Free Republic

Hackers who broke into the International Monetary Fund's computer system may have been backed by a nation state, according to security experts.They point to the sophisticated nature of the attack and the resources needed to develop it. Malicious software, designed to steal confidential files, was installed on at least one IMF computer. Although government involvement is widely suspected, the IMF has not released enough details to be sure. > According to Mark Darvill, director of security firm AEP Networks, many countries are involved in cyber espionage but China remained at the "forefront". > Not everyone is convinced that state-sponsored attacks...

The Twitter feed of the company that put online 24,000 pages of Sarah Palin's emails for msnbc.com was hacked over the weekend, with vandals posting a series of pro-Palin and anti-Obama messages. Among the tweets: * Emails: Gov. Palin a Hard-Working Public Servant * Email Witch-hunt Backfires * Weiner's America Or Palin's America - That Is The 2012 Choice "It appears that there is a 'hole' in one of the applications (we think Facebook) that links to Twitter," Art Crivella, founder and CEO of the company, Crivella West, told msnbc.com Sunday evening. "We've disabled them and mopped up the bile...

WASHINGTON, June 11 (Reuters) - The International Monetary Fund, the intergovernmental group that oversees the global financial system and brings together 187 member nations, has become the latest known target of a significant cyber attack on its computer systems. A cybersecruty expert who has worked for both the Washington-headquartered IMF and the World Bank, its sister institution, said the intruders' goal had been to install software that would give a nation state a "digital insider presence" on the IMF network. Such a presence could yield a trove of non-public economic data used by the Fund to promote exchange rate stability,...

Members of the hacking group Anonymous say they've managed to infiltrate an Iranian government mail server and copy more than 10,000 internal emails and a series of images. ... "The documents are from Iranian Ministry of Foreign Affairs' mail server which we took control over," said a member of the group who called himself Arash. He said he was the founder of Anonymous' effort to hack Iranian government computers, which began in 2009 after Iran's disputed presidential election and corresponding government efforts to suppress Internet freedom. The main goal of the ongoing attack, however, is to embarrass the current government,...

Computer hackers in China broke into the Gmail accounts of several hundred people, including senior U.S. government officials, military personnel and political activists, Google Inc. said Wednesday. The attacks aren't believed to be tied to a more sophisticated assault originating from China in late 2009 and early last year. That intrusion targeted the Google's own security systems and triggered a high-profile battle with China's Communist government over online censorship, which has made it more difficult for the company to do business in the world's most populous country. The latest duplicity appeared to rely on so-called "phishing" scams and other underhanded...

OK, I admit it: when I heard this morning that Rep. Weiner had supposedly sent a coed a picture of his (encased) genitalia via Twitter, I assumed that somebody was just having his or her little joke by hacking into the man’s account and indicating that Weiner is, as I put it, one of the bigger d*cks in Congress.  But that was before Ace of Spades demolished this argument utterly (H/T: Neil Stevens) (remember, folks [and bad Moe!]: identity theft is a crime), so now I am taking this seriously as a possible scandal, and I found something interesting going...

I received this email from jewishsouthflroida.com. I don't know how I got on their mailing list. I don't really like them (too left), and I usually delete their stuff without opening any of it. But the title of this one was different; and I think an indication of big political trouble for Obama. When I thought to post this email here I went to the jewishsouthflorida.com to look for an html version I could lift. The site has been hacked by some Islamic Swine. I think some might find the site in this present condition edifying. Below is a reproduction...

The U.N. nuclear agency is investigating reports from its experts that their cellphones and laptops may have been hacked into by Iranian officials looking for confidential information while the equipment was left unattended during inspection tours in the Islamic Republic, diplomats have told The Associated Press.

Secrets surface about North Korea's cyberwar college Super-covert military school graduates 120 cyberwarriors per year By Matt Liebowitz The inner workings of a secret North Korean cyberwar college in existence for the past 25 years are finally coming to the surface. According to the South Korean newspaper the DailyNK, Mirim College, in a mountainous region of North Korea's capital, Pyongyang, was opened in 1986 by North Korean dictator Kim Jong-il, and in the 25 years since has made it its mission to train about 120 students per year in electronic warfare. The DailyNK spoke to a North Korean defector, Cheong,...

The group of Internet hackers hopes to reignite last year's protests in Iran.The Internet hackers group Anonymous plans to hack Iran on Sunday, according to a press release published on their website. The group wants to use International Workers' Day, which commemorates the first national general strike in the United States, as an opportunity to reignite last year's protests in Iran. Exactly how they intend to "attack" Iran remains to be seen. The sophistication of their previous attacks ranges from the denial-of-service overloading of web servers (this simply knocks a website out) to the exploitation of code and accessing of...

A mother is to go on trial for assault after allegedly using a box cutter and a pair of pliers to circumcise her three-month-old son. Keemonta Peterson told police she had watched YouTube videos on how to carry out the surgical procedure. The mother-of-four is alleged to have left her baby son bleeding for two hours before finally calling emergency services. Peterson, 29, said she was inspired to carry out the DIY operation at her home in Portland, Oregon, after reading the Bible. According to an arrest report Peterson began the operation at midnight using a box cutter knife as...

Details about the recent cyber attacks against security firm RSA suggest the assailants may have been taunting the industry giant and the United States while they were stealing secrets from a company whose technology is used to secure many banks and government agencies. Earlier this month, RSA disclosed that “an extremely sophisticated cyber attack” targeting its business unit “resulted in certain information being extracted from RSA’s systems that relates to RSA’s SecurID two-factor authentication products.” The company was careful to caution that while data gleaned did not enable a successful direct attack on any of its SecurID customers, the information...

MALICIOUS hacking software that could force a passenger jet to nosedive has been developed. Security representatives at the Asia-Pacific Aviation Security conference, which included representatives from Qantas and Virgin Airlines, said that cyber attacks were the second biggest risk to the aviation industry after natural disasters. Ty Miller, of Australian security firm Pure Hacking, said the risk was no longer "something out of a movie" but had become more likely with the dawn of the Stuxnet virus. An unknown attacker last year used the software to sabotage one of Iran's uranium enrichment plants. "The stereotypical Die Hard 2 airport attack...

Millions of sites hit with mass-injection cyberattackBy Sarah Jacobsson Purewal April 1, 2011 10:37 AM ET PC World - Hundreds of thousands -- and possibly millions -- of websites have been hit with a cyberattack that some are calling "one of the biggest mass-injection attacks we've ever seen." The attack was discovered on March 29 by security firm WebSense, and the injected domain was called lizamoon.com -- thus, the name of the mass-injection is "LizaMoon." According to WebSense, LizaMoon uses SQL Injection to add malicious script to compromised sites. While the first injected domain was lizamoon.com, additional URLs have since...

SAN FRANCISCO—Hackers from Iran are suspected of swiping authentication data from a US computer security firm in an attempt to impersonate popular Google or Yahoo! sites. "The incident got close to, but was not quite, an Internet-wide security meltdown," Electronic Frontier Foundation senior staff technologist Peter Eckersley said in a message posted at the group's website. Hackers using computers with addresses in Iran posed as a European affiliate of New Jersey-based Comodo on March 15 to get digital certificates allowing the creation of imitation Google, Yahoo!, Microsoft or Skype log-in pages. "The attacker was well prepared and knew in advance...

From the results of the Pwn2Own hacking competition, it looks like Android and Windows Phone 7 are tough nuts to crack. It took only two days for hackers to crack into the Apple and Blackberry operating systems during the three-day Pwn2Own tournament last week, while Android and Windows Phone 7 models were abandoned and left unhacked by the end of the contest. Is this because their operating systems are more secure? Yes and no. "The survival of a target does not automatically declare it safer than a target that went down," last year's Internet Explorer Pwn2Own winner Peter Vreugdenhil cautions....

Sophisticated hackers broke into security company RSA's servers and stole data related to SecurID authentication tokens, the firm's head announced late Thursday. The tokens are used by an estimated 40 million employees of large corporations and organizations. They generate a seemingly random six-digit number every 30 or 60 seconds, which the employees type in to log into virtual private networks or other sensitive systems. The RSA cryptography algorithm, which uses a 128-bit "seed" unique to each token to generate the numbers, is virtually impossible to crack. An estimated 250 million smartphones use similar RSA software to verify identity. "Recently, our...

A group of decentralized hacker activists — or “hacktivists” — known as Anonymous announced a new plan on March 14 to take on the Federal Reserve System, the International Monetary Fund, the Bank for International Settlements, the World Bank, and the entire “global banking cartel.” In a video posted on YouTube the group said “Operation Empire State Rebellion,” as the effort is being called, would entail “a relentless campaign of nonviolent, peaceful civil disobedience” until the group’s demands are met and “a rule of law is restored.” And it has already announced several demands which U.S. and international authorities will...

Hacker group Anonymous (aka OperationLeaks on Twitter) just released what they say is a trove of damning documents on Bank of America.You can find them here: bankofamericasuck.comRemember, at this point, we can't verify whether they are legitimate or not, but Gawker's Adrien Chen, who has sources within Anonymous, suggest there's something real to the leaks.Anonymous says the emails deal with BofA's mortgage practices, but the source is not an employee of Bank of America proper -- the source is a former employee from Balboa Insurance, a firm which used to be owned by BofA. Click here to see what Bank...

Hacker group Anonymous (aka OperationLeaks on Twitter) just released what they say is a trove of damning documents on Bank of America. You can find them here: bankofamericasuck.com