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Foreign hackers broke into a water plant control system in Illinois last week and damaged a water pump in what appears to be the first reported case of a malicious cyber attack damaging a critical computer system in the United States, according to an industry expert. On Nov. 8, a municipal water district employee in Illinois noticed problems with the city’s water pump control system, and a technician determined the system had been remotely hacked into from a computer located in Russia, said Joe Weiss, an industry security expert who obtained a copy of an Illinois state fusion center report...

SNIPPET: "In July, the British government warned that Al Qaeda’s exploitation of social networking websites is on the rise." SNIPPET: "The massive and multifarious network of websites and social media has presented a challenge to authorities in trying to combat it. Additionally, civil liberty concerns have conflicted with government efforts to spy on communications. Reducing terrorist activity on social media sites has been particularly difficult because users have adopted new forms of communication to conform with the new formats. Many Arabic speakers on Facebook, Twitter, MySpace and other sites use Arabizi, a form of colloquial Arabic written in the Latin...

If “password” is your password, chances are you’ve been the victim of a hack attack. “Password” is the least successful, according to SplashData’s annual list of worst Internet passwords. The list, notes Mashable.com, is somewhat predictable. Sequences of adjacent numbers or letters on the keyboard, such as “qwerty” and “123456,” and popular names, such as “ashley” and “michael,” all are common choices. Other common choices, such as “monkey” and “shadow,” are harder to explain. As some websites have begun to require passwords to include both numbers and letters, it makes sense varied choices, such as “abc123″ and “trustno1,” have become...

The following is an excerpt from “Bowing to Beijing” (Regnery Publishing, Nov. 14, 2011): In November 1997, Deputy Defense Secretary John Hamre testified before the Senate Subcommittee on Terrorism that “we’re facing the possibility of an electronic Pearl Harbor. … There is going to be an electronic attack on this country some time in the future.” Two years later, he told a secret session of the House Armed Services Committee, “We are at war - right now. We are in cyberwar.” Fast-forward more than a decade, to 2011. President Obama’s choice for secretary of defense, Leon Panetta, tells the Senate...

> According to the indictment, the suspects entered into deals with various internet advertisers in which they would be paid for generating traffic to certain websites or advertisements. But instead of earning the money legitimately, the FBI said the defendants used malware to force infected computers to unwillingly visit the target sites or advertisements -- pumping up click results and, therefore, ill-gotten profits to the tune of $14 million. The malware was also designed to prevent users from installing anti-virus software that may have been able to free the infected computers. > In the first case, if a user searched...

It was inevitable that the “F*** the Police” generation would grow into a meaner version of the left that has long called police officers “pigs” and worse. Despite its union support, the Occupy Wall Street crowd has taken police hate and confrontation to a level seldom seen outside of organized crime. Gone are the days of goofy liberal protests where police officers stand idly by watching the street theater. The Occupiers have escalated their levels of abuse, confrontation, intimidation, harassment and threats – all so they can score good video clips to boost their movement. Even an awful incident like...

OWS Exposed, a blog that aggregates Occupy Wall Street news, suffered a cyber attack late last week. The site’s owner, a conservative opponent of the left-wing protest movement, discovered malicious code had been inserted into his website’s infrastructure.“Somebody found a back door to our website and planted a bunch of PHP scripts,” Jeff Davis, president of the conservative issue advocacy group Minnesota Majority, told The Daily Caller Monday. PHP, a general-purpose scripting language, is often used for Web development and can be embedded into HTML to produce dynamic web pages. Power Line’s John Hinderaker first blogged about the website on October 27, and...

Has social networking changed hacking? Made it easier. I can go into LinkedIn and search for network engineers and come up with a list of great spear-phishing targets because they usually have administrator rights over the network. Then I go onto Twitter or Facebook and trick them into doing something, and I have privileged access. If I know you love Angry Birds, maybe I would send you an e-mail purporting to be from Angry Birds with a new pro version. Once you download it, I could have complete access to everything on your phone. How easy was it for those...

An international group of online hackers is warning a Mexican drug cartel to release one of its members, kidnapped from a street protest, or it will publish the identities and addresses of the syndicate's associates, from corrupt police to taxi drivers, as well as reveal the syndicates' businesses. The vow is a bizarre cyber twist to Mexico's ongoing drug war, as a group that has no guns is squaring off against the Zetas, a cartel blamed for thousands of deaths as well as introducing beheadings and other frightening brutality. "You made a huge mistake by taking one of us. Release...

Boston cops are probing alleged threats by cyber goons tied to Occupy Boston, including online messages urging violence and harassment, officials said. “The Boston Police Department is investigating harassment attempts and threats directed at department personnel. These threats appear to be generated by those either involved or sympathetic with the Occupy Boston movement,” Boston police Commissioner Edward F. Davis said in a statement last night. “The department will not disclose the specific nature of the intelligence gathered relative to this matter. We are taking the appropriate steps to address any potential concerns.” Sources said the threats included publicizing the phone...

Anonymous, the group of high-powered hackers famous for taking down websites belonging to Bank of America and Sony, has turned its vigilante brand of online activism to child pornography sites. The “hacktivists” are targeting web host Freedom Hosting and accusing it of knowingly hosting child pornography. This marks a shift for Anonymous, which is better known for hitting corporate and big-business sites with DDoS attacks, briefly taking over operations or scraping information.

Major Security Firms Detect New Trojan Capable Of Disrupting Power Plants, Oil Refineries and Other Critical Infrastructure Networks Mac Slavo October 19th, 2011 In our October 7, 2011 report There Have Been Intrusions, we noted that DHS Undersecretary Greg Shaffer warned that hackers and foreign governments are “knocking on the backdoor” of the networked systems which connect everything from infrastructure grid control systems to financial networks. It now appears that our interconnected smart grid is actively under attack, as evidenced by a new Stuxnet-style trojan that has been detected by major cyber security leaders Symantec and McAfee. Much like its...

Brought to you by the letter “X” – Sesame Street’s YouTube channel is back up today after being shut down Sunday when hackers took over the site and replaced the videos with porn.

This is a complete vanity. Isn't today the day that the Anonmyous Hackers are going to make Wall Street disappear?

Ever since Occupy Wall Street protests began mid-September, the hacker collective Anonymous has been posting its support for protestors and threats against those like the New York Police Department, on its YouTube channel. In its most recent post over the weekend, Anonymous threatens to “erase” the New York Stock Exchange from the Internet. Anonymous includes instruction on its video for people to "JOIN THE RAID". When? October 10. Watch the group’s video threat — a message to the media — of a day that will “never, ever be forgot:” As PC Magazine reports the threat, it notes that Anonymous does...

Billionaire investor George Soros said he sympathizes with the protesters who have camped out near Wall Street in New York and inspired similar anti-corporate demonstrations in other major cities across the United S While announcing a $40-million aid pledge at the United Nations for rural African development, Soros told media that he understood the protesters’ rage over big government bailout for banks "Actually I can understand their [protesters] sentiment, frankly," he said. "And at the same time the decision not to inject capital into the banks, but to effectively relieve them of their bad assets and then allow them to...

Owners of popular conservative websites have increasing reason to be concerned their sites may be hacked or otherwise physically attacked for political reasons. Traditionally, hackers took an anarchist approach that primarily targeted government websites. Lately, they are assailing politically conservative websites. Many of these newer attacks are coming from hackers associated with Wikileaks. Some libertarian conservatives defend Wikileaks’ business of leaking government documents, unaware that its affiliates are hypocritically trying to silence them. In addition to wreaking technical havoc, hackers have figured out they can use Google’s strict policy against deceptive website tactics to keep conservative websites hidden from the...

Gay hackers attack pro-family petition in defense of Julio Severo and other Christians By Julio Severo A pro-family petition website to support me and other Christians has been hacked today. Attack by hackers on Sunday, September 25 The petition was created by LifeSiteNews in response to a massive campaign by homo-fascist group AllOut, which boasts more than 500,000 adherents. The campaign of AllOut pressured PayPal to block services to me and pro-family groups. PayPal readily yielded, firstly blocking my account, effectively hindering me from receiving voluntary donations from friends. Now, to make sure that a positive pro-family campaign may pressure...

http://internet-haganah.com/harchives/007413.html "Whither the jihadi forums?" SNIPPET: "There are currently only three jihadi forums that are sufficiently active and well-connected to be of any interest whatsoever. Why we claim to be on the verge of defeating al-Qaida while simultaneously watching passively as they use these forums to regroup and regenerate is beyond me. These are the forums three: • al-Fidaa, a forum created by al-Qaida core. That it is directly linked to al-Qaida by definition moves it to the top of the list. Current membership: 2,462, all of whom can be considered "active" if only because they just joined the forum....