Free Republic

A worldwide gang of criminals stole $45 million in a matter of hours by hacking their way into a database of prepaid debit cards and then draining cash machines around the globe, federal prosecutors said Thursday — and outmoded U.S. card technology may be partly to blame. Seven people are under arrest in the U.S. in connection with the case, which prosecutors said involved thousands of thefts from ATMs using bogus magnetic swipe cards carrying information from Middle Eastern banks. The fraudsters moved with astounding speed to loot financial institutions around the world, working in cells including one in...

For the first time the Obama administration has explicitly accused China’s military of hacking into computer systems of the U.S. government and its defense contractors. "The accusations relayed in the Pentagon’s annual report to Congress on Chinese military capabilities were remarkable in their directness," writes David Sanger of The New York Times.

It would appear that Rep. Mike Rogers, the main person in Congress pushing for CISPA, has kept rather quiet about a very direct conflict of interest that calls into serious question the entire bill. It would appear that Rogers' wife stands to benefit quite a lot from the passage of CISPA, and has helped in the push to get the bill passed. It's somewhat amazing that no one has really covered this part of the story, but it highlights, yet again, the kind of activities by folks in Congress that make the public trust Congress less and less. It has...

The US stock market went into a temporary tailspin after hackers broke into the Twitter account of the Associated Press and announced that two bombs had exploded at the White House, injuring Barack Obama. “Breaking: Two Explosions in the White House and Barack Obama is injured,” said the fake “alert” from one of America’s most trusted news sources, briefly fooling some news outlets and sending the Dow Jones plunging 145 points in the space of two minutes — or 1 per cent. The benchmark S&P 500 index also fell nearly 1 percent in the space of three minutes as the...

Republicans have been so busy attacking each other lately that little attention is being paid to the antics of the left. The far left activists, including the Occupy movement and Anonymous, have been quite busy. The Occupiers are helping fast food workers strike for higher wages and a union. Their targets include Wendy's and Burger King in New York City. If they really wanted to help those workers, they would encourage them to attend college and find higher paying jobs. The founder of the Occupy movement, Adbusters, is organizing Occupiers to protest Goldman Sachs banks around the world. They would...

Terror group Hamas was quoted Saturday as saying that members of the hacking group Anonymous broke into a Mossad website and revealed the names of 123 Israeli spies. According to a report in Egyptian newspaper Al Shaab al Masri, the claim was made by an officer for the "internal security intelligence" mechanism in the interior ministry of the Hamas government of Gaza. The officer said that 48 of the spies work in Egypt's and Saudi Arabia's stock exchanges. Another 52 work in the EMPC building, where Egypt's central television studios are located, 15 work on oil rigs in the Persian...

This has not been a very good cyber war for Anonymous hackers against the Jews of Israel. As we reported earlier, their own site was humiliatingly hacked just hours after declaring their cyber war, dubbed #OpIsrael. Now, the apparently not so Anonymous hacktivists have been arrested in Jordan. Weasel Zippers has the story. Jordanian security forces arrested several youths who are suspected of attacking Israeli internet sites as part of the large scale cyber attack on Israel declared by the group called Anonymous. This has really upset the hacker community, who is now threatening to attack Jordan. They’ve also declared...

Hackers Bust N.Korean Propaganda Site International hacker group Anonymous on Thursday broke into Uriminzokkiri, a North Korean website that spreads propaganda from North Korea's official KCNA news agency. The hacker collective released the personal information of the website's 9,001 subscribers, including their ID and password, name, date of birth and other details. The South Korean National Intelligence Service said, "Many of the leaked details on the website match those of South Koreans." Police are taking a keen interest. A National Police Agency spokesman said, "A considerable number of people who want to access information about North Korea are registered on...

A group of international hackers, dubbed “Hackers Anonymous,” has vowed to “erase Israel from the Internet” in a coordinated attack against the Jewish state scheduled to take place on April 7. The campaign, titled #OpIsrael, was initiated and announced by a hacker who goes by the name of Anon Ghost, the Arabian Gazette reported Wednesday. It is being supported by a number of other known hacktivists who have gained notoriety for carrying out similar state-targeted attacks. “Israel isn't stopping human rights violations. It’s to show solidarity with newly recognized Palestinian state,” one hacking team told The Hackers Post website, providing...

The hacker, who is being hunted by law enforcement, reportedly forwarded the sensitive information on to a website The website, exposed.su, reveals the hacked information about Jay-Z, Beyonce, Hillary Clinton and 12 other big name entertainers and political figures. Fifteen bigs in entertainment and politics — including Jay-Z and Beyoncé, Hillary Clinton and Attorney General Eric Holder — were hacked and had their financial details or sensitive material published online.

