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WASHINGTON (CNN) -- The State Department is investigating a major computer break-in that targeted its headquarters and offices dealing with China and North Korea, department officials said Tuesday. The officials made clear that the break-in over the past several weeks affected only the State Department's unclassified computer system and did not compromise its classified system. "The department detected anomalies in network traffic," department spokeswoman Nancy Beck said. The interruption was "not a virus," she said. The agency's emergency response resulted in limited access to the Internet, with secure and encrypted sites such as banking and personal e-mails restricted for a...

Widespread break-ins appear aimed at HQ, East Asian office WASHINGTON (AP) -- The State Department is recovering from large-scale computer break-ins worldwide over the past several weeks that appeared to target its headquarters and offices dealing with China and North Korea, The Associated Press has learned. Investigators believe hackers stole sensitive U.S. information and passwords and implanted backdoors in unclassified government computers to allow them to return at will, said U.S. officials familiar with the hacking. These people spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the widespread intrusions and the resulting investigation. The break-ins and the State...

Hackers on Sunday broke into a part of Microsoft's French Web site, replacing the front page with online graffiti. The intruders were able to access the server that was running "http://experts.microsoft.fr/," Microsoft confirmed Monday. The attack was claimed by Turkish hackers using the handle "TiTHacK," according to Zone-H, a security Web site that keeps an archive with screenshots of defaced Web sites. The attackers were likely able to penetrate the server running the Web site due to faulty configuration, Microsoft said in a statement Monday. "Microsoft took the appropriate action to resolve the issue and stop any additional criminal activity,"...

"A hacker stole a file containing the names and Social Security numbers of 1,500 people working for the Energy Department's nuclear weapons agency. But in the incident last September, somewhat similar to recent problems at the Veterans Affairs Department, senior department officials were told only two days ago, officials told a congressional hearing Friday. None of the victims were notified, they said...."

The Web site of Sweden's national police was shut down after a hacker attack that investigators on Friday said could be a retaliation for a crackdown on a popular file-sharing site called The Pirate Bay. Meanwhile, the government faced allegations that police had acted under pressure from U.S. authorities when they targeted the file-sharing site in raids earlier this week. The police Web site was closed late Thursday after a so-called denial of service attack, in which hackers overload a single network by directing massive traffic to the site, police spokesman Lars Lindahl said. He did not rule out that...

On May 23, 2006, a grand jury at the U.S. District Court in Illinois handed down an indictment against Jeremy Alexander Hammond for hacking into the ProtestWarrior server. The indictment reads in part, "Between January and February 2005, defendant HAMMOND accessed ProtestWarrior.com's server without authority on multiple occasions in an effort to obtain information not otherwise available to him or the general public, specifically credit card numbers, home addresses, and other identifying information of the members and customers of ProtestWarrior.com." The specific violation is of Title 18, US Code, Sections 1030 (a)(2)(c) and 2. Per our understanding of the law,...

WASHINGTON -- Symantec Corp.'s leading antivirus software, which protects some of the world's largest corporations and U.S. government agencies, suffers from a flaw that lets hackers seize control of computers to steal sensitive data, delete files or implant malicious programs, researchers said Thursday.

Gary McKinnon leaves Bow Street Magistrates' Court yesterday after a judge recommended that he be extradited to the US (DAVID BEBBER) A BRITISH man accused of the biggest military hacking operation yet faces trial in the US after a judge recommended him for extradition yesterday. Gary McKinnon believes that he could be sent to Guantanamo Bay and tried by a military tribunal if his extradition goes ahead. He said that he was “practically already hung and quartered” if US government claims that he would face a federal court in Virginia proved correct. Mr McKinnon, 40, is alleged to have caused...

UK hacker Gary McKinnon should be recommended for extradition to the US, a district court judge has ruled. The decision means Mr McKinnon will face trial in America for what the US has called "the biggest military hack of all time". Although he has admitted hacking US military networks, Mr McKinnon said he was motivated by curiosity not malice. The final decision on whether the Londoner should be sent to the US for trial rests with the home secretary. Hack attack The decision was given at Bow Street Magistrates' Court in London and ends three years of uncertainty for Mr...

LOS ANGELES - A 21-year-old computer whiz was sentenced to nearly five years in federal prison for taking control of 400,000 Internet-connected computers and renting access to them to spammers and fellow hackers. Among the machines authorities said Jeanson James Ancheta infected in 2004 and 2005 were those at the China Lake Naval Air Facility and the Defense Information System Agency headquartered in Falls Church, Va. "Your worst enemy is your own intellectual arrogance that somehow the world cannot touch you on this," U.S. District Judge R. Gary Klausner told Ancheta in sentencing him Monday to 57 months in prison....

