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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...

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...

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...

JUVENILE COMPUTER HACKER SENTENCED FOR COMPUTER INTRUSION, INTERSTATE THREATS, AND WIRE FRAUD STEMMING FROM HACKING, BOTNET, AND “SWATTING” ACTIVITIES BOSTON, MA—A male juvenile, who has been widely known in the hacker underground by his online moniker, “DSHOCKER,” was sentenced today in federal court to 11 months in prison, to be served in a juvenile detention facility, for computer intrusion, interstate threats, and wire fraud, stemming from hacking, botnet, and “swatting” activities. In accordance with federal law, the juvenile was not publicly named. United States Attorney Michael J. Sullivan and Warren T. Bamford, Special Agent in Charge of the Federal Bureau...

As protesters again took to the streets of London today in connection with the G20 summit of world leaders, a much smaller rally in support of British hacker Gary McKinnon took place outside the U.S. embassy in the city. McKinnon, a 43-year-old London resident, was indicted on hacking charges in November 2002 in a U.S. District Court in Virginia, after he admittedly broke into computers belonging to the U.S. military and NASA. He was arrested by London police four years ago and has lost numerous efforts to block his extradition since then. But he is drawing increasing looking for evidence...

Deployments of smart grids should be slowed until security vulnerabilities are addressed, according to some cybersecurity experts, citing tests showing that a hacker can cause a major blackout after breaking into a smart-grid system. The idea behind smart grids, a burgeoning energy sector in which even Google is playing a role, is that automated meters and two-way power consumption data can be used to improve the efficiency and reliability of an electrical system's power distribution. A washing machine in a household hooked up to a smart meter, for instance, could be set up to run only at lower-cost, off-peak hours,...

A China-based cyber spy network has hacked into government and private systems in 103 countries, including those of many Indian embassies and the Dalai Lama, an Internet research group said here Saturday. The Information Warfare Monitor (IWM), which carried out an extensive 10-month research on cyber spy activities emanating from China, said the hacked systems include the computers of Indian embassies and offices of the Dalai Lama.

http://www.covertradioshow.com # The Daily Blast for March 23, 2009 PodCast Link: http://covertradioshow.com/podcast.cfm?pid=159 SNIPPET: “CHINA Chinese Hackers Target Senate Computers Cyber hackers believed to be based in China have tapped three times into the computer network in US Sen. Bill Nelson’s office, the Florida Democrat said Friday. Two attacks on the same day this month and another one last month targeted work stations used by three Nelson staffers — a key foreign-policy aide, the deputy legislative director and a former Nelson NASA advisor, according to Nelson’s staff.”

WASHINGTON — U.S. Sen. Bill Nelson says hackers breached the computer network in his Washington office, but didn't access any classified information.

I’ve been receiving complaints from readers who are Time Warner customers and, apparently, this is serious stuff.Jeff Simmermon, Time Warner’s director of digital communications, said its DNS servers (the system that matches easy-to-remember web addresses to the corresponding numbers — such as ocregister.com instead of numbers) have targeted by ”denial of service” attacks for seven days. Without these translations functioning, web browsers are unable to locate their destinations.In a message, Simmermon said “hackers have launched a series of DOS attacks on Time Warner Cable’s DNS servers, affecting customer experience in our Southern California and National regions.” It ain’t pretty, he said. Customers are being affected...

""Wikileaks" explained in an earlier email that it was making public the information on Coleman's donors, including their credit card numbers, because of the "Coleman campaign's effort to impugn the election processes in the State of Minnesota." As a result of Wikileak's mass email of a spread sheet containing credit card information for thousands of Coleman donors, the Coleman campaign sent an email to its supporters today suggesting that they cancel their credit cards."

KNOXVILLE, Tenn. (AP) - Three more federal charges have been filed against a University of Tennessee student charged with hacking into the personal e-mail account of Alaska Gov. and former Republican vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin.

British prosecutors have decided not to charge Gary McKinnon with crimes, but that's bad news for the alleged computer hacker. It opens the door for extradition to the U.S., where McKinnon could face much more serious charges. The London man is accused of hacking into 97 U.S. government and military computers to attempt to find evidence of UFOs.

...Islamists gloat anyway.

There's a new "holy grail" for hackers — President Obama's super-secure BlackBerry. Despite warnings from his advisers, the president insisted on keeping his beloved PDA, which now has specially designed superencrypting security software. But that just makes cracking into it more challenging — and, yes, it can be done, says the world's most famous hacker. "It's a long shot, but it's possible," Kevin Mitnick told FOXNews.com. "You'd probably need to be pretty sophisticated, but there's people out there who are."

Every result from Google for the past few minutes has been marked unsafe ("This site may harm your computer."), and you can't click through on them.

URBANA, Md. (AP) - The Justice Department says it foiled a plot by a fired Fannie Mae contract worker in Maryland to destroy all the data on the mortgage giant's 4,000 computer servers nationwide. The U.S. Attorney's Office says 35-year-old Rajendrasinh Makwana, of Glen Allen, Va., is scheduled for arraignment Friday in U.S. District Court in Baltimore on one count of computer intrusion. U.S. Attorney Rod Rosenstein says Makwana was fired Oct. 24. Rosenstein says that on that day, Makwana programmed a computer with a malicious code that was set to spread throughout the Fannie Mae network and destroy all...

A fired Fannie Mae contract employee allegedly placed a virus in the mortgage giant’s software that could have shut the company down for at least a week and caused millions of dollars in damage, prosecutors say.

Transportation officials in Texas are scrambling to prevent hackers from changing messages on digital road signs after one sign in Austin was altered to read, "Zombies Ahead." Chris Lippincott, director of media relations for the Texas Department of Transportation, confirmed that a portable traffic sign at Lamar Boulevard and West 15th Street, near the University of Texas at Austin, was hacked into during the early hours of Jan. 19. "It was clever, kind of cute, but not what it was intended for," said Lippincott, who saw the sign during his morning commute. "Those signs are deployed for a reason —...