Free Republic

For the last four months, Chinese hackers have persistently attacked The New York Times, infiltrating its computer systems and getting passwords for its reporters and other employees. After surreptitiously tracking the intruders to study their movements and help erect better defenses to block them, The Times and computer security experts have expelled the attackers and kept them from breaking back in. The timing of the attacks coincided with the reporting for a Times investigation, published online on Oct. 25, that found that the relatives of Wen Jiabao, China’s prime minister, had accumulated a fortune worth several billion dollars through business...

Hacktivist group Anonymous took control of the U.S. Sentencing Commission website Friday, January 25 in a new campaign called "Operation Last Resort." The first attack on the website was early Friday morning. The second - successful - attack came around 9pm PST that evening. anonymous By 3am PST ussc.gov was down (it has since been dropped from the DNS), yet as of this writing the IP address (66.153.19.162) still returns the defaced site's contents. It appears that via the U.S. government website, Anonymous had distributed encrypted government files and left a statement on the website that de-encryption keys would be...

Anonymous has hacked the US Sentencing Commission’s website in retaliation for the suicide of internet activist and Reddit co-founder Aaron Swartz, and as of now, the site is still displaying in its compromised state.More on this breaking story as it develops. Statement below from Anonymous on the decision to hack USSC.gov. [Correction: An earlier version of this post stated that Anonymous' attack affected the Supreme Court's website, when in actuality, it is the US Sentencing Commission's website as stated above.]In addition to the defacing of the site with a video, a statement on Swartz’s death and the government’s alleged harassment of the activist...

As the health-care industry rushed onto the Internet in search of efficiencies and improved care in recent years, it has exposed a wide array of vulnerable hospital computers and medical devices to hacking, according to documents and interviews. Security researchers warn that intruders could exploit known gaps to steal patients’ records for use in identity theft schemes and even launch disruptive attacks that could shut down critical hospital systems. A year-long examination of cybersecurity by The Washington Post has found that health care is among the most vulnerable industries in the country, in part because it lags behind in addressing...

Viewers, beware: while you’re watching TV, your TV might be watching you back. A security firm discovered that Samsung’s Smart TV can give hackers access to the device’s built-in camera and microphones, allowing them to watch everything you do. The Malta-based firm ReVuln posted a video showing its team of researchers hacking into one of the Samsung TVs and accessing its settings, channel lists, widgets, USB drives, and remote control configurations. The security flaw allows hackers to access any and all personal data stored on the TV. “We can install malicious software to gain complete root access to the TV,”...

What do you need to rig an election? A basic knowledge of electronics and $30 worth of RadioShack gear, professional hacker Roger Johnston reveals. The good news: we can stop it.Roger Johnston is the head of the Vulnerability Assessment Team at Argonne National Laboratory. Not long ago, he and his colleagues launched security attacks on electronic voting machines to demonstrate the startling ease with which one can steal votes. Even more startling: Versions of those machines will appear in polling places all over America on Tuesday. The touchscreen Diebold Accuvote-TSX will be used by more than 26 million voters in...

Mitt Romney's Republican Get Out the Vote system (ORCA) had a meltdown on Election Day leaving some campaign workers wandering around with nothing to do. Now Anonymous has released a video claiming responsibility for jamming ORCA...

• Amanda Todd, 15, killed herself on October 10, just five weeks after she detailed her treatment by cyber bullies in emotional YouTube video • Man 'blackmailed teenage girls on the internet and used "jailbait" websites' • Sparks concerns over hacking group's power to create 'trial by internet' • Police investigation underway and they are 'aware' of the claims

The City of Burlington is struggling after someone stole $487,000 from the city's $4 million general fund at Bank of America. "We really don't know exactly how it happened," said City Manager Bryan Harrison. "Multiple banks in multiple states involved."

"Entire cities in the World of Warcraft have been destroyed with no one spared, not even the NPCs. About 13:00 GMT, forums on WOW started getting the first comments from users regarding players and NPCs dying on the Ragnaros-EU realm in Orgrimmar. Users of the online game started reporting that Draenor had a similar sight to offer. Some of the other realms where this was reported include Tarren Mill, and Twisting Nether." Also at Joystiq, and (with more screenshots) at WCCF Tech, which reports that "it appears the damage is most severe in World of Warcraft European servers."

Bill Gertz has the grim news in the Washington Free Beacon: Hackers linked to China's government broke into one of the U.S. government's most sensitive computer networks, breaching a system used by the White House Military Office for nuclear commands, according to defense and intelligence officials familiar with the incident. One official said the cyber breach was one of Beijing's most brazen cyber attacks against the United States and highlights a failure of the Obama administration to press China on its persistent cyber attacks. Disclosure of the cyber attack also comes amid heightened tensions in Asia, as the Pentagon moved...

