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As a cyber space race looms, the military is looking for a few good geeks. High school hackers, crackers and digital deviants: Uncle Sam wants you. As part of a government information security review released as early as Friday, White House interim cybersecurity chief Melissa Hathaway likely will mention a new military-funded program aimed at leveraging an untapped resource: the U.S.' population of geeky high school and college students. The so-called Cyber Challenge, which will be officially announced later this month, will create three new national competitions for high school and college students intended to foster a young generation of...

NEWARK, NJ—A New Jersey man pleaded guilty today to his role in a cyber attack on Church of Scientology websites in January 2008 that rendered the websites unavailable. Dmitriy Guzner, 19, of Verona, New Jersey, pleaded guilty to computer hacking charges originally filed in Los Angeles for his role in the distributed denial of service (DDOS) attack against the Scientology websites. A DDOS attack occurs where a large amount of malicious Internet traffic is directed at a website or a set of websites. The target websites are unable to handle the high volume of Internet traffic and therefore become unavailable...

SAN FRANCISCO — University of California, Berkeley, officials said Friday that hackers infiltrated restricted computer databases, putting at risk the personal information of 160,000 current and former students, alumni and others. The university said data include Social Security numbers, health insurance information and some medical records dating back to 1999. The databases also included personal information of parents and spouses as well as Mills College students who used or were eligible for Berkeley's health services.

COVERT RADIO SHOW http://covertradioshow.com # http://covertradioshow.com/podcast.cfm?pid=187 Covert Radio Daily Blast May 7 North Korea has hackers working round the clock on cyberwarfare. Could they have been behind recent attacks on the Alaskan Air Traffic Control system? Are we prepared for Cyber Warfare? Narco Traffickers are declaring war on our cops, and the latest in the coming war between Georgia and Russia.

Symantec says a new worm targeting Mac OS X spreads via email and network shares. But is it really a threat?According to Symantec, the Tored worm spreads through network shares and by emailing itself to addresses gathered from the infected computer's Address Book. It opens a back door to the computer, allowing it to be conscripted into distributed denial of service attacks as well as logging keystrokes (which could be used to steal passwords and other confidential information). There is no indication that Tored can execute without user intervention. For example, Symantec does not seem to suggest that there are...

Hackers last week broke into a Virginia state Web site used by pharmacists to track prescription drug abuse. They deleted records on more than 8 million patients and replaced the site's homepage with a ransom note demanding $10 million for the return of the records, according to a posting on Wikileaks.org, an online clearinghouse for leaked documents. Wikileaks reports that the Web site for the Virginia Prescription Monitoring Program was defaced last week with a message claiming that the database of prescriptions had been bundled into an encrypted, password-protected file.

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...

A FRENCH computer hacker is thought to have tapped into Twitter's internal system, gaining access to millions of accounts including that of US President Barack Obama. The hacker, under the name "Hacker Croll", posted a series of screenshots showing him viewing internal website settings and the private details of user accounts. The screenshots show Croll looking at the behind-the-scenes details for the account of US President Barack Obama, including the IP address of the last person to use it. Twitter co-founder Biz Stone confirmed unauthorised access was gained by an outside party during the week, but said only 10 individual...

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...

For years, the U.S. intelligence community worried that China’s government was attacking our cyber-infrastructure. Now one man has discovered it’s worse: It’s hundreds of thousands of everyday civilians. And they’ve only just begun At 8 a.m. on May 4, 2001, anyone trying to access the White House Web site got an error message. By noon, whitehouse.gov was down entirely, the victim of a so-called distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack. Somewhere in the world, hackers were pinging White House servers with thousands of page requests per second, clogging the site. Also attacked were sites for the U.S. Navy and various other federal...

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...

WASHINGTON — Computer spies have broken into the Pentagon's $300 billion Joint Strike Fighter project — the Defense Department's costliest weapons program ever — according to current and former government officials familiar with the attacks. Similar incidents have also breached the Air Force's air-traffic-control system in recent months, these people say. In the case of the fighter-jet program, the intruders were able to copy and siphon off several terabytes of data related to design and electronics systems, officials say, potentially making it easier to defend against the craft. The latest intrusions provide new evidence that a battle is heating up...

WASHINGTON — Computer spies have broken into the Pentagon's $300 billion Joint Strike Fighter project — the Defense Department's costliest weapons program ever — according to current and former government officials familiar with the attacks. Similar incidents have also breached the Air Force's air-traffic-control system in recent months, these people say. In the case of the fighter-jet program, the intruders were able to copy and siphon off several terabytes of data related to design and electronics systems, officials say, potentially making it easier to defend against the craft. The latest intrusions provide new evidence that a battle is heating up...

This was going to be a "don't believe everything you read on Twitter" sort of post, but the reality involving a rumor that online celeb/MTV star Tila Tequila had died is a little scarier than that. It appears that a stalker broke into the "A Shot at Love" star's house early Monday and posted two messages to her Twitter account (which has some 79,000 followers). "Tila Tequila is dead," the first one read, followed a few minutes later by "I just broke into her house, killer her and her dog. Logged onto Twitter to tell you guys. She was signed...

The Sun-Sentinel has an article this morning about how a hackers are using a Web site that is posing as the Palm Beach County government Web site: Leaving out the first “.” in www.pbcgov.com lands unwitting visitors on a hoax site. Making the wrong move on that site could enable hackers and spammers to secretly take over a computer, using it to send viruses and mass e-mails without the owner knowing. Michael Butler, the county director of network services, says there’s a Trojan Horse for them to take over your machine. When you visit the hoax site, an official-looking message...

U.S. concerns about the potential for cyber-attacks on critical infrastructure extended to the American electrical power grid on Wednesday and experts pointed the finger anew at Chinese hackers, among others. As a result, electric utilities are likely to face new pressures from the U.S. Congress and government regulators to tighten security and preparations against computer intrusions that would wreak widespread havoc. U.S. Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano told reporters the power grid is vulnerable to potentially disabling computer attacks, while declining to comment on reports that an intrusion had taken place. "The vulnerability is something that the Department of Homeland...

Foreign hackers have reportedly managed to break into the computer network controlling the nation's power grid. The discovery has raised alarm about how such unauthorized access could be used to harm the U.S., though the discovery may motivate actions to strengthen the security systems surrounding the nation's infrastructure. A Wall Street Journal report that foreign hackers have repeatedly penetrated the U.S. power grid computer network has delivered a loud wake-up call. Cyber-spies from countries including China and Russia have breached the electrical infrastructure's computer network and left software tools behind that would have allowed them to control or destroy infrastructure...

Chinese and Russian cyber spies have penetrated the U.S. electrical grid and left behind software programs that could be used to disrupt the system, according to current and former national-security officials. According to Fox News, the spies are also from other countries, and they were believed to be on a mission to navigate the U.S. electrical system and its controls. The intruders haven't sought to damage the power grid or other key infrastructure, but officials warned they could try during a crisis or war. The espionage appeared pervasive across the U.S. and doesn't target a particular company or region, said...

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,...