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Claims of Mac OS X being hacked in under 30 minutes are not quite what they seem, according to Dave Schroeder, Senior Systems Engineer at the University of Wisconsin - Madison. A recent ZDNet article told the story of a Swedish man who setup his Mac mini as a server and invited people to try to break into the system and gain root control. Having root control of a computer allows you do install applications, move or delete files. Within hours of the challenge going live, it was over as a hacker gained root control of the Mac mini. However,...

[Editor’s Note: Michelle Malkin is experiencing problems with her weblog after being the target of cyberattacks. While they last, Pajamas Media will host her posts here] The cyberjihad continues. Zone-H, which monitors Internet hackers, reports that “the Moroccan hacker known as Yanis was arrested” in Paris on Tuesday: Yanis is accused of having defaced several French important websites (university of Strasbourg and Toulouse, website of the city of Lyon etc..), but his activity as defacer is far more complex: Zone-h, the independent observatory of cyber-crime, have monitored nearly 3000 notifications of intrusions in the last month related to the Prophet...

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...

Last Tuesday, during or immediately after my appearance on Fox News Channel to discuss the Mohammed Cartoons, this blog was hit by a large, foreign-based denial of service attack. Last night, my hosting service notified me that it is receiving ongoing threats from individuals vowing to take down this site--and others along with it--which will presumably continue until I take down the cartoons. For now, we are on guard and continuing with business as usual. But you should know there's something much wider and deeper going on: I. Security Pro News reports on the latest Islamist hacker attacks spurred by...

Two decades ago, Brain, the first boot sector virus which infected personal computers via the floppy disk, was detected. While Brain itself was relatively harmless, it marked the genesis of the world of computer viruses. This year marks the 20th year of the existence of viruses after Brain was detected on January 19, 1986. Boot sector viruses, now long extinct along with the floppy disk, held a relatively long reign from 1986 to 1995. Since transmission was via disk from computer to computer, infection would only reach a significant level months or even years after its release. This changed in...

LONDON - A Web site that earned an enterprising British student $1 million suffered a crippling attack by ransom-seeking hackers. Alex Tew, 21, said Wednesday that his Million Dollar Homepage was targeted after he publicized how it had helped him raise money for his university studies. Tew had sold 10,000 small squares of advertising space on the Web site for $100 each, achieving his target in four months. His initiative spawned several copycat sites. But Tew said that on Jan. 7, he received a threat from an organization calling itself "The Dark Group," demanding that he pay them $50,000 within...

It seems some poor soul has decided to do a DOS (Denial of service) attack on my site. Being resolved as I am writing this, please be patient and lets hope this saddo gets bored.

CHARLOTTE COUNTY — Managing your money on-line can be a risky proposition. One Southwest Florida family found out the hard way after losing more than $50,000 to computer hackers. A simple login in to a familiar web site revealed a nightmare. "We looked at the account and instead of having $119,000, there was only $56,000. At that point I said what's going on?" said Jeanette Miller of Port Charlotte.

Details of a zero-day vulnerability in Microsoft's Excel spreadsheet program have been put up for sale on eBay, with the seller offering a starting price of 1 US cent. At the time of writing, the bidding had reached $US60 ($A79). Zero day means information that is not publicly available and is used to describe security vulnerabilities exploits which are unknown to security professionals. The seller said the vulnerability had been discovered on December 6 and the details had been sent to Microsoft. "All the details were submitted to Microsoft, and the reply was received indicating that they may start working...

In late January, I uncovered a password-protected Arabic-language website, Barsomyat.com, that was frequented by Middle Eastern Muslims, predominantly Egyptians. The purpose of Barsomyat.com was to systematically track Christians who were active in religious debates against Muslims on the internet chat service PalTalk. Barsomyat featured pictures of these Christians (some of which were obviously obtained by hacking into the Christians' computers) along with death threats and attempts to track down the subjects' physical addresses. Even Barsomyat.com's banner showed the website's intentions toward Christians, as it pictured a sheep--obviously intended to represent Christianity--getting its throat slit.

