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Hackers on Sunday claimed to have stolen 200 GB of e-mails and credit card data from United States security think tank Stratfor, promising a weeklong Christmas-inspired assault on a long list of targets. Members of the loose hacking movement known as "Anonymous" posted a link on Twitter to what it said was Stratfor's secret client list - including the U.S. Army, the U.S. Air Force, Goldman Sachs and MF Global. "Not so private and secret anymore?," the group taunted in a message on the microblogging site. Anonymous said it was able to get credit details, in part, because Stratfor didn't...

An unpatched critical flaw in 64-bit Windows 7 leaves computers vulnerable to a full 'blue screen of death' system crash. The memory corruption bug in x64 Win 7 could also allow malicious kernel-level code to be injected into machines, security alert biz Secunia warns. Fortunately the 32-bit version of Windows 7 is immune to the flaw, which has been pinned down to the win32k.sys operating system file - which contains the kernel portion of the Windows user interface and related infrastructure.Proof-of-concept code showing how to crash vulnerable Win 7 boxes has been leaked: the simple HTML script, when opened in...

The pending Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) continues to inspire opponents to come up with creative solutions to circumvent it. A new anti-SOPA add-on for Firefox, titled “DeSopa,” is such a counter measure.When installed, users can click a single button to resolve a blocked domain via foreign DNS servers, bypassing all domestic DNS blockades and allowing the user to browse the site though the bare IP-address (if supported). “I feel that the general public is not aware of the gravity of SOPA and Congress seems like they are about to cater to the special interests involved, to the detriment of...

Computer hackers are avenging the Occupy movement by exposing the personal information of police officers who evicted protesters and threatening family-values advocates who led a boycott of an American Muslim television show. In three Internet postings last week, hackers from the loose online coalition called Anonymous published the email and physical addresses, phone numbers and, in some cases, salary details of thousands of law enforcement officers all over the country. The hackers said they were retaliating for police violence during evictions of Occupy protest camps in cities around the country, but law enforcement advocates slammed the disclosures as dangerous.

Expect hackers to try to disgrace presidential candidates with electronic extortion and other forms of digital deception during the upcoming primaries, say some former hackers and computer security specialists. The surge in social networking has coincided with the rise of social engineering, or tricking a computer user into revealing personal data -- perhaps the answer to a password recovery question -- by posing as a trusted acquaintance. Hacker collectives Anonymous and LulzSec, and presumably China, have exploited this tactic, and other online gambits, to filch law enforcement authorities' personal data, and to gain access to the Gmail accounts of senior...

SNIPPET: "MANILA, Philippines—A group of suspected Filipino hackers allegedly financed by a Saudi-based terrorist cell was arrested by agents of the Philippine National Police and the United States’ Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), the Criminal Investigation and Detection Group (CIDG) disclosed on Thursday." SNIPPET: "The group was allegedly behind attacks on the US telecommunication firm AT&T that resulted in $2 million in losses to the company in 2009. In a statement, the CIDG said the group also had links to the Asian terrorist network Jemaah Islamiyah (JI)." SNIPPET: "ATCCD chief Senior Supt. Gilbert Sosa identified the suspects as Macnell Gracilla,...

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?