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Over the past couple of weeks, I've written twice (first here, then here) about my ongoing frustrations with Microsoft Windows. What have I learned in the process of writing these columns? Among other things, I've learned that the word "hell" included in an e-mail subject line will make it through most people's spam filters. ("Sex" won't, which is one reason we don't write about it much on AnchorDesk; I'll definitely have to can those Viagra columns.) MORE IMPORTANTLY, I've learned that I'm not alone in my personal Windows hell. You've shared your own tales of woe in TalkBack, and AnchorDesk...

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - The FBI have arrested a Minnesota teenager suspected of making a copycat variant of the devastating Blaster Internet worm. Jeffrey Lee Parson, 18, of Hopkins, Minnesota, a middle- class suburb west of Minneapolis, was arrested on one count of intentionally causing or attempting to cause damage to a computer, according to a St. Paul district court clerk.

<p>LOS ANGELES (AP) - A laid-off computer technician has been arrested for investigation of hacking into telephone hotline systems used by the Los Angeles County Department of Children and Family Services and other government agencies, the FBI said Monday.</p> <p>Walter Wiggs, 44, of Douglasville, Ga., was arrested Friday on federal charges of gaining unauthorized access to a protected computer, authorities said.</p>

How vulnerable is the United States to attack from cyberspace? How imminent is the threat? Many experts believe the clock is already ticking, and that America is already fighting a Cyberwar... You can download and watch the whole show here. http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/cyberwar/ Just click on "Watch the full program" at the top left.

Hackers hijacking PCs to transmit porn sitesIntricate scheme targets high-speed connections, is difficult to detect07/11/2003By JOHN SCHWARTZ / The New York Times More than a thousand unsuspecting Internet users around the world have recently had their computers hijacked by hackers, who are using them as pornographic Web sites. The hijacked computers, which are chosen apparently because they are linked by high-speed Internet connections, are secretly loaded with software that makes them transmit explicit Web pages advertising porn sites and offers to sign visitors up as customers, according to computer security experts. Unless the owner of the hijacked computer is...

A 17-year-old French hacker who defaced websites in Australia, Britain, and the United States with political messages has been arrested in Paris and ordered to stay away from the Internet while on parole, police revealed today. The teenager, who cannot be named for legal reasons but who was known on the web under the nickname DKD, plastered home pages with messages "for example in favour of the Palestinians or against the US government," a police chief for the northern city of Lille, Eric Voulleminot, told AFP. The hacker was arrested on June 23 at home in a western Paris suburb,...

If you are on a mailing list for any Israeli news service, you are at risk for receiving the W32.sobig.E@mm mass-mailing virus. I must have received this virus at least a dozen times this week, all from sources purporting to be "israelnationalnews.com" "jpost.com" "koshertoday.com" The subject header is something like "Re: Your Applications" and the email contains an attachment called "your_details.zip" or "application.zip" THIS IS THE VIRUS. Fortunately Symantec detected and deleted the virus (which I verified from reading the logfiles). If you feel that you have opened this virus and infected your system Symantec has a tool for its...

Go to Google.com and type in "Weapons of Mass Destruction" on the search window. Click on the "I'm feeling lucky" tab instead of the Search tab. Read the error message!

Remember the hacker who really screwed up Al Jazeera during the early days of the war? Here's the resolution (afternoon news tells me he got probation) (Apologies if I'm not following proper link etiquette here....I don't generally post articles)

RENO, Nev. (AP) - A hacker who invaded the computer system at William Bee Ririe Hospital in Ely has been traced to the former Soviet Union, authorities said. The FBI said the hacker used the Web site of Al-Jazeera, the Arab news network, as a conduit to the hospital. Officials at the 40-bed hospital said patient records are safe, but added that the cyber intruder may have accessed employee Social Security and bank information. The incident has resulted in improved computer security at Nevada's other rural hospitals and serves as a lesson for all computer users. "Here's tiny Ely, a...

A MUSLIM militant group is believed to have hacked into the Hereford Diocese web-site and left pictures of dead and wounded children. Four video stills, two showing fatally injured children, possibly taken from Middle East TV war coverage, appeared on the site on Monday afternoon. Anyone visiting the church web-site would have found themselves on the Muslim Allah Akbar page, which means `Allah is the greatest'. Diocese director of communications, Anni Holden, said she presumed a militant Muslim Arab organisation was behind the sabotage. "It was very dramatic. The page said Allah Akbar and there was also a line of...

