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I suspect that China might be stealing our confidential data that is stored (or backed up) on external USB hard disks, such as those 1 TB commodities sold as Costco for $100. Early this year, I bought two 1 TB external USB drives to backup my computer. These drives cost a little over $100 with a five-year warranty. I figured, for redundancy, I’d copy my main C-drive data files to both drives, just in case one dies. Sure enough, six months later, I get the Windows XP error message “USB Device Not Recognized: one of the USB devices attached to...

The former director of information technology for a non-profit organ and tissue donation center was sentenced today to two years in prison for hacking into her former employer’s computer network, announced Assistant Attorney General Lanny A. Breuer of the Criminal Division and U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of Texas Tim Johnson. Danielle Duann, 51, of Houston, pleaded guilty on April 30, 2009, to a one-count criminal indictment charging her with unauthorized computer access. Duann was sentenced today by U.S. District Judge David Hittner in the Southern District of Texas. In addition to the two-year prison term, Judge Hittner sentenced...

A fresh wave of cyber attacks that slowed U.S. and South Korean websites this week hit more targets on Thursday, a Web security firm said, while the South's spy agency has said the hacking may be linked to North Korea. The impact of the attacks, aimed so far at dozens of sites including the White House and the South's presidential office, was seen as negligible, experts said, but served as a reminder that Pyongyang has been planning for cyber warfare.

DALLAS—A man from Arlington, Texas, who worked as a contract security guard at the Carrell Clinic on North Central Expressway in Dallas, has been arrested on felony charges outlined in a criminal complaint, announced Acting U.S. Attorney James T. Jacks of the Northern District of Texas. Late Friday evening, agents with the FBI arrested Jesse William McGraw, a/k/a "GhostExodus," "PhantomExodizzmo," "Howard Daniel Bertin," "Howard William McGraw," and "Howard Rogers," age 25. McGraw appeared yesterday afternoon before U.S. Magistrate Judge Wm. F. Sanderson, Jr., for his initial appearance. He was detained until his probable cause and detention hearing set for Wednesday,...

"SKULDUGGERY," says Andrew Henwood, "is a very good word to describe what this extremely advanced, cleverly written malware gets up to. We've never seen anything like it." What he has discovered is a devious piece of criminal coding that has been quietly at work in a clutch of cash machines at banks in Russia and Ukraine. It allows a gang member to walk up to an ATM, insert a "trigger" card, and use the machine's receipt printer to produce a list of all the debit card numbers used that day, including their start and expiry dates - and their PINs....

Note: The following text is a quote: Two Missouri Brothers Among Those Indicted in $4 Million Nationwide Spamming Conspiracy Millions of E-Mail Addresses Illegally Harvested from Computers at 2,000 Schools KANSAS CITY, MO—Two Missouri men and their company are among those indicted by a federal grand jury in a nationwide e-mail spamming case that victimized more than 2,000 colleges and universities in a scheme that sold more than $4 million worth of products to students, announced Matt J. Whitworth, Acting United States Attorney for the Western District of Missouri. Amir Ahmad Shah, 28, of St. Louis., his brother, Osmaan Ahmad...

Officials with the Defense Department and Lockheed Martin disputed a report by The Wall Street Journal that computer spies had hacked into government and contractor computer systems and stolen data about the design of the F-35 joint strike fighter program. The newspaper reported Tuesday that several government officials confirmed that intruders had downloaded F-35 data. The hackers could not access the most sensitive design data about the aircraft’s flight controls and electronics, which are stored on computers not connected to the Internet, The Journal reported. In a conference call with Wall Street analysts, Bruce Tanner, Lockheed’s chief financial officer, said...

Chinese and Russian hackers are attempting to seed viruses in the US power grid that could one day plunge major cities into chaos, a report warned Wednesday. The report in the Wall Street Journal quotes intelligence officials saying that cyber-spies last year repeatedly gained access to the system powering everything from financial institutions to sewage systems.

In what appears to be a growing trend, displaced employees are turning to cybercrime using their corporate data access to steal, exploit and damage information networks, and may have cost businesses as much as $1 trillion globally according to a new study from McAfee and Purdue University's Center for Education and Research in Information Assurance and Security Although insiders have always posed a threat to information security, the report warns that the global recession is putting vital information at greater risk than ever before. The report, Unsecured Economies: Protecting Vital Information (free, requires free registration) was released last week at...

