Free Republic

SNIPPET: "U.S. officials familiar with intelligence reports said the websites of Ansar al-Mujahidin, Shumukh al-Islam and Al Fida — all accredited as official outlets of the terrorist group once led by Osama bin Laden — were knocked off the Internet by cyberattacks in early May. Two of the sites — Ansar al-Mujahidin (as-ansar.com) and Shumukh al-Islam (shamikh1.info) — came back up Monday and Tuesday. The site Al Fida remains down." SNIPPET: "The disruptions are prompting many jihadists to shift from Web forums to Twitter for communications and propaganda messaging."

It was a brazen bank heist, but a 21st-century version in which the criminals never wore ski masks, threatened a teller or set foot in a vault. In two precision operations that involved people in more than two dozen countries acting in close coordination and with surgical precision, thieves stole $45 million from thousands of A.T.M.'s in a matter of hours. In New York City alone, the thieves responsible for A.T.M. withdrawals struck 2,904 machines over 10 hours starting on Feb. 19, withdrawing $2.4 million. The operation included sophisticated computer experts operating in the shadowy world of Internet hacking, manipulating...

Middle East- and North Africa-based criminal hackers are preparing cyberattacks this week against the websites of high-profile U.S. government agencies, banks and other companies, according to the Department of Homeland Security. The attacks, dubbed #OpUSA, for Operation USA, will begin Tuesday, the department said in a warning bulletin circulated to the private sector last week. The bulletin was first obtained and posted online by blogger and cybercrime expert Brian Krebs.

On April 25, Spanish police, at the request of Holland's national prosecutor's office, arrested Dutch citizen Sven Olaf Kamphuis. Kamphuis will likely face charges in Holland related to what Dutch officials describe as the most extensive criminal cyberattacks in the history of the Internet. The attacks, which occurred in mid-March, overwhelmed the website of Spamhaus, a European nonprofit organization that tracks computer viruses (malware) and spam (unwanted email). Spamhaus had blacklisted Kamphuis' Internet company, CyberBunker. Spamhaus alleged that CyberBunker provided hosting services for spammers. The attacks (distributed denial of service, DDOS attacks) not only denied Internet users access to the...

On the back of widespread public interest RT has decided to publish in their entirety a series of memos which were allegedly sent from a one-time White House aide to former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

In e-mail blasts this weekend, “Guccifer” sent documents stolen from the e-mail account of a former White House aide to congressional aides, political figures, and journalists. Armed with confidential memos to Hillary Clinton that were stolen from the e-mail account of a former White House aide, a hacker has distributed some of the documents to a wide array of congressional aides, political figures, and journalists worldwide. In a series of weekend e-mail blasts, the hacker known as “Guccifer” disseminated four recent memos to Clinton from Sidney Blumenthal, a longtime confidant of the former Secretary of State.

Michelle Obama is the latest victim of a group of hackers targeting celebrities. This time, they even hacked the organization that's after them -- Robert Mueller, the Director of the FBI! Read more: http://www.tmz.com/videos/0_ntu8q9o0/#ixzz2NWbXvTsM I do not know if this is true as I've not seen it anywhere else but TMZ so I am putting this in chat. They are, however, often the first to break a story such as the pictures of Harry's Vegas vacation and Tiger getting in trouble with the wife. They also claim to research the truth to their stories and in the vid, the one...

Chrome, Internet Explorer, and Firefox all fell to the mercy of the hackers Thursday. That is, in a controlled environment. Security firms Vupen and MWR Labs were able to crack the browsers during a condoned bug-hunt, with one company winning $100,000 for finding a huge hole. The Pwn2Own competition is an event at the CanSecWest conference in Vancouver. The competition was created by HP’s DVLabs as part of its Zero Day Initiative: an attempt to get more people to find and report bugs as opposed to exploiting them for personal gains.