Online information storage firm Evernote has asked all users to reset their passwords, following a security breach by hackers. The California-based company, which allows people to store and organize personal data on an external server, is thought to have about 50 million users. It said user names, email addresses and encrypted passwords were accessed. But it insisted there was “no evidence” that payment details or stored content was accessed, changed or lost. …

The case of the phantom ballots: an electoral whodunit By Patricia Mazzei pmazzei@MiamiHerald.com TIM CHAPMAN / MIAMI HERALD STAFF About 2,000 rejected absentee ballots at Miami-Dade Elections Department, mostly for lack of signatures or review of signatures from the last election. The first phantom absentee ballot request hit the Miami-Dade elections website at 9:11 p.m. Saturday, July 7. The next one came at 9:14. Then 9:17. 9:22. 9:24. 9:25. Within 2½ weeks, 2,552 online requests arrived from voters who had not applied for absentee ballots. They streamed in much too quickly for real people to be filling them out. They...

Cyberwar: A cybersecurity firm reports a secretive Chinese military unit is behind many recent "hack attacks" into U.S. computers, stealing trade and military secrets and developing a potentially crippling new weapon. In a 2009 editorial we noted that units of China's armed forces, whom we dubbed its "Cybertooth Tigers" were developing capabilities to penetrate and potentially disrupt U.S. computer systems as part of the People's Liberation Army's focus on what is known as "asymmetrical" warfare, specifically cyber-warfare. At least as far back as the 2008 edition of the Pentagon's annual report to Congress entitled "Military Power of the People's Republic...

The hacker group Anonymous claims to have taken down the LAPD's website, apparently in retaliation for its treatment of alleged cop killer Christopher Dorner and for its subsequent shootings of two innocents in the hunt for the former L.A. policeman. The group has been particularly unhappy with the department's shootings early Thursday of two people in a truck somewhat like Dorner's (but which was a different make and color). A separate shooting involved Torrance police and another pickup. And now the group indicates ... ... that Dorner should reach out to the group so it can leak any documents that...

A year behind bars: That's what David Kernell received for guessing his way into the private email account of vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin in 2008. So that would certainly be the starting point for penalties due the perpetrator of this latest invasion of privacy against the politically powerful. From a lengthy account by The Smoking Gun (that includes private Bush family photos and information, if you'd rather not be party to seeing that stuff): The apparent hack of several e-mail accounts has exposed personal photos and sensitive correspondence from members of the Bush family, including both former U.S. presidents,...

An Oviedo, Florida family was woken up by police with guns surrounding their house in the middle of the night. This terrifying and potentially scarring event is brought to you by Microsoft Xbox.WFTV reports that the cops and family were the victims of a hacker hoax conducted on an Xbox at another house in town. How does that work? Hackers busted into a teenager's Xbox demanding information about a video game, and when he wouldn't help them, the internet criminals used his account to file a false report about a murder and hostage situation. The cops traced the account to...

Anonymous, a band of online vigilante activists, has turned its ire on the U.S. Department of Justice, threatening to release secret, internal documents the group hacked in memory of Aaron Swartz, the Internet prodigy who committed suicide before his federal trial. “With Aaron’s death we can wait no longer. The time has come to show the United States Department of Justice and its affiliates the true meaning of infiltration. The time has come to give this system a taste of its own medicine,” read part of the message and video posted on the U.S. Sentencing Commission website, which the activist...

Hacktivist group Anonymous took control of the U.S. Sentencing Commission website Friday, January 25 in a new campaign called "Operation Last Resort." The first attack on the website was early Friday morning. The second - successful - attack came around 9pm PST that evening. anonymous By 3am PST ussc.gov was down (it has since been dropped from the DNS), yet as of this writing the IP address (66.153.19.162) still returns the defaced site's contents. It appears that via the U.S. government website, Anonymous had distributed encrypted government files and left a statement on the website that de-encryption keys would be...

Computer users told to disable Java Press Association – 16 hours ago Press Association - Computer owners in the US have been advised to temporarily disable Java software (AP) The US Department of Homeland Security has advised people to temporarily disable the Java software on their computers to avoid potential hacking attacks. The recommendation came in an advisory which was issued following concerns raised by computer security experts. Experts believe hackers have found a flaw in Java's coding that creates an opening for criminal activity and other hi-tech mischief. Java is a widely used technical language that allows computer programmers...

Denial-of-Service assault - Third time in three days their website won't load - I'm thinking targeted drone missile strikes could solve this malicious hacker issue in a couple days - Spammers would be next on my "Ka-Boom List"