An anonymous hacking group claims to have stolen Mitt Romney's tax returns from financial services firm PricewaterhouseCoopers (PWC). PWC denies that there has been any unauthorized access to Mitt Romney or wife Ann's tax information and that any of their systems have been breached. The hacking group sent thumb drives that supposedly contained copies of the returns to the Democratic and Republican county offices in Nashville Tennessee, as well as PWC. The Nashville city paper was among the first to report on the hacking incident. The group announced their demands on Pastebin, a tool that is used by coders to...

An anonymous individual or group claims to have obtained "all available" tax returns associated with Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney. The alleged hackers claim to have accessed them via computers in the Franklin, Tenn., office of professional services firm PriceWaterhouseCoopers. An anonymous posting on a file sharing website claims PwC was hacked; the same site has been used to boast of other high-profile corporate hacks. How'd they pull it off, allegedly? The posting states: "[Romney's tax returns] were taken from the PWC office 8/25/2012 by gaining access to the third floor via a gentleman working on the 3rd floor of...

Some 450,000 Yahoo users' email addresses and passwords have been leaked because of a security breach, the company confirmed Thursday, adding that just a small fraction of the stolen passwords were valid. The company said in a statement that an "old file" from the Yahoo Contributor Network was compromised Wednesday. Among the stolen emails and passwords were many from Yahoo's own email service along with those of other companies. The Yahoo Contributor Network is a content-sharing platform. Yahoo said it is fixing the vulnerability that led to the disclosure, changing the passwords of affected Yahoo users, and notifying other companies...

From WeWork Labs to General Assembly, there are a lot of incubators that give entrepreneurs a place to code during the day. There aren't many that offer sleeping arrangements as well. Three "hacker hostels" have cropped up in Silicon Valley, The New York Times reports. Coders, designers and scientists can spend the night packed like sardines in rows of bunk beds for $40. The hostels are all run by the same management company, Chez JJ, with accommodations in Menlo Park, Mountain View and San Francisco. Chez JJ was founded by 28-year-old neuroscientist Jade Wang and Jocelyn Berl. Wang had used...

Some 60m euro is stolen from bank accounts in a massive cyber raid, after fraudsters raid dozens of banks around the world. Sixty million euro has been stolen from bank accounts in a massive cyber bank raid after fraudsters raided dozens of financial institutions around the world. According to a joint report by software security firm McAfee and Guardian Analytics, more than 60 firms have suffered from what it has called an "insider level of understanding". "The fraudsters' objective in these attacks is to siphon large amounts from high balance accounts, hence the name chosen for this research - Operation...

Today, my son's name and the name of his close friend, were in a message posted to my facebook page saying that they "liked" Barack Obama along with a link to his facebook page. Considering my son is a deployed Marine with limited access to the internet and the time there is in the wee morning hours, I contacted his friend who is also rarely on facebook and asked him if he had recently "liked" the article. He said he hadn't. Do you think it possible this is a political hack? Just wondering.

It's been a cheerily good spring for FOSS fans here in the Linux blogosphere, so we may perhaps be forgiven for our utter shock and disbelief at the affront recently committed against us by a certain brick-and-mortar purveyor of books and magazines. Yes, that's right -- it's Barnes & Noble (NYSE: BKS) Linux Girl is referring to; specifically, its decision to yank the very excellent Linux Format magazine from its U.S. shelves -- apparently because of a cover story on the topic of "hacking.""We've just learned that issue 154 of Linux Format, the one with 'Learn to Hack' on the...

An investigation by Dr Web suggests that about 600,000 Macs have the malware - potentially allowing them to be hijacked and used as a "botnet". It says that more than half that number are in the US. Flashback was first detected last September when anti-virus researchers flagged software masquerading itself as a Flash Player update. Once downloaded it deactivated some of the computer's security software. Remote control "By introducing the code criminals are potentially able to control the machine," the firm's chief executive Boris Sharov told the BBC. "We stress the word potential as we have never seen any malicious...

FOR the last two months, senior government officials and private-sector experts have paraded before Congress and described in alarming terms a silent threat: cyberattacks carried out by foreign governments. Robert S. Mueller III, the director of the F.B.I., said cyberattacks would soon replace terrorism as the agency’s No. 1 concern as foreign hackers, particularly from China, penetrate American firms’ computers and steal huge amounts of valuable data and intellectual property.