Hacktivist tool targets Hamas DDoS street protest covers both side of Gaza conflict Israeli cyberactivists are inviting pro-Israeli surfers to install a tool that attacks websites associated with Hamas. This "Patriot" tool effectively turns the computers of sympathisers of the Israeli cause into zombies - albeit willing, complicit ones - in the control of Israeli hackers. The hackers are working under the banner of the Help Israel Win collective, which was formed last month at the start of the conflict in Gaza. "We couldn't join the real combat, so we decided to fight Hamas in the cyber arena," one...

In the wake of the escalating conflict between Israel and Hamas, it didn’t take long before pro-Hamas supporters organized themselves and started to defacing thousands of pro-Israeli web sites in order to use them as vehicles for propaganda — Israel is meanwhile hijacking TV signals. For the time being, pro-Israeli sites remain automatically probed for web application vulnerabilities through search engines reconnaissance of the Israeli web space by JURM-TEAM and TEAM-Evil, two groups working together and using identical templates for the defaced sites.Compared to previous hacktivism (politically motivated hacking)  activities on behalf of this group consisting primarily of mass web...

This started out as a short answer to a comment on our last post. Originally my comment would have taken up about ten lines but ever since Chaim himself answered Steve and wondered if he was merely a shill for CAIR as did various other who answered ion the same vein, as they waded through the commenter's language and all too obvious prejudices, our blog became unstable. Since Thursday last and until a short while ago, it kept appearing and disappearing from cyberspace. Even as it reappeared we could not get into the admin area to post. Although commenters could...

THE Home Office has quietly adopted a new plan to allow police across Britain routinely to hack into people’s personal computers without a warrant. The move, which follows a decision by the European Union’s council of ministers in Brussels, has angered civil liberties groups and opposition MPs. They described it as a sinister extension of the surveillance state which drives “a coach and horses” through privacy laws. The hacking is known as “remote searching”. It allows police or MI5 officers who may be hundreds of miles away to examine covertly the hard drive of someone’s PC at his home, office...

THE Home Office has quietly adopted a new plan to allow police across Britain routinely to hack into people’s personal computers without a warrant. The move, which follows a decision by the European Union’s council of ministers in Brussels, has angered civil liberties groups and opposition MPs. They described it as a sinister extension of the surveillance state which drives “a coach and horses” through privacy laws. The hacking is known as “remote searching”. It allows police or MI5 officers who may be hundreds of miles away to examine covertly the hard drive of someone’s PC at his home,...

A group of Israeli students is asking for help in returning the hacking favor to Hamas. They have a website set up to guide you to appropriate targets.

Internet security has deteriorated markedly this year as a new generation of invasive computer attacks, often masterminded by criminal gangs, has reached a heightened level of sophistication, according to the latest studies of online threats. “It’s getting worse year after year,” warned Pat Peterson, chief security researcher at Cisco Systems, who blamed the deterioration on the fact that computer “hacking” is quickly turning into big business. “Capitalism is working against us,” he said. In particular, computer security experts warn that so-called botnets, or networks of “slave” PCs whose owners do not know their machines have been infected, have become both...

Users of Microsoft's Internet Explorer are being urged by experts to switch to a rival until a serious security flaw has been fixed. The flaw in Microsoft's Internet Explorer could allow criminals to take control of people's computers and steal their passwords, internet experts say. Microsoft urged people to be vigilant while it investigated and prepared an emergency patch to resolve it. ....

Intelligence and Terrorism Information Center at the Israel Intelligence Heritage & Commemoration Center (IICC) November 23, 2008 Iran and Hamas declare digital war against Israel: Hamas recently participated in a digital communications exhibition in Tehran and was involved in establishing a group calling itself “The Digital Intifada.” Its objective was to develop websites to fight Israel and encourage the criminal activity of hacking Israeli websites.

A former prison inmate has been arrested and charged with hacking the facility's computer network, stealing personal details of more than 1,100 prison employees and making them available to fellow inmates. Francis G. Janosko, 42, gained access to the names, addresses, dates of birth, social security numbers and telephone numbers of employees working for the Plymouth County Correctional Facility in Massachusetts, according to an indictment unsealed Wednesday in US District Court in Boston. Using a thin client that was connected to a prison server, the prisoner was able to access an employee database by exploiting a bug in legal research...

For the past week or so, a couple of really strange things have been happening with my FR account. One, I keep getting mysteriously 'bumped' off the site (logged out). Once bumped off I am unable to get back on (log in) for hours. Two, a few days ago, nearly every one of my posts were deleted from the message board. All of the posts were direct responses to questions asked and contained powerful spot-on facts about the issue at hand. Now, as a lot of you know, I've compiled quite a bit of evidence on the ObamaRats' connections to...