China's economy continues its incredible growth, but the IT infrastructure at all the new offices, research parks and other projects isn't keeping pace and is increasingly imperiled by hackers and other Internet predators, experts tell UPI's The Web. The IT problems -- hackers, viruses, worms, malware -- are so severe in China that entire enterprises are at risk, and doing e-business with companies with such shoddy Internet security could pose a threat to U.S. companies. By Gene Koprowski

Successful assaults by viruses and other malware on the Mac operating system are rare as it has better security and attackers are less keen, says Stephen Wildstrom of BusinessWeek. "There is endless debate among security experts about whether the paucity of successful assaults on Apple's OS X is attributable to better security or attackers' lack of interest in an operating system whose share of the market is in single digits. I think it's some of both." Wildstrom says one reason Mac OS X offers inherently better security is that it was designed with relatively little concern for compatibility with earlier...

FAA defends 'very secure systems' WASHINGTON - High-tech networks that link key parts of the U.S. air traffic control system lack important controls and are potentially vulnerable to hackers and others familiar with how those computer programs work, congressional investigators concluded Monday. The Government Accountability Office (GAO) said in an update to a 2000 report that the Federal Aviation Administration has made progress in protecting information technology systems and noted the agency's contention that its interconnected networks are secure. Greg Martin, an FAA spokesman, said separately the investigation was too narrowly focused and the agency has adequate controls in place...

PANAMA CITY, Fla. (AP) - Three teenagers face felony charges for allegedly hacking into their school computer system to "fix" grades - not for themselves but for friends. The 16-year-olds are enrolled in advanced computer classes at Bay High School, and sheriff's investigator Paul Vecker said they didn't need to change their own grades. "These are three young men who are quite intelligent," he said. Vecker said they mostly changed friends' grades by small increments to avoid notice. However, they allegedly made a big change for one junior, who reportedly would've failed if her grade hadn't been changed from an...

Carpenter had never seen hackers work so quickly, with such a sense of purpose. They would commandeer a hidden section of a hard drive, zip up as many files as possible and immediately transmit the data to way stations in South Korea, Hong Kong or Taiwan before sending them to mainland China. They always made a silent escape, wiping their electronic fingerprints clean and leaving behind an almost undetectable beacon allowing them to re-enter the machine at will. An entire attack took 10 to 30 minutes. "Most hackers, if they actually get into a government network, get excited and make...

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- The FBI and the Pentagon are investigating whether Chinese spies have been hacking into U.S. government computer systems, U.S. officials said Thursday. Officials are trying to determine whether the continuing hacking efforts are sponsored by Beijing or merely involve hackers using Chinese Web sites to mask their origins, they said.

A Web forum for Muslim extremists is calling on its members to organize an Islamist hackers' army to carry out Internet attacks against the U.S. government. The site has posted tips, software and links to other resources to help would-be cyber-warriors. The Jamestown Foundation, a District-based nonprofit with a history of extensive ties to the CIA, said that it has monitored postings on a new section of an extremist bulletin board called al-Farooq. According to Jeffrey Poole, a researcher for the foundation, the forum "represents a how-to manual for the disruption and/or destruction of enemy electronic resources, including e-mail, Web...

Web sites in China are being used heavily to target computer networks in the Defense Department and other U.S. agencies, successfully breaching hundreds of unclassified networks, according to several U.S. officials.Classified systems have not been compromised, the officials added. U.S. authorities remain concerned because, as one official said, even seemingly innocuous information, when pulled together from various sources, can yield useful intelligence to an adversary."The scope of this thing is surprisingly big," said one of four government officials who spoke separately about the incidents, which stretch back as far as two or three years and have been code-named Titan Rain...

In the early days of computer attacks, when bright teens could bring down corporate systems, the point was often to trumpet a hacker's success. No longer. In today's murky world of digital viruses, worms, and Trojan horses, the idea is to stay quiet and use hijacked computers to flood the Internet with spam, spread destructive viruses, or disgorge e-mail to choke corporate systems. Not only can networks of these compromised computers be leased or sold, experts say, they are becoming more valuable as the number of vulnerable computers slowly shrinks. That's a major reason that turf wars are emerging among...

Apparently a group of alleged Middle Eastern hackers (whom I will not name) are hacking PHP-Nuke web sites through some sort of vulnerability that I have yet to hear of. A Canadian forum, canadaka.net has been taken down along with some other websites. If you're using this software you may wish to take preventive action. Now is a good time to do that, by the way!