Tag: HACKS

An Australian teen's Facebook account was hacked and used to invite more than 4,000 people to a party at his parents' house. According to an AAP report, the unnamed South Brisbane boy, who apparently had planned on having a small party with friends before his account was compromised, told his dad what had happened when the number of people who RSVPd climbed into the thousands. "The first thing ...

With jobs being hard to come by these days, you need to get creative in order to land that dream gig. We wouldn't recommend this path to everybody, but Chris Putnam earned a job at Facebook by creating a worm that made users' profiles look like a MySpace page. In 2005, Putnam, along with his friends Marcel Laverdet and Kyle Stoneman, wrote the XSS-based worm, which spread every time an ...

The modding and hacking community is simply having a field day with Microsoft's Kinect. It was just a couple of weeks ago that we highlighted a few of the fun and impressive things that people much smarter than us were doing with the latest in motion-controlled gaming peripherals. But those innovations already look simplistic next to the crazy things being cooked up in living rooms and labs ...

If you're scratching your head over the new vertical orientation of iTunes 10's close/minimize/maximize 'traffic light' buttons -- which diverts from years of Apple design history -- there's a quick fix on the Mac (sorry, Windows users). Boot up the Terminal app (in your Applications folder), and paste in the following single line: defaults write com.apple.iTunes full-window -1 and press Return. ...

It's summer, which means your gadgets will be spending some time around water. But a trip to the beach or lake doesn't have to spell doom for a camera or cell phone. Lifehacker recently wrote about some cheap and easy ways to waterproof a gadget (and protect against STDs, too!) Believe it or not, you can use a clear, non-lubricated condom as a waterproof bag for cameras and other hydro-sensitive ...

Apple's criticized policy of banning certain content from its App Store may not be so debatable or controversial anymore. Like sharks executing exploratory test bites on possible prey, scammers and cybercriminals progressively seek mobile weaknesses by performing attacks on smartphones and wireless gadgets. According to the Wall Street Journal, probes of Air Force mobile devices exponentially ...

When there's a will for a hideous piece of skin art, there's a way. A detainee at Brook House Immigration Removal Centre in West Sussex, Britain was recently caught with one of the most inventive PlayStation hacks we've ever seen. After gutting the console, the prisoner attached the motor to a ballpoint pen with a sharpened tip. Et voilà! A DIY tattoo machine! Sadly, the prisoner's gadget ...

2009 was an abysmal year in terms of cybersecurity, as cyberattacks and data breaches doubled from 2008. The most publicized event occurred when Google became embroiled in a heated dispute with China over the nation's involvement in a hack on the search engine. Google even threatened to shutter its Google China service because of the incident, which Director of National Intelligence Dennis C. ...

Seriously, people. We've said it before but hacking your current or former employer because you're not happy with your job, desk, or termination is not a constructive way to deal with the problem. The latest idiot to clearly overstep his legal boundaries is Mario Azar, a 28-year-old former IT worker for Pacific Energy Resources (PER). According to Wired, the Los Angeles resident has been ...

In an era of ever-present phishing scams, debilitating viruses, and dwindling privacy, computer users have a new threat to confront. Two separate research firms have discovered inexpensive and relatively easy methods of intercepting and interpreting keyboard strokes. Using only an oscillator, an electronic circuit that emits a repetitive signal, and a regular wireless antenna, researchers from ...

We're sure this one has Apple's panties in a bunch: Chinese hackers have cracked the iTunes gift card system. Fake, but functional, cards have found their way onto Chinese auction site Taobao.com and are selling for a tiny fraction of their value. Using a custom program, hackers are able to generate viable gift card codes without actually purchasing them. These fake codes are then being ...

Well, a couple of hacker, pranksters have gotten themselves in some legal trouble... that is, if law enforcement in Missouri can find them. Someone managed to hack into the radio frequency for a Taco Bell drive-through and started shouting obscenities at the customers. Officials believe that the culprits must have been nearby to interfere with radio, and Taco Bell plans to press charges if the ...

Robots are awesome, we can all probably agree on that. Robots made from iPhones are basically an extension of that awesomeness, crossed with an element of unimaginable, ludicrous fun, which is why we're pleasantly surprised to see that such a device finally exists. Using a jailbroken iPhone 3G running some Ruby code, an Arduino CPU, a TA7291P motor, and 4 AA batteries, the creator is able to ...

We've spent a decent amount of time covering hacks and hackers. But for all our talk about great (as in skilled) hackers there is one glaring mistake they've all made -- they got caught. The really skilled ones get away scot-free, sometimes with out even being identified by their handles. PC Magazine has compiled a list of the ten most mysterious cyber-crimes, ones where the perpetrator got ...

Friday, the Web site of Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani -- Iraq's most prominent Shiite cleric -- was hacked by the mysterious Group XP, CNN reports. As a result of the hack, the Web site displayed -- instead of al-Sistani's usual words of moral guidance -- a video of Bill Maher mocking the cleric and advice he had given on said Web site. Claiming to be offended Sunnis, Group XP supplemented the ...