In 2002, Gary McKinnon was arrested by the UK's national high-tech crime unit, after being accused of hacking into Nasa and the US military computer networks. He says he spent two years looking for photographic evidence of alien spacecraft and advanced power technology. America now wants to put him on trial, and if tried there he could face 60 years behind bars. Banned from using the internet, Gary spoke to Click presenter Spencer Kelly to tell his side of the story, ahead of his extradition hearing on Wednesday, 10 May. You can read what he had to say here. Spencer...

***scroll for updates...1230pm EDT Looks like the problem may be resolved, though several blogs still down...Glenn Reynolds confirms the attack originated in Saudi Arabia, as I suspected...Mary Katherine Ham of downed blog hughhewitt.com is guest-blogging over at Wizbang...Hugh's back up...looks like most are back up...update on Aaron's CC below...513pm EDT update several blogs reporting they are down again...*** Many Hosting Matters-hosted blogs are down--including Instapundit, Power Line, Hugh Hewitt, and tons of others large and small. Hosting Matters' own website is also down. Blogger Chuck Simmins e-mails: Denial of service attack on Hosting Matters. Most, if not all, their hosted...

BLOGS DOWN: HACK ATTACK By Michelle Malkin · April 28, 2006 11:51 AM 1230pm EDT Looks like the problem may be resolved, though several blogs still down...Glenn Reynolds confirms the attack originated in Saudi Arabia, as I suspected...Mary Katherine Ham of downed blog hughhewitt.com is guest-blogging over at Wizbang...*** Many Hosting Matters-hosted blogs are down--including Instapundit, Power Line, Hugh Hewitt, and tons of others large and small. Hosting Matters' own website is also down. Blogger Chuck Simmins e-mails: Denial of service attack on Hosting Matters. Most, if not all, their hosted sites are down. Attack is originating internationally. Haven't been...

Al-Qaeda is using hacking techniques as part of its war against the US, the head of a security company which works for the US military has claimed. Paul Innella, chief executive of Tetrad Digital Integrity, told last week's WebSec Conference that a laptop recovered from a terrorist training camp in Afghanistan revealed that the group has been researching hacking techniques. Innella claimed that the laptop contained information on how to map computer networks and exploit software vulnerabilities. He also said the laptop had software capable of modelling the impact of an attack on a US dam and calculating the damage...

You have been warned!

<p>For almost two years, intelligence services around the world tried to uncover the identity of an Internet hacker who had become a key conduit for al-Qaeda. The savvy, English-speaking, presumably young webmaster taunted his pursuers, calling himself Irhabi -- Terrorist -- 007. He hacked into American university computers, propagandized for the Iraq insurgents led by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi and taught other online jihadists how to wield their computers for the cause.</p>

China Construction Bank may not know that a security vulnerability on its server has been exploited Criminals appear to have hacked a Chinese bank's server and are using it to host phishing sites to steal personal data from customers of eBay Inc. and a major U.S. bank., according to Internet services company Netcraft Ltd. It may be the first scheme that uses one bank's infrastructure to exploit another bank, said Paul Mutton, an Internet services developer for Netcraft, based in Bath, England. A user of Netcraft's free phishing toolbar reported receiving a suspicious e-mail, Mutton said. The e-mail led to...

One hacker was able to gain control of a Mac OS X machine within 30 minutes, according to a new report. ZDNet Australia reports that Mac OS X was hacked within 30 minutes using an unpublished security vulnerability. The "gwerdna" hacker, who was able to quickly gain root access to the Mac, was responding to a "rm-my-mac" challenge issued in late February by a Sweden-based Mac enthusiast. While the hacker said that the Mac could have been better protected, he said that it would not have made a difference, as he exploited a vulnerability that has not yet been made...

Muslim computer-hacker gangs have launched a massive attack on Danish and Western Web sites as part of the mass protests across the Arab world over the publication of cartoons making fun of the Prophet Mohammed. The cyber-crime monitoring group Zone-H.org said in a statement that more than 1,000 Danish, Israeli and European sites were defaced or shut down by Islamic hackers in the last week. And experts fear that's just the beginning of what could be a massive cyber-jihad stretching from the Middle East and Europe to the United States and dominating cyberspace for weeks, costing millions of dollars. "We...

LOS ANGELES, CA, USA -- A US computer hacker on Monday pleaded guilty to hijacking around 400,000 computers, including military servers, and infecting them with malicious software. In the first such prosecution of its kind, "botmaster" Jeanson Ancheta, 20, admitted infecting the computers with software that caused them to send spam, show ads and launch crippling attacks on Internet sites. In federal court in Los Angeles, Ancheta admitted conspiring to violate both the Computer Fraud Abuse Act and an anti-spam law, to causing damage to US defense computers and to hacking into computers to commit fraud. His plea comes after...