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The FBI on Wednesday announced that it had charged 53 defendants, the largest number ever charged in a cybercrime case, following a multinational investigation into a phishing scheme that operated in the United States and Egypt. Thirty-three of the 53 defendants named in the indictment have been arrested, the FBI said, and several others are being sought. The investigation, dubbed "Operation Phish Phry," began in 2007. Authorities in Egypt have charged 47 defendants linked to the phishing operation. Phishing is a form of social engineering that attempts to convince Internet users, via e-mail or other means, to provide online credentials...

"...In other words, after you've blithely downloaded a plug-in that shares your computer's Internet connection and processing power with other, unknown computers, Octoshape might choose to alter just what it's doing, how it's doing it, or the extent to which it is using your computer, remotely updating the software on your machine to change it, and /they're not going to tell you/. Oh, they'll make a revision to the license agreement available on their website, sure – but when was the last time you actually read all of the details of any software agreement, much less reviewed revisions to the...

“MI5 hiring Asian teenagers to fight cyber terror” London, September 21, 2009 First Published: 00:09 IST(21/9/2009) Last Updated: 02:44 IST(21/9/2009) SNIPPET: “MI5 head Jonathan Evans has told his staff that the recruits were essential to combat cyber terrorism which has been traced to China, Russia and Pakistan — the hackers have also intercepted messages from terrorists in Belmarsh maximum security prison, the newspaper said. In a report to Lord West, the Security Minister, Evans has revealed that during the summer over 1,000 hits were made on computers in Whitehall. Other targets have been air traffic control, power stations and the...

Cyber criminals have created a highly sophisticated Trojan virus that steals online banking log-in details from infected computers. The Clampi virus, which is spreading rapidly across hundreds of thousands of computers in Britain and the United States, infects computers when users visit websites that host a malicious code. Once on the computer, the virus sits unnoticed until the user logs on to bank, credit card or other financial websites. It then captures log-in and password information and sends it to a server run by the attackers. They can then tell the compromised computer to send money to accounts that they...

The shadowy internet group known as Anonymous has hacked into the prime minister's website to protest over proposed internet censorship reforms. An Attorney-General's Department spokesperson confirmed to ninemsn the Prime Minister's website was taken down at 7.25pm last night, but said the site was operational again "within minutes". "Visitors to the site received a service unavailable error," the spokesperson said in a statement. "There was no unauthorised access to site infrastructure." The Australian Communications and Media Authority's website was also affected. A message posted on the Inquisitor website by Anonymous stated that the action was in response to a federal...

Security: A Senate bill lets the president "declare a cybersecurity emergency" relating to "nongovernmental" computer networks and do what's needed to respond to the threat. Didn't they just collect our e-mail addresses?We wish this was just a piece of the fictional "Dr. Strangelove" that fell to the cutting-room floor, but it's not. It is a real piece of disturbingly vague legislation sponsored by Sens. Jay Rockefeller, D-W.Va., Bill Nelson, D-Fla., and Olympia Snowe, R-Maine. Senate Bill 773 would grant the administration emergency powers (where have we heard that before?) in the event of a cyberemergency that the president would have...

Hackers are becoming more organised as a new pool of talent coming from eastern European countries – Russia in particular – becomes available, writes CIARA O’BRIEN A number of attacks involving Russian hackers has hit the headlines in recent weeks. The most recent was the charging of Albert Gonzalez, a former US government informant who has already been jailed in connection with hacking cases. He is accused of stealing 130 million credit and debit card numbers. Two unnamed Russian co-conspirators were also charged in relation to the theft, said to the biggest case of identity theft seen yet. Mr Harbison,...

Three Indicted in Largest Corporate Identity Theft Case in History Monday, August 17, 2009 DEVELOPING: Three men have been indicted in New Jersey in an identity theft case that the Justice Department is labeling as the largest in history. Authorities say more than 130 million credit and debit card numbers were stolen in a corporate data breach involving five different companies. This is a developing story. Please click refresh for updates.

SNIPPET: "One of the Chinese bloggers that I follow reported that Uyghur separatists have defaced a handful of Chinese .gov.cn sites. The hacker(s) are known as “Spy HackerZ” and their handy work can be found with a simple google search for “spy hackerz” site:gov.cn. There are eight results all from different local government sites. The Spy Hackerz use the defacements as opportunities to voice their opinion about perceived injustices. The sites’ admins have apparently been notified because the defacements are either removed or the sites are presently down. I grabbed this screenshot from the ‘iron circle’ blog:"

Last week, Twitter was vexed by a DDoS attack that took it offline for a few hours. In that case, Russian hackers were suspected. This week's DDoS attack, however, may have different origins -- and they could be related to the attacks that took out a few U.S. and South Korean government sites last Fourth of July, according to AVG's chief of research. The latest attack hit the site in waves. "We're currently experiencing another wave of Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks against our system," Alex Payne, platform lead at Twitter, wrote on the service's Web dev blog on...

A TSG investigation unmasks the leader of Pranknet and the miscreants behind a year-long wave of phone call criminality AUGUST 4--At 4:15 AM on a recent Tuesday, on a quiet, darkened street in Windsor, Ontario, a man was wrapping up another long day tormenting and terrorizing strangers on the telephone. Working from a sparsely furnished two-bedroom apartment in a ramshackle building a block from the Detroit River, the man, nicknamed "Dex", heads a network of so-called pranksters who have spent more than a year engaged in an orgy of criminal activity--vandalism, threats, harassment, impersonation, hacking, and other assorted felonies and...

http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3179840 As some of you may have noticed, recently the Republican Party has begun cracking down on the "birthers", realizing that openly supporting the most crazy members of your party is, well, problematic for appealing to non-crazy people. This, of course, leads to even more crazy, as they turn on their leaders for hiding the "truth". It's a drat shame to let all this crazy go to waste, when properly cultivated and raised it could be so much more. So welcome to the first FreeRepublic Infiltration Contest! We're going to infiltrate freerepublic as agents provocateur. This can take several forms;...

Scofflaws could hack the smart cards that access electronic parking meters in large cities around the United States, researchers are finding. The smart cards pay for parking spots, and their programming could be easily changed to obtain unlimited free parking. It took researcher Joe Grand only three days to design an attack on the smart cards. The researchers examined the meters used in San Francisco, California, but the same and similar electronic meters are being installed in cities around the world. "It wasn't technically complicated and the fact that I can do it in three days means that other people...

Terrorists groups could soon use the internet to help set off a devastating nuclear attack, according to new research. The claims come in a study commissioned by the International Commission on Nuclear Non-proliferation and Disarmament (ICNND), which suggests that under the right circumstances, terrorists could break into computer systems and launch an attack on a nuclear state – triggering a catastrophic chain of events that would have a global impact.

* Mac expert shows how hackers can steal encrypted data * Demonstrates method at conference for security experts LAS VEGAS, July 29 (Reuters) - A Mac security expert has uncovered a technique that hackers could use to take control of Apple Inc (AAPL.O) computers and steal data that is scrambled to protect it from identity thieves. Prominent Mac researcher Dino Dai Zovi disclosed the software flaw at the Black Hat security conference in Las Vegas, one of the world's top forums for exchanging information on Internet threats. About 4,000 security professionals are in attendance, including some who are really hackers....

SNIPPET: "In theory at least, the Wild West days of Internet telecommunications are over. Based upon the inventions articulated in his five-patent suite, inventor Harry Emerson III, has mapped out a union between our secure and venerable telephone system - (Plain Old Telephone Service; a.k.a., POTS) - and the hyper-evolving, media-rich Internet which is so famously not one bit secure. As it evolves, he believes this next generation telecommunications system, dubbed IronPipe™, will have huge implications for national security as well as tremendous new revenue opportunities for the carriers and supply chains which serve them."

South Korea's state intelligence organization said Friday it has discovered that a wave of cyber attacks carried out earlier this week into key government and private websites in South Korea and the United States was launched from computers in 16 countries, Yonhap News Agency reported. The National Intelligence Service made the report to a closed-door meeting with members of a parliamentary intelligence committee, Yonhap quoted committee members as saying. North Korea was not among the 16 countries, which include South Korea, the United States, Japan, and Guatemala, Yonhap said. The cyber attacks have been traced to 86 Internet Protocol addresses...

The powerful attack that overwhelmed computers at U.S. and South Korean government agencies for days was even broader than initially realized, also targeting the White House, the Pentagon and the New York Stock Exchange. Other targets of the attack included the National Security Agency, Homeland Security Department, State Department, the Nasdaq stock market and The Washington Post, according to an early analysis of the malicious software used in the attacks. Many of the organizations appeared to successfully blunt the sustained computer assaults. The Associated Press obtained the target list from security experts analyzing the attacks. It was not immediately clear...

The flagship system designed to protect the U.S. government's computer networks from cyberspies is being stymied by technical limitations and privacy concerns, according to current and former national-security officials. The latest complete version of the system, known as Einstein, won't be fully installed for 18 months, according to current and former officials, seven years after it was first rolled out. This system doesn't protect networks from attack. It only raises the alarm after one has happened. A more capable version has sparked privacy alarms, which could delay its rollout. Since the National Security Agency acknowledged eavesdropping on phone and Internet...

PORTLAND, Ore. – Hackers defaced the home page of the Oregon University System, posting a caustic message telling President Barack Obama to mind his own business and stop talking about the disputed Iranian election. Attempts to access the university system's Web site were automatically redirected to another page, where readers viewed a message said to be from Iran that asserted there was no cheating in the election. That message was up for 90 minutes before university system technicians intervened Wednesday morning.