Free Republic

For 90 minutes this morning, hackers upset with President Obama’s vocal stance on the disputed Iranian election made their voice known. A message telling President Barack Obama to mind his own business and not to comment on Iran’s election was posted. A spokeswoman for the university, Diane Saunders, said hackers allegedly broke through the school’s computer defenses via a third-party software application that had not been properly updated. It afforded the hackers the ability to access the computer and address the president in the unflattering way: “Hey Stupid Fly Catcher Obama!”, according to the AP. Note: The phrase “Stupid Fly...

Neda Soltani’s Death Inspires New Site A hastily created Web site called NedaNet has formed in honor of a young woman, Neda Soltani, who was killed during a Tehran protest. The site’s founder, Eric S. Raymond, created the page to serve as a jumping-off point for hackers who want to help Iranian citizens. “Our mission is to help the Iranian people by setting up networks of proxy servers, anonymizers and any other appropriate technologies that can enable them to communicate and organize — a network beyond the censorship or control of the Iranian regime,” the site says. A video widely...

A recent computer intrusion that forced the FBI to shut down its computer network and disrupted FBI operations was traced to an e-mail containing malicious code that originated in China, according to FBI officials. The forced shutdown of the network affected one significant FBI operation -- the May 20 arrest of homegrown terrorism suspects in New York, said officials who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the matter. "The Chinese shut down our network," said one FBI official familiar with assessments of the attack.

NEWARK, N.J.—An Indictment was unsealed today against three individuals who allegedly hacked into the telephone systems of large corporations and entities in the United States and abroad and sold information about the compromised telephone systems to Pakistani nationals residing in Italy, Acting U.S. Attorney Ralph J. Marra, Jr. announced. In conjunction with the unsealing of the Indictment, Italian law enforcement conducted searches of approximately 10 locations in four regions of Italy and arrested the financiers of the hacking activity. Those financiers allegedly used the information to transmit over 12 million minutes of telephone calls valued at more than $55 million...

An action by the US government is causing a flurry of not so complimentary comments across the internet. A group of 17 Uighur detainees who are on the road to release are being given laptops to train them for life outside Guantanamo. Army Lt. Col. Miguel Mendez oversees detainee classes, as well as the multilingual library and, now, the new virtual computer lab. “We’re getting them computer classes to prepare for their return.” Nury Turkel is a Uighur rights activist in Washington, D.C. He felt the computer training would “give hope to the men that their freedom is nearing” after...

May 13th, 2009 China's 'secure' OS Kylin - a threat to U.S offensive cyber capabilities? Posted by Dancho Danchev @ 6:23 am Categories: Browsers, Complex Attacks, Governments, Hackers, Kernel-level Exploits... Tags: China, Operating System, Operating Systems, Linux, Software... Picture a cyber warfare arms race where the participating countries have spent years of building offensive cyber warfare capabilities by exploiting the monoculture on one another’s IT infrastructure. Suddenly, one of the countries starts migrating to a hardened operating system of its own, and by integrating it on systems managing the critical infrastructure it successfully undermines the offensive cyber warfare capabilities developed...

Cyberwar is now a fact of life in 21st Century wars. Actual and potential enemies of America already know the dimensions of Cyberwar and have moved into full combat. With a real world combat engagement in Georgia and Estonia, the Russians have shown skill. Make no mistake; in certain arenas the Russians are smart and capable, and as the invasion of Georgia shows, ruthless. They have world class scientists and engineers. It is well known they are excellent Cyber Warfighters who have now also apparently harnessed their criminal hackers to augment their worldwide reach. This melding of Russian conventional military...

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...