United States and abroad and sold information about the compromised telephone systems to Pakistani nationals residing in Italy, Acting U.S. Attorney Ralph J. Marra, Jr. announced. In conjunction with the unsealing of the Indictment, Italian law enforcement conducted searches of approximately 10 locations in four regions of Italy and arrested the financiers of the hacking activity. Those financiers allegedly used the information to transmit over 12 million minutes of telephone calls valued at more than $55 million...

An action by the US government is causing a flurry of not so complimentary comments across the internet. A group of 17 Uighur detainees who are on the road to release are being given laptops to train them for life outside Guantanamo. Army Lt. Col. Miguel Mendez oversees detainee classes, as well as the multilingual library and, now, the new virtual computer lab. “We’re getting them computer classes to prepare for their return.” Nury Turkel is a Uighur rights activist in Washington, D.C. He felt the computer training would “give hope to the men that their freedom is nearing” after...

May 13th, 2009 China's 'secure' OS Kylin - a threat to U.S offensive cyber capabilities? Posted by Dancho Danchev @ 6:23 am Categories: Browsers, Complex Attacks, Governments, Hackers, Kernel-level Exploits... Tags: China, Operating System, Operating Systems, Linux, Software... Picture a cyber warfare arms race where the participating countries have spent years of building offensive cyber warfare capabilities by exploiting the monoculture on one another’s IT infrastructure. Suddenly, one of the countries starts migrating to a hardened operating system of its own, and by integrating it on systems managing the critical infrastructure it successfully undermines the offensive cyber warfare capabilities developed...

Cyberwar is now a fact of life in 21st Century wars. Actual and potential enemies of America already know the dimensions of Cyberwar and have moved into full combat. With a real world combat engagement in Georgia and Estonia, the Russians have shown skill. Make no mistake; in certain arenas the Russians are smart and capable, and as the invasion of Georgia shows, ruthless. They have world class scientists and engineers. It is well known they are excellent Cyber Warfighters who have now also apparently harnessed their criminal hackers to augment their worldwide reach. This melding of Russian conventional military...

As a cyber space race looms, the military is looking for a few good geeks. High school hackers, crackers and digital deviants: Uncle Sam wants you. As part of a government information security review released as early as Friday, White House interim cybersecurity chief Melissa Hathaway likely will mention a new military-funded program aimed at leveraging an untapped resource: the U.S.' population of geeky high school and college students. The so-called Cyber Challenge, which will be officially announced later this month, will create three new national competitions for high school and college students intended to foster a young generation of...

NEWARK, NJ—A New Jersey man pleaded guilty today to his role in a cyber attack on Church of Scientology websites in January 2008 that rendered the websites unavailable. Dmitriy Guzner, 19, of Verona, New Jersey, pleaded guilty to computer hacking charges originally filed in Los Angeles for his role in the distributed denial of service (DDOS) attack against the Scientology websites. A DDOS attack occurs where a large amount of malicious Internet traffic is directed at a website or a set of websites. The target websites are unable to handle the high volume of Internet traffic and therefore become unavailable...

SAN FRANCISCO — University of California, Berkeley, officials said Friday that hackers infiltrated restricted computer databases, putting at risk the personal information of 160,000 current and former students, alumni and others. The university said data include Social Security numbers, health insurance information and some medical records dating back to 1999. The databases also included personal information of parents and spouses as well as Mills College students who used or were eligible for Berkeley's health services.

COVERT RADIO SHOW http://covertradioshow.com # http://covertradioshow.com/podcast.cfm?pid=187 Covert Radio Daily Blast May 7 North Korea has hackers working round the clock on cyberwarfare. Could they have been behind recent attacks on the Alaskan Air Traffic Control system? Are we prepared for Cyber Warfare? Narco Traffickers are declaring war on our cops, and the latest in the coming war between Georgia and Russia.

Symantec says a new worm targeting Mac OS X spreads via email and network shares. But is it really a threat?According to Symantec, the Tored worm spreads through network shares and by emailing itself to addresses gathered from the infected computer's Address Book. It opens a back door to the computer, allowing it to be conscripted into distributed denial of service attacks as well as logging keystrokes (which could be used to steal passwords and other confidential information). There is no indication that Tored can execute without user intervention. For example, Symantec does not seem to suggest that there are...

Hackers last week broke into a Virginia state Web site used by pharmacists to track prescription drug abuse. They deleted records on more than 8 million patients and replaced the site's homepage with a ransom note demanding $10 million for the return of the records, according to a posting on Wikileaks.org, an online clearinghouse for leaked documents. Wikileaks reports that the Web site for the Virginia Prescription Monitoring Program was defaced last week with a message claiming that the database of prescriptions had been bundled into an encrypted, password-protected file.

North Korea runs a cyber warfare unit that tries to hack into U.S. and South Korean military networks to gather confidential information and disrupt service, a news report said Tuesday. The North's military has expanded the unit, staffing it with about 100 personnel, mostly graduates of a Pyongyang university that teaches computer skills, Yonhap news agency reported, citing an intelligence agency it didn't identify. South Korea's Defense Ministry said it is aware that Pyongyang has been training hackers in recent years but did not provide details and had no other comment. The National Intelligence Service — South Korea's main spy...

A FRENCH computer hacker is thought to have tapped into Twitter's internal system, gaining access to millions of accounts including that of US President Barack Obama. The hacker, under the name "Hacker Croll", posted a series of screenshots showing him viewing internal website settings and the private details of user accounts. The screenshots show Croll looking at the behind-the-scenes details for the account of US President Barack Obama, including the IP address of the last person to use it. Twitter co-founder Biz Stone confirmed unauthorised access was gained by an outside party during the week, but said only 10 individual...

Note: The following text is a quote: Two Missouri Brothers Among Those Indicted in $4 Million Nationwide Spamming Conspiracy Millions of E-Mail Addresses Illegally Harvested from Computers at 2,000 Schools KANSAS CITY, MO—Two Missouri men and their company are among those indicted by a federal grand jury in a nationwide e-mail spamming case that victimized more than 2,000 colleges and universities in a scheme that sold more than $4 million worth of products to students, announced Matt J. Whitworth, Acting United States Attorney for the Western District of Missouri. Amir Ahmad Shah, 28, of St. Louis., his brother, Osmaan Ahmad...

For years, the U.S. intelligence community worried that China’s government was attacking our cyber-infrastructure. Now one man has discovered it’s worse: It’s hundreds of thousands of everyday civilians. And they’ve only just begun At 8 a.m. on May 4, 2001, anyone trying to access the White House Web site got an error message. By noon, whitehouse.gov was down entirely, the victim of a so-called distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack. Somewhere in the world, hackers were pinging White House servers with thousands of page requests per second, clogging the site. Also attacked were sites for the U.S. Navy and various other federal...

AMERICA needs to pay a heckuva a lot more atten tion to the cyberthreat. Now. Sure, the Pentagon is refuting a Wall Street Journal report last week that hackers pinched loads of data on the military's newest, high-tech fighter aircraft from contractors' computer networks via the Internet. But even if the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter program wasn't actually penetrated by cyberspies, it's still a chilling wake-up call for the United States. The computer systems of the F-35 Lightning were penetrated "repeatedly," according to the newspaper, allowing cyber cat burglars to "copy and siphon off several terabytes of data related to...

By Donna Miles American Forces Press Service WASHINGTON, April 22, 2009 – Defense Department officials are working to reduce vulnerability to cyber-attack attempts that occur regularly and are likely to continue for the foreseeable future, Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates said. “We are under attack virtually all the time, every day here,” Gates told CBS Evening News anchor Katie Couric yesterday during an interview broadcast on the show. Attempts to attack DoD computer networks have more than doubled recently, Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman told reporters yesterday. He declined to cite details, saying that to do so would only “make it...