Free Republic

House OKs life sentences for hackers By Declan McCullagh Staff Writer, CNET News.com July 15, 2002, 6:00 PM PT WASHINGTON--The House of Representatives on Monday overwhelmingly approved a bill that would allow for life prison sentences for malicious computer hackers. By a 385-3 vote, the House approved a computer crime bill that also expands police ability to conduct Internet or telephone eavesdropping without first obtaining a court order. The Bush administration had asked Congress to approve the Cyber Security Enhancement Act (CSEA) as a way of responding to electronic intrusions, denial of service attacks and the threat of "cyber-terrorism." The...

Hackers hit USA Today's Web site 07/13/2002 Associated Press NEW YORK - Hackers broke into USA Today's Web site and replaced legitimate news stories with phony articles, lampooning newsmakers and claiming Israel was under missile attack. The bogus pages were viewable on USAToday.com for about 15 minutes before they were discovered about 11 p.m. Thursday and taken offline, company spokesman Steve Anderson said. Mr. Anderson said the site was shut down for three hours to upgrade security. The hackers appeared to have penetrated the Web server computers from outside company firewalls, he said. All the bogus stories, on seven...

[...]Unsettling signs of al Qaeda's aims and skills in cyberspace have led some government experts to conclude that terrorists are at the threshhold of using the Internet as a direct instrument of bloodshed. The new threat bears little resemblance to familiar financial disruptions by hackers responsible for viruses and worms. It comes instead at the meeting points between computers and the physical structures they control.By disabling or taking command of floodgates in a dam, for example, or of substations handling 300,000 volts of electric power, U.S. analysts believe an intruder could use virtual tools to destroy real-world lives and property....

My firewall software frequently logs attempted penetrations of my computer. Among the information it captures is the IP address of the offending PC. My question is, can I use this information to counter-attack the hacker, or notify an unwitting computer owner that his PC or server is infected? How do I go about doing this? I've played with tracer programs before, but never really used the information to follow up.

“A computer sciences graduate student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, a highly respected private co-ed tech college in the People’s Republic of Massachusetts, proudly published a paper detailing how to hack the secure software technology on Microsoft’s Xbox video game console. Andrew 'bunnie' Huang told a reporter in a telephone interview that he will not 'share the secret code at all, or the key--those are Microsoft copyrighted items,' and said that he had 'been in touch with Microsoft about my work, and we've been really clear about what they think is legal research activity.' The hack bunnie used to...

<p>Computer hackers gained access to the California state government's computer systems in April and sensitive financial and personal information about as many as 265,000 state workers, officials said Friday.</p> <p>The electronic assault on payroll and other records was discovered by the Sacramento Valley Hi Tech Task Force, which determined that none of the information has been used illegally so far.</p>

SEATTLE (AP) - Microsoft Corp. has warned that its Internet Explorer software contains six flaws, some of which could give hackers access to - and even potentially change - personal information about computer users. The Redmond company, which called the severity of some of the flaws "critical," advised users of Explorer versions 5.01, 5.5 and 6.0 to download a patch for the software from the Microsoft Web site at www.microsoft.com/security. The security bulletin issued late Wednesday marks the fourth time this year that Microsoft has issued a fix for Explorer. >{? Among other things, the flaws could allow hackers to...

<p>The FBI this weekend raided the homes of the two online vandals known as the Deceptive Duo and confiscated their computers, according to a friend of the teens.</p> <p>The Duo -- Robert Lyttle, known online as Pimpshiz, and The-Rev -- defaced numerous government and private industry Web sites over the past few weeks in a spree that they claimed was driven by patriotism.</p>

<p>Internet Explorer users who click their browser's back button open the Windows operating system to a malicious hack attack.</p> <p>When users hit the back button on Explorer's toolbar, the browser's security settings for the "Internet" zone can be bypassed, and the browser will automatically execute malicious code embedded into a site's URL.</p>