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Top members of the computer hacker group "Anonymous" and its offshoots were arrested and charged Tuesday after a wide-ranging investigation used the help of a group leader who was working as a secret government informant. Five of the suspects, considered by investigators among the "most sophisticated hackers in the world," were arrested in the United States and Europe and charged in a Manhattan federal court over their alleged role in high-profile cyberattacks against government agencies and large companies, according to an indictment. A sixth man, Hector Xavier Monsegur, a notorious hacker known as "Sabu," pleaded guilty in August to computer...

Chinese hackers gained control over NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in November, which could have allowed them delete sensitive files, add user accounts to mission-critical systems, upload hacking tools, and more -- all at a central repository of U.S. space technology, according to a report released Wednesday afternoon by the Office of the Inspector General. That report revealed scant details of an ongoing investigation into the incident against the Pasadena, Calif., lab, noting only that cyberattacks against the JPL involved Chinese-based Internet Protocol (IP) addresses. Paul K. Martin, NASA’s inspector general, put his conclusions bluntly. “The attackers had full functional...

-excerpt- The international police agency said in a statement Tuesday that the arrests in Argentina, Chile, Colombia and Spain were carried out by national law enforcement officers working under the support of Interpol's Latin American Working Group of Experts on Information Technology Crime.

If there is one war that Greece could not afford to join, that is with the global computer hacking collective known as Anonymous. Yet as of minutes ago, that is precisley what happened, after Anonymous, as part of what it now calls Operation Greece, took down the Greek Ministry of Justice (http://www.ministryofjustice.gr/). While the pretext for the hacking appears to have been an arrest of the wrong people, is seems to have angered Anonymous to the point where they have left an extended message of demands on the Greek website, warning that unless the IMF withdraws from the country and...

I have a new paper appearing at IEEE S&P with Hristo Paskov, Neil Gong, John Bethencourt, Emil Stefanov, Richard Shin and Dawn Song on Internet-scale authorship identification based on stylometry, i.e., analysis of writing style. Stylometric identification exploits the fact that we all have a ‘fingerprint’ based on our stylistic choices and idiosyncrasies with the written word. To quote from my previous post speculating on the possibility of Internet-scale authorship identification: Consider two words that are nearly interchangeable, say ‘since’ and ‘because’. Different people use the two words in a differing proportion. By comparing the relative frequency of the two...

The director of the National Security Agency warned that the hacking group Anonymous could have the ability within the next year or two to bring about a limited power outage in the US through a cyber attack. Gen. Keith Alexander, the agency's director, provided his assessment in meetings at the White House and in other private sessions, according to people familiar with the gatherings.

Israeli hackers took down a website run by Hamas on Tuesday, and warned that the web company which hosted the site will be their next target. The 'IDF Team' hacker group took responsibility for the attack. The affected website, www.qasssam.ps, is run by Hamas's Izzadin al-Qassam Brigades terrorist force, and often displays content celebrating rocket fire on Israeli civilians from Gaza. The website was unavailable after IDF Team said it would take the site offline. IDF Team added that it had first sent an email to the Nashirnet web hosting company asking them "to remove the Hamas terrorist site. But...

A developing Senate plan that would bolster the government's ability to regulate the computer security of companies that run critical industries is drawing strong opposition from businesses that say it goes too far and security experts who believe it should have even more teeth. Legislation set to come out in the days ahead is intended to ensure that computer systems running power plants and other essential parts of the country's infrastructure are protected from hackers, terrorists or other criminals. The Department of Homeland Security, with input from businesses, would select which companies to regulate; the agency would have the power...

The “anti-fascist” wing of the “Anonymous” hacker group has broken into a website run by the white supremacist American Third Position (A3P), and released a document dump consisting of private forum messages, emails, organizational notes, and other personal information. The documents show numerous connections between Republican candidate Ron Paul and these racist Neanderthals; they’re heavily involved in campaigning for Paul, and according to the messages, have held regular meetings with Ron Paul himself:

Palestinian Authority hackers briefly managed to pull down a few sites in Israel Wednesday night in the ongoing cyberwar launched by Iran and anti-Israel Arabs. Among the sites that fell prey to attacks were the home pages of El Al Airlines, the Dan Bus Company, the Israel Festival, Israel's CinemaTek and Ha'aretz newspaper. The home pages were replaced with anti-Israel and anti-Semitic slogans such as "Free Palestine, Death to Israel," "Jew = Nazi" and a promise that "4 more Gilad Shalits will be abducted." The latter hacker remark is a reference to IDF soldier Gilad Shalit, kidnapped by Hamas-allied terrorists...

The Jihad Will Be YouTubed by Raffaello Pantucci December 15, 2011 FOREIGN POLICY - The AFPAK Channel SNIPPET: "While clearly the technology to make such videos is something that is universal, it does seem as though it is aspirant jihadists in the West who find it easiest to use. There was no evidence that Gul was being directed by foreign terrorist organizations to produce his material, and his case shows the continued existence of young Westerners producing radical material on their own. It may indeed be the case that the virtual armies have yet to fully emerge as active warriors...

The website of Israel's main stock exchange was floored by a denial-of-service attack on Monday. ... The attacks, unleashed by hackers affiliated with elements of Anonymous and other groups, are the latest in tit-for-tat campaign that began a fortnight ago. It began when a hacker called OxOmar posted thousands of Israeli credit card details online and invited others to make mischief with the information in order to wreck international trust in the cards' issuers. Israeli deputy foreign minister Danny Ayalon responded to this by comparing the cyberattack to a terrorist assault and threatening reprisals. Elements of Anonymous waded in at...

Kelly Clarkson and Michelle Branch may have unofficially endorsed Ron Paul, but Nicole Scherzinger, No Doubt and Rise Against? Not exactly supporters, as recent tweets from the musical artists may lead people to believe. Early Wednesday morning, very similarly-phrased Ron Paul endorsements popped up on the official Twitter accounts of Nicole Scherzinger, No Doubt and Rise Against. The tweets, which were deleted by each artist after several hours, have been confirmed to Billboard.com as hacks. It's worth noting that all three artists are currently signed to Interscope Records, a curious coincidence that may explain why they're linked in this specific...

June 07, 2010 I SUPPOSE IF I SUGGESTED SUMMARY EXECUTION I WOULD BE CALLED "HARSH"? SNIPPET: "U.S. Intelligence Analyst Arrested in Wikileaks Video Probe Note that he didn't just lift a video and send it to Wikileaks. He also stole and released 260,000 classified US State Department diplomatic cables."

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,...