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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"

The Likud primaries were back on track by early Sunday evening, and by 8:45 p.m., 40% of registered members – 49,322 in total – had voted. However, a serious malfunction in the computerized voting system earlier in the day made it necessary to extend the voting by two hours, to midnight – and there is possibility of a further extension. The Likud's Election Committee was to meet again at 10:00 p.m. and decide whether voting would continue for another day. Various news sources estimated that the committee would decide to continue the voting until Monday at 10:00 p.m. There have...

A hacker known as “The Jester” claims to have revealed the identity of a LulzSec member who may be the group’s leader. Thirty-year-old Xavier Kaotico, also known as Xavier de Leon or “sabu,” has been outed as the hacker prankster group’s leader, though his role and involvement with LulzSec has not been confirmed. The man allegedly lives or has recently lived in New York City, and is an independant IT consultant specializing in Python programming, Linux development, network security and exploit development. LulzSec, a small group of hackers that has become the focus of the international technology media over...

When hacktivist Jeremy Hammond was arrested last week in Chicago as a part of a wide government investigation in the online group Anonymous, his mother, Rose Collins, called him a genius without any wisdom. “Again?” she asked when informed by the Chicago Tribune that her son had been arrested for hacking. “I love my son, but he is a genius with no brain. He has a 168 IQ, but he has no wisdom.”  In an attempt to educate the world at-large about the dangers of Anonymous, Rose Collins reached out to Townhall Finance and spoke about Jeremy and Anonymous. She ended by asking a...

Internet leftist terrorists Anonymous have begun posting personal information on top-ranking Israeli officials online. Using Anonpaste.me to send a message to the Israeli government, Anonymous wrote, “It has come to our attention that the Israeli government has ignored repeated warnings about the abuse of human rights, shutting down the internet in Israel and mistreating its own citizens andt hose of its neighboring countries.” This newest assault follows hot on the heels of Anonymous’ attack on over 700 Israeli websites...

<p>Hackers have discovered a new way to part computer uses with their money. They plant malware on a computer that threatens to report the computer user to the police for viewing or distributing porn.</p> <p>It's a form of hacking called "ransomware," according to a new report by security company Symantec, which estimates hackers are earning upwards of $5 million a year from computer users who fall for the scam and pay the blackmail.</p>

  "German Islamists Target Youth on the Internet" By Christoph Sydow 11/01/2012 "Translated from the German by Christopher Sultan." PHOTO CAPTION: "A growing community of German-speaking Islamists has developed on the Internet. Aiming to find new recruits, they glorify jihad and call for attacks on Germany. A new study warns that such online propaganda might foster a new generation of terrorists." SNIPPET: "International terrorist groups like al-Qaida recognized the importance of the Internet for recruiting new supporters early on." SNIPPET: "Intelligence services can also take advantage of the anonymity of Internet forums to deliberately plant false information or obtain insider...

Barnes & Noble said Tuesday that devices used by customers to swipe credit and debit cards have been tampered with in 63 of its stores in nine states. The company warned customers to check for unauthorized transactions and to change their personal identification numbers, or PINs. It didn't say how many accounts may have been compromised. But The New York Times, citing a high-ranking company official it did not name, reported that hackers had made unauthorized purchases on some customer credit cards. The New York-based bookseller said in a statement Tuesday only one of the devices, known as PIN pads,...

The City of Burlington is struggling after someone stole $487,000 from the city's $4 million general fund at Bank of America. "We really don't know exactly how it happened," said City Manager Bryan Harrison. "Multiple banks in multiple states involved."

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has lost another high-profile supporter as Anonymous, the hacking collective, said the whistleblowing site had been “ruined by egos”. Anonymous, a loose group of internet “hacktivists”, has been one of WikiLeaks’ closest allies during the past two years, launching cyber attacks against the site’s opponents and, some claim, becoming a source of its material. ...But leading Anonymous accounts on Twitter, which rallied behind WikiLeaks and Mr Assange despite his legal and financial woes, have now withdrawn their support, decrying the freedom-of-information project as a “One Man Julian Assange show”. Calling the split “the end of an...

Security experts are cautioning computer users that they could be targeted by a malicious SOPA “ransomware” virus that rekindles the witch-hunt targeting information sharing introduced last year by congressional lawmakers. Hackers have brought the failed Stop Online Piracy Act back to center stage, this time by distributing a virus that demands the owners of infected computers pay a $200 fine for sharing copyrighted files, lest they want their hard drives destroyed.

The House Intelligence committee isn't going so far as to say the Chinese government is trying to turn us into a nation of Manchurian Candidates by using Chinese-made smartphones. What it is saying, after a yearlong investigation, is that two Chinese telecommunications equipment makers, Huawei Technologies and ZTE, may, under the direction of the Chinese government, make the equipment they sell purposely vulnerable to cyber-security leaks. "We simply cannot trust such vital systems to companies with known ties to the Chinese state, a country that is the largest perpetrator of cyber espionage against the U.S.," said committee chairman Mike Rogers...

SNIPPET: "New York City is the center of a public uproar as Internet blogger Pamela Gellar rises with an “anti-jihad” ad campaign." SNIPPET: "Gellar and her group are protesting the Jihad, which in definition is the religious duty of Muslims. According to the Dictionary of Islam, jihad is defined as “A religious war with those who are unbelievers in the mission of Muhammad . . . enjoined especially for the purpose of advancing Islam and repelling evil from Muslims.” The literal meaning of jihad, according to the British Broadcasting Network, “is struggle or effort, and it means much more than...

Bill Gertz has the grim news in the Washington Free Beacon: Hackers linked to China's government broke into one of the U.S. government's most sensitive computer networks, breaching a system used by the White House Military Office for nuclear commands, according to defense and intelligence officials familiar with the incident. One official said the cyber breach was one of Beijing's most brazen cyber attacks against the United States and highlights a failure of the Obama administration to press China on its persistent cyber attacks. Disclosure of the cyber attack also comes amid heightened tensions in Asia, as the Pentagon moved...

Iranian hackers have repeatedly attacked Bank of America Corp (BA.N), JPMorgan Chase & Co (JPM.N) and Citigroup Inc (C.N) over the past year, as part of a broad cyber campaign targeting the United States, according to people familiar with the situation. The attacks, which began in late 2011 and escalated this year, have primarily been "denial of service" campaigns that disrupted the banks' websites and corporate networks by overwhelming them with incoming web traffic, said the sources. Whether the hackers have been able to inflict more serious damage on computer networks or steal critical data is not yet known. The...

Al-Jazeera has become the second news agency in a little more than a month to be targeted by pro-Syrian government hackers. The Qatar-based satellite TV station revealed in a tweet this morning that its short messaging service had been compromised and used to send false news reports, including a report that Qatar's prime minister had been assassinated: