Free Republic

CNN) -- They've breached or busted the websites of the CIA, PBS and the U.S. Senate, and launched at least part of an extended attack on Sony, whose PlayStation Network was brought to a grinding halt for the better part of a month. And, to hear them tell it, it's all for a laugh. Meet Lulz Security, or LulzSec, the gleeful and secretive band of hackers who appear to be responsible for a string of high-profile and sometimes embarrassing Internet attacks. Their most recent strike, and arguably the most ambitious, was a distributed denial-of-service attack Wednesday that shut down the...

Last year's Stuxnet virus attack represented a new kind of threat to critical infrastructure. Just over a year ago, a computer in Iran started repeatedly rebooting itself, seemingly without reason. Suspecting some kind of malicious software (malware), analysts at VirusBlokAda, an antivirus-software company in Minsk, examined the misbehaving machine over the Internet, and soon found that they were right. Disturbingly so: the code they extracted from the Iranian machine proved to be a previously unknown computer virus of unprecedented size and complexity. On 17 June 2010, VirusBlokAda issued a worldwide alert that set off an international race to track down...

angry tapir writes "Seattle police are investigating a group of criminals who they say have been cruising around town in a black Mercedes stealing credit card data by tapping into wireless networks belonging to area businesses. The group has been at it for about five years, according to an affidavit signed by Detective Chris Hansen, a fraud investigator with the Seattle Police Department."

I have received notification of email breaches from Kroger, Best Buy and Home Depot so far. They seem legit as they are not asking for any info, just notifying me of probable phishing scams based on these breaches. so how many credit cards got info stolen recently?

I thought I'd share this with you all, as some may benefit from this. Today, I was called by Wells-Fargo's fraud protection department to let me know my online ID and password had been compromised. Not only could they not tell me when exactly this occurred, or for what reason, but I was also told, I would have to run a full virus scan before they could restore my access. Now I could easily lie of course, although they make a point of saying that if an online scan truly was not performed, then they are not responsible for any...

Most of us by now have heard about Anonymous. Anonymous has had its roots in various areas for a while now. Its primary targets tend to be a focused attempt at righting the wrongs of corporate monopolies and injustices that face the average person. Anonymous became a household known entity as it was exposed in its efforts to defend the operations of Wikileaks and Wikileaks founder Julian Assange. Their newest activities have revolved around shutting down various copyright agencies such as BMI as an attempt to fight back in the ongoing file sharing battle. A member of Anonymous who goes...

It wasn’t an insecure SIPRNet that created the “perfect storm” that allowed Private Bradley Manning to dump the State Department cables to Wikileaks. It was the failure of our government to apply standard IT practices in a theater of war. >== snip == So if SIPRNet is secure, and with the NetTop 2 environment it’s impossible to copy data off to a USB flash drive or a DVD from a secure session, how the heck was Manning able to dump that data to Wikileaks? == SNIP == But according to a Wired article from over the summer, we know...

A Russian software company today released a password cracking tool that instantly reveals cached passwords to Web sites in Microsoft Internet Explorer, mailbox and identity passwords in all versions of Microsoft Outlook Express, Outlook, Windows Mail and Windows Live Mail. Moscow based ElcomSoft, developer of the new password recovery tool, “Elcomsoft Internet Password Breaker,” says the product designed as tool to provide forensics, criminal investigators, security officers and government authorities with the ability to retrieve a variety of passwords stored on a PC. With a price tag of just $49, it doesn’t seem as though investigators and government authorities are...

Traditional phishing attacks are reasonably easy to avoid, just don’t click links in suspicious e-mails (or, for the really paranoid, any e-mail). But Firefox Creative Lead Aza Raskin has found a far more devious way to launch an attack — by hijacking your unattended browser tabs. The attack works by first detecting that the tab the page is in does not have focus. Then the attacking script can change the tab favicon and title before loading a new site, say a fake version of Gmail, in the background. Even scarier, the attack can parse through your history to find sites...