Cyberwar: A cybersecurity firm reports a secretive Chinese military unit is behind many recent "hack attacks" into U.S. computers, stealing trade and military secrets and developing a potentially crippling new weapon. In a 2009 editorial we noted that units of China's armed forces, whom we dubbed its "Cybertooth Tigers" were developing capabilities to penetrate and potentially disrupt U.S. computer systems as part of the People's Liberation Army's focus on what is known as "asymmetrical" warfare, specifically cyber-warfare. At least as far back as the 2008 edition of the Pentagon's annual report to Congress entitled "Military Power of the People's Republic...

According to a threat posted on Anonymous information website Anon Relations.net, the loosely banded hacker collective will attempt to disrupt the State of the Union address Tuesday by preventing it from being broadcast online. **SNIP** The AnonRelations.net post cites a litany of offenses as motive for the threatened attack, from "tyrannical" legislation to the treatment of Internet heroes like Aaron Swartz and Bradley Manning. It goes on to state that hackers will "form a virtual blockade between Capitol Hill and the Internet," although onlookers may be skeptical of the group's ability to do this. A recent campaign against Israel during...

At the time of his suicide, Aaron Swartz was preparing for a crucial hearing in his federal criminal case, likely his best chance to thwart federal prosecutors who had developed solid evidence against the Internet activist who was facing an April trial on a 13-count felony indictment. The 26-year-old Swartz, who killed himself Friday in his Brooklyn apartment, was scheduled for a January 25 evidentiary hearing in U.S. District Court in Boston, Massachusetts. Lawyers for Swartz were seeking to suppress material gathered in connection with Swartz’s breach of a Massachusetts Institute of Technology computer network. The January 2011 incursion netted...

If you have not yet seen or acted upon Homeland Security's warning, I urge you to do so immediately: The U.S. Department of Homeland Security is advising people to temporarily disable the Java software on their computers to avoid potential hacking attacks.  The recommendation came in an advisory issued late Thursday, following up on concerns raised by computer security experts. BlazingCatFur explains the situation: My suspicion is that it's related to this: Iran blamed for massive cyber attack on U.S. banks data centers as 'puppet hacking group' says they did it because the anti-Mohammed movie is still on the...

Computer activist Aaron H. Swartz committed suicide in New York City yesterday. The news was first reported by the MIT newspaper The Tech, citing both his uncle and his attorney. Swartz was 26.

  "German Islamists Target Youth on the Internet" By Christoph Sydow 11/01/2012 "Translated from the German by Christopher Sultan." PHOTO CAPTION: "A growing community of German-speaking Islamists has developed on the Internet. Aiming to find new recruits, they glorify jihad and call for attacks on Germany. A new study warns that such online propaganda might foster a new generation of terrorists." SNIPPET: "International terrorist groups like al-Qaida recognized the importance of the Internet for recruiting new supporters early on." SNIPPET: "Intelligence services can also take advantage of the anonymity of Internet forums to deliberately plant false information or obtain insider...

A massive security breach at Northwest Florida State College has affected 300,000 records in the school's computer systems, including information on about 200,000 students statewide who were once eligible for Bright Futures scholarships, the school said Wednesday. The compromised information contained the names and Social Security and bank routing numbers of students, teachers, staff and retirees. Hackers also stole 200,000 records of people who may never have attended or set foot on the Niceville campus in Okaloosa County. The names, Social Security numbers and dates of birth for students statewide who were Bright Futures scholarship candidates in 2005-06 and 2006-07...

According to many customers, sites hosted by major web host and domain registrar GoDaddy are down. According to the official GoDaddy Twitter account the company is aware of the issue and is working to resolve it. Update: customers are complaining that GoDaddy hosted e-mail accounts are down as well, along with GoDaddy phone service and all sites using GoDaddy’s DNS service. Update 2: Anonymous is claiming responsibility. A member of Anonymous known as AnonymousOwn3r is claiming responsibility, and makes it clear this is not an Anonymous collective action. The service Down For Everyone Or Just Me says the GoDaddy company...

