Tag: HACKER

Yesterday evening, a hacker seized control of French President Nicolas Sarkozy's Facebook account, and posted a message that many disgruntled Frenchmen have been dying to hear: "Dear compatriots, given the exceptional circumstances our country is experiencing, I have decided in my spirit and conscience not to run for office again at the end of my mandate in 2012." The fake post then extended an ...

Thousands of iTunes accounts have been stolen, and are now for sale in China. According to the BBC, up to 50,000 fraudulent accounts are being sold on taobao.com, a Chinese version of eBay, at prices ranging from 1 yuan ($0.15) to 200 yuan ($30). Many listings for the accounts guarantee that buyers will enjoy unlimited downloads, including "software, games, movies, music and so on." Free ...

If you've ever found yourself looking to hop onto a free wireless network while killing time at an airport, you've probably come across an available network called 'Free Public WiFi.' At first, you think you've hit the jackpot. It's free. It's public. It's Wi-Fi. Game on. A few seconds after you attempt to connect, though, you realize that this so-called wireless network doesn't actually provide ...

In 2006, a U.K. investigation revealed that employees at Rupert Murdoch's 'News of the World' tabloid had successfully hacked into the cell phones of three aides to the royal family. A few months later, Scotland Yard discovered that reporter Clive Goodman and private investigator Glenn Mulcaire had also gained access to the cell phones and voicemails of several celebrities, government officials ...

The same, privacy-conscious German government that threatened Google with legal action over its "invasive" Street View feature is now facing its very own security crisis, after a group of hackers recently demonstrated how to easily extract private information from government-issued ID cards. The hackers, who are part of the so-called 'Chaos Computer Club,' recently appeared on the German TV show ...

If you've been following the Wikileaks controversy over the last month or two, you're already familiar with 22-year-old Pfc. Bradley E. Manning, the man accused of stealing more than 260,000 classified files, including the infamous video of American soldiers shooting Iraqi civilians from an Apache helicopter. Manning's been under intense scrutiny, obviously, by both the government and the media, ...

digg_url ='http://www.switched.com/2010/07/04/any-usb-peripheral-is-now-a-potential-threat/'; A group of Canadian hackers have identified and learned to exploit a flaw that allows them to turn any USB peripheral into a sort of hardware trojan horse. Plug-and-play USB devices follow a consistent rule, the device identifies itself to the PC. The computer, by rule, will believe that a UB device ...

Share In the past few weeks, spammers and hackers have feasted on Facebook like King Curtis on bacon. Now, however, it looks as if Facebook has finally decided to take some action. Yesterday, the social network announced on its blog that users will soon benefit from a host of new security features specially designed to "keep the bad guys out." From now on, you can choose to be automatically ...

Share Researchers at Matousec have discovered a new and particularly worrisome flaw in the Windows ecosystem that allows malware to completely bypass security software. Anti-virus software works by standing between applications and the Windows kernel, inspecting code before it has a chance to execute. Matousec passes benign code through a security suite, thus clearing the way for a program to ...

Share To get a look at the world of cyber-security from an insider, Switched turned to noted and notorious hacker Jeff Moss, a.k.a Dark Tangent. Moss got his start hacking the phone system before founding DefCon, the long-running annual hacker convention in Las Vegas, in 1992. He then took his l337 skillz to big industry by founding the network security consultancy firm Black Hat. Moss's ...

Perhaps no other person in the world is kept under closer security than President Obama. His Twitter account, on the other hand... not so much. A small gap in Presidential security was publicly exposed Wednesday, as French police, in coordination with the FBI, arrested a man who'd successfully hacked his way into Obama's Twitter. The (not surprisingly) unemployed 25-year old Frenchman, who ...

As if phishing scams and identity thefts didn't already make the Internet unappetizing, hackers are apparently getting still more industrious in ways that leave us feeling queasy. According to The New Scientist, we now have to worry about "a burgeoning cyber-crime industry, one which lets people with next to no programming skills steal a fortune in cash or get hold of sensitive government ...

Share When Omar Ramos-Lopez was laid off from his job at Texas Auto Center last month, he decided to send his former employer a message... about 100 times. It turns out that Ramos-Lopez not only had an intimate knowledge of cars, but knew his way around computers, as well -- and, in particular, around his company's online vehicle-immobilization system. With the help of a former colleague's ...

Share Valery Maltsev, believed to be the sole owner and operator of Broco Investments, has found himself in the crosshairs of the SEC. The St. Petersburg, Russia-based trader has had his assets and accounts frozen after being fingered as the man behind a "pump and dump" scam. According to a complaint filed by the SEC, Broco hacked several accounts at AmeriServe Financial, and used them to ...

Hacker Christopher Tarnovsky has accomplished what many thought was nearly impossible: cracking the Trusted Platform Module (TPM). Described by some as a "digital Fort Knox," the TPM is a specialized processor dedicated to encrypting data and keeping sensitive information from prying eyes. The chips, found in many PCs, are an important line of defense for businesses and governments who need to ...