One of the Internet security companies (McAfee) that monitors hacker activity (by compiling data on attacks their clients have suffered), estimates that more computers are being turned into zombies in China, than in the United States. At least during the last three months of 2009. Both countries have about 12 million zombie computers. Many of 1.5 billion computers in the world are infected with secret programs that enable criminals, or intelligence agencies, to control these PCs, turning them into "zombies". These captive computers are organized into "botnets" of thousands, or even a million or more, PCs that do the bidding...

January 3, 2010 CYBERSECURITY Wanted: ‘Cyber Ninjas’ By CHRISTOPHER DREW FOR a regional competition last spring, eight students from California State Polytechnic University, Pomona, spent six months of Saturdays practicing how to defend a typical business computer network from attacks. Then, over two grueling days, they outscored teams from five other schools at blocking worms and other efforts to disrupt their e-mail and Internet systems. For the six seniors in the group, all in computer information systems, the victory was even sweeter. Boeing, the giant aerospace and military company, offered them jobs. Boeing’s decision to snap up all the graduates...

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.

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...

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...

A Briton wanted in the United States for breaking into NASA and Pentagon networks in "the biggest military hack of all time" lost an appeal against his extradition Friday, making a U.S. trial more likely. Gary McKinnon, 43, has fought a three-year battle to avoid extradition, including going to the European Court of Human Rights, but he appeared to have run out of options as Britain's High Court ruled against his latest appeal Friday. The court rejected arguments by McKinnon's lawyers that extraditing McKinnon, who was recently diagnosed with Asperger's Syndrome, a form of autism, would have disastrous consequences for...

If you have any interest in the sporting world, you undoubtedly have heard about the recent video depicting an exposed Erin Andrews--a high-profile sports reporter for ESPN--filmed through a peephole at her hotel room. This video is now being tied to security issues on both PCs and Macs. Although, as Graham Cluley notes, Ms. Andrew's lawyers have threatened lawsuits for any Web site distributing the video, several sites have set up pages claiming to offer the footage. Cluley writes on his blog: "And - surprise surprise - if you visit those webpages you could be putting the security of your...

Survey finds one in six consumers act on spam by Jeremy Kirk, IDG News Service About one in six consumers have at some time acted on a spam message, affirming the economic incentive for spammers to keep churning out millions of obnoxious pitches per day, according to a new survey.Due to be released Wednesday, the survey was sponsored by the Messaging Anti-Abuse Working Group (MAAWG), an industrywide security think tank composed of service providers and network operators dedicated to fighting spam and malicious software.Eight hundred consumers in the U.S. and Canada were asked about their computer security practices habits...

PCs Used in Korean DDoS Attacks May Self Destruct There are signs that the concerted cyber attacks targeting U.S. and Korean government and commercial Web sites this past week are beginning to wane. Yet, even if the assaults were to be completely blocked tomorrow, the attackers could still have one last, inglorious weapon in their arsenal: New evidence suggests that the malicious code responsible for spreading this attack includes instructions to overwrite the infected PC's hard drive. Update: This is already happening. Please be sure to read the updates at the end of this post. Original post: According to Joe...

NRO colleague Kevin Williamson passes along this item from Wired.com’s Danger Room:  It's like Burn After Reading, the latest Coen brothers' flick, come to life. Well, kinda sorta."A New Zealand man has found confidential United States military files on an MP3 player," the Age reports. He bought at an Oklahoma thrift shop, for less than ten bucks. Chris Ogle wasn't looking for secrets during his little shopping trip, of course. But when he brought the player home and hooked it up, "he discovered a playlist he could never have imagined," New Zealand's TV One pants.The sixty files included personal details of...

Internet security is broken, and no one knows how to fix it By John Markoff Sunday, December 7, 2008 SAN FRANCISCO: Internet security is broken, and nobody seems to know quite how to fix it. Despite the efforts of the computer security industry and a half-decade struggle by Microsoft to improve the security of its Windows operating system software, malicious software is spreading faster than ever. The so-called malware surreptitiously takes over a PC and then uses that computer to spread the software to other machines exponentially. Computer scientists and security researchers acknowledge that they cannot get ahead of the...