SNIPPET: "I. When considering the matter of jihadis online, remember that most of what we think we know is based on analyses of the comments made by an handful of vocal activists. The vast majority of jihadis online, be they on forums or social networking sites[i], say nothing. Skillful translations and insightful analyses by definition tell us little about this potentially lethal yet silent majority."

AS VEGAS (CNNMoney) -- A Wal-Mart store manager in a small military town in Canada got an urgent phone call last month from "Gary Darnell" in the home office in Bentonville, Ark. Darnell told the manager Wal-Mart had a multi-million-dollar opportunity to win a major government contract, and that he was assigned to visit the handful of Wal-Mart stores picked as likely pilot spots. First, he needed to get a complete picture of the store's operations. For about 10 minutes, Darnell described who he was (a newly hired manager of government logistics), the outlines of the contract ("all I know...

What would you do if your entire digital life started evaporating before your eyes and there was virtually nothing you could do about it? This is the nightmare scenario that greeted US technology journalist Mat Honan, who had all of the contents of his iPhone, iPad and Macbook Air wiped, and lost control of his Gmail and Twitter accounts, all in the span of just over 15 minutes.

Obama heads to the golf courseBy Russell Berman - 04/07/12 02:11 PM ET President Obama kicked off the sunny Easter weekend on Saturday with a trip to the golf course. The president, a frequent golfer, left the White House shortly before 1 p.m. for a ride to what has become his home course at Andrews Air Force Base. The weather is beautiful in the Washington D.C. area this weekend, sunny with temperatures in the low 60s. It's the second round of golf for Obama this Spring, and also the second time this week the White House has put golf on...

A recent threat, purportedly from the hacker group Anonymous, stated boldly that its members would stop the internet on 31 March ...

EXCLUSIVE: Law enforcement agents on two continents swooped in on top members of the infamous computer hacking group LulzSec early this morning, and acting largely on evidence gathered by the organization’s brazen leader -- who sources say has been secretly working for the government for months -- arrested three and charged two more with conspiracy. “This is devastating to the organization,” said an FBI official involved with the investigation. “We’re chopping off the head of LulzSec.” SUMMARY Hector Xavier Monsegur, aka "Sabu," pleaded guilty to the following charges on Aug. 15, 2011: COUNT ONE: Conspiracy to Engage in Computer Hacking—Anonymous...

A former college student convicted for hacking into Sarah Palin's e-mail account during the 2008 presidential election lost a bid to overturn his felony conviction on Monday. The former University of Tennessee student, David Kernell, argued he was not aware of any pending investigation when he deleted information from his computer related to the hacking of Palin's account. But the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 6th Circuit found Kernell's awareness of a possible future FBI investigation was enough to uphold a conviction on obstruction of justice.

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...

DoJ, RIAA, MPAA, and Universal Music All Offline Anonymous has sure been quiet lately, but today's federal bust of Megaupload riled 'em up good: a retaliatory strike against DoJ.gov (and plenty of other foes) leaving them completely dead. DownForEveryoneOrJustMe.com is reporting the department's site as universally nuked, and an Anonymous-affiliated Twitter account is boasting success. This is almost certainly the result of a quickly-assembled DDoS attack—and easily the widest in scope and ferocity we've seen in some time. If you had any doubts Anonymous is still a hacker wrecking ball, doubt no more. The combination of the hacking nebula's SOPA...

Hacker “OxOmar,” dubbed the “Saudi Hacker,” struck again on Monday, this time shutting down the El Al and Tel Aviv Stock Exchange information site. The cyber attack did not affect the site on which investors trade stocks, and trading was not affected. The hacker struck last month by invading thousands of accounts of Israeli credit card holders. The El Al site was shut down as of mid-morning, and the Stock Exchange site was available but not operable. OxOmar blocked the El Al site but did not take control of it or damage its content. The real damage is to the...

NEW DELHI (Reuters) - A hacker who goes by the name of 'Yama Tough' threatened Saturday to release next week the full source code for Symantec Corp's flagship Norton Antivirus software. "This coming Tuesday behold the full Norton Antivirus 1,7Gb src, the rest will follow," Yama Tough posted via Twitter.

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."

Reference: ‘Anonymous’ is the name of a collective group of activist hackers who originally posted videos scheduling the Occupy Wall Street protests. These videos spread virally and played a significant role in the O.W.S. grassroots campaign. The hacker collective ‘Anonymous’ says it has stolen four thousand emails, passwords and credit card details from a US-based security think-tank “Stratfor”. Stratfor’s clients include the US Department of Defense, US Air Force, Apple, law enforcement agencies and media organizations. Anonymous said the list it had posted was a small slice of the 200 gigabytes worth of plunder it stole from Stratfor and promised...

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...

The hackers known as “Anonymous,” who helped organize and support the Occupy Wall Street protests this past fall, claim to have stolen emails and credit card numbers from Stratfor, the highly respected U.S. security think tank

With two weeks remaining before Iowa kicks off the 2012 campaign with its first-in-the-nation presidential caucuses, the state Republican Party is taking steps to secure its electronic vote collection system after receiving a mysterious threat to its computers. A video claiming to be from a collective of computer hackers has jolted party officials with a worst-case scenario: an Iowa caucus marred by hackers who successfully corrupt the database used to gather vote totals and crash the website used to inform the public about results that can shape the campaign for the White House. Watch the video here

Iowa Caucus Polling System Threatened By HackersPublished December 19, 2011 | Associated Press IOWA CITY, Iowa – Republican Party officials in Iowa are taking new steps to secure their vote counting systems after an anonymous threat suggested computer hackers could attempt to disrupt next month's presidential nominating caucuses. A video uploaded to YouTube features a computer-generated voice denouncing a corrupt political system and calls on supporters to "peacefully shut down" the Jan. 3 caucuses. The video claims to be from Anonymous, a loosely organized group of hackers who have successfully conducted past computer attacks. Investigators aren't sure whether the video...

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,...

SNIPPET: "In July, the British government warned that Al Qaeda’s exploitation of social networking websites is on the rise." SNIPPET: "The massive and multifarious network of websites and social media has presented a challenge to authorities in trying to combat it. Additionally, civil liberty concerns have conflicted with government efforts to spy on communications. Reducing terrorist activity on social media sites has been particularly difficult because users have adopted new forms of communication to conform with the new formats. Many Arabic speakers on Facebook, Twitter, MySpace and other sites use Arabizi, a form of colloquial Arabic written in the Latin...

Has social networking changed hacking? Made it easier. I can go into LinkedIn and search for network engineers and come up with a list of great spear-phishing targets because they usually have administrator rights over the network. Then I go onto Twitter or Facebook and trick them into doing something, and I have privileged access. If I know you love Angry Birds, maybe I would send you an e-mail purporting to be from Angry Birds with a new pro version. Once you download it, I could have complete access to everything on your phone. How easy was it for those...

Anarcho-Doritologist hacker collective has declared war on the New York Stock Exchange and will launch a "raid" on the company's website on Monday, October 10! Or is "Operation Invade Wall Street" a "fake planted operation"? Or maybe it doesn't really matter either way. If you buy the video (which, if it's a "plant," is convincingly self-serious), Anonymous' plan is essentially the same as the one that briefly took down PayPal and MasterCard: Convince a bunch of people to download and run a program that will effect a distributed denial of service attack on the target, in this case the NYSE...