March 17 — A computer intruder armed with a secret, particularly effective attack tool recently took control of an Army Web server, MSNBC.com has learned. Both Microsoft and the CERT Coordination Center released hastily-prepared warnings about the vulnerability that led to the attack on Monday. But it was a disturbingly successful attack, experts say, because the intruder found and exploited a flaw that took security researchers completely by surprise. It’s unknown what Army computer was attacked, how significant a target it was, or what the intruder’s intentions were. But the exploit was sophisticated and well designed, and it was alarmingly...

<p>NEW YORK (CNN) -- A hacker has gained access to as many as 2.2 million Visa and MasterCard accounts, the two companies announced Monday.</p> <p>The hacker breached the security system of a company that processes credit card transactions on behalf of merchants, Visa and MasterCard said.</p>

SAN DIEGO -- Oakland Raiders fans have apparently won Round 1 in the off-field battle with the Tampa Bay Buccaneers partisans. Tampa Bay officials confirmed that an unknown person, certainly believed to have been a Raiders supporter, "hacked" into the Bucs' official team Web site Saturday and changed a headline. The original headline and story on the site dealt with the Bucs' final walk-through session for Super Bowl XXXVII. The headline on the story was changed to "Bucs Suck!! Go Raiders!" Bucs officials said the bogus headline was on the site for about an hour before the team was alerted...

A hacker who caused chaos with one of the world's most prolific computer viruses has been jailed for two years. Simon Vallor, 22, spent hours at his bedroom keyboard constructing "enticing" bugs in a bid to ensnare as many victims as possible. The so-called "mass-mailers" posed as innocent messages of love or timely warnings about security. In this way one of the viruses spread around the globe, infecting hundreds of thousands of terminals in 46 countries. It clogged up networks, caused computers to crash, affected institutions, businesses and individuals, and at its height at the beginning of last year was...

Opinion A lot has happened since my Right to Defend column in SecurityFocus Onlinr last July, and the subsequent presentation I made at the Blackhat Security Briefings in Las Vegas. The idea has withstood a lot of criticism. To refresh, I believe you should have the right to neutralize a worm process running on someone else's infected system, if it's relentlessly attacking your network. I've even written code to demonstrate the process. Though the initial news coverage of the concept was grossly inaccurate in conveying my ideas, it has stirred up a constructive dialog. I knew my idea was...

Ex-Computer Hacker Granted Radio License WASHINGTON (AP) -- A man the federal government once labeled "the most wanted computer criminal in U.S. history" has won a long fight to renew his ham radio license and next month can resume surfing the Internet. Kevin Mitnick, 39, of Thousand Oaks, Calif., served five years in federal prison for stealing software and altering data at Motorola, Novell, Nokia, Sun Microsystems and the University of Southern California. Prosecutors accused him of causing tens of millions of dollars in damage to corporate computer networks. Mitnick was freed in January 2000. The terms of his probation,...

The fact is that Mitnick used his manipulative skills in an amoral attempt to defraud and steal from respected companies like Novell, Motorola, Nokia and Sun Microsystems for years until his capture in 1995. Mitnick has often claimed that he did nothing wrong and that the onus of the crimes was actually on the companies he stole from. For example, Mitnick firmly believes Novell’s stupid gullible employees shouldn’t have trusted him when he showed up to their offices wearing a stolen phone company technician’s uniform and asking for access to their company’s phone system. To Mitnick, the 20,000 credit card...

The Japanese government is contemplating to replace Microsoft Windows, used in much of its computer networks, with another operating system to bolster security. According to the local newspaper Asahi Shimbun, the planned move came in the wake of recent event of leakage of secure data from Japan's military network. Instead the government is looking the possibility of adopting open source programs like Linux. Reuters TOKYO: The Japanese government will consider replacing Microsoft Corp's Windows, used in much of its computer networks, with another operating system to bolster security, a newspaper said on Saturday. The safety of computer networks is under...

<p>Gary McKinnon, the Briton indicted this week for hacking into scores of U.S. military computers, left behind few clues on the compromised systems of his victims. But download log files from a Wisconsin software firm may have led investigators straight to his London door.</p>