A hacker group broke into the NBC News Twitter account Friday, sending a series of tweets about a terror attack on Ground Zero to the news outlet’s 129,000 followers. “Flight 4782 is not responding, suspected hijacking. One plane just hit Ground Zero site at 5:47. #groundzeroattacked,” the account wrote. “This is not a joke, Ground Zero has just been attacked,” the account tweeted. “We’re attempting to get reporters on the scene.” No such terror attack happened at Ground Zero in Manhattan Friday evening. A group calling themselves “The Script Kiddies” claimed responsibility for the hack, advertising its own Twitter account,...

http://internet-haganah.com/harchives/007413.html "Whither the jihadi forums?" SNIPPET: "There are currently only three jihadi forums that are sufficiently active and well-connected to be of any interest whatsoever. Why we claim to be on the verge of defeating al-Qaida while simultaneously watching passively as they use these forums to regroup and regenerate is beyond me. These are the forums three: • al-Fidaa, a forum created by al-Qaida core. That it is directly linked to al-Qaida by definition moves it to the top of the list. Current membership: 2,462, all of whom can be considered "active" if only because they just joined the forum....

OAKLAND -- Hackers carried out the second cyber-attack on BART within the past week today, breaking into the website of the union that represents the transit system's rank-and-file police and releasing a roster of 102 officers along with their home addresses, e-mail account addresses and passwords for the site. The roster was published on a separate website, where the hackers wrote, "Yet another success." Hackers have said they will strike back at BART for temporarily shutting down underground cellular and wi-fi service Thursday, a move BART made to try to quell a planned antipolice protest in downtown San Francisco. The...

Microsoft’s security used to be a joke. Its operating systems were riddled with bugs that were exploited by hackers and mocked at conferences such as Black Hat, the Las Vegas confab for security technology. But yesterday, one of the independent security researchers at the conference praised Microsoft’s progress on improving security. Chris Paget, chief hacker at security consulting firm Recursion Ventures, is a well-known figure at the twin Black Hat and Defcon conferences in Las Vegas, having demonstrated a live interception of a cell phone call last year. In her talk this year, she said she hated the limitations of...

N.Korea Turns to Online Game Hackers to Earn Hard Currency Elite North Korean hackers created and distributed programs that stole millions of U.S. dollars from popular South Korean on-line gaming sites, such as Lineage and Dungeon Fighter, according to a police investigation. The hackers, who are believed to have graduated from the North's prestigious Kim Il-sung University and Kim Chaek University of Technology, stole gaming items such as weapons, armor and other objects that players collect and store in their on-line games and trade for cash. The Seoul Metropolitan Police Agency said on Thursday it had arrested five South Koreans,...

BOSTON (AP) — A Harvard University fellow who was studying ethics was charged with hacking into the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's computer network to steal nearly 5 million academic articles. Aaron Swartz, 24, of Cambridge, was accused of stealing the documents from JSTOR, a popular research subscription service that offers digitized copies of more than 1,000 academic journals and documents, some dating back to the 17th century. In an indictment released Tuesday, prosecutors say Swartz stole 4.8 million articles between September 2010 and January after breaking into a computer wiring closet on MIT's campus. Swartz, then a student at the...

Security: The Pentagon has disclosed perhaps the largest theft of sensitive data by an unnamed foreign government. The threat to our electronic infrastructure is real, growing and as dangerous as a North Korean missile. In outlining America's cyberwarfare strategy last Thursday at the National Defense University, Deputy Secretary of Defense William Lynn disclosed that 24,000 sensitive files containing Pentagon data at a defense company were accessed in a cyberattack in March, likely by a foreign government. He didn't disclose the identity of that government, but in a bit of an understatement he acknowledged, "We have a pretty good idea." So...

Rogue 4 July tweets on TV news channel's politics service go viral but Fox News is apparently back in control Fox News has apparently fallen victim to hacking, with its politics Twitter feed repeatedly announcing President Barack Obama had been shot dead. @foxnewspolitics began tweeting the information to its 33,000 followers at about 2am local time, with the posts rapidly being shared around the internet. The rogue tweets appeared to begin after the account sent a message saying Fox had just "regained full access to our Twitter account". The following tweets all related to the supposed death of Obama, with...

LulzSec the hacker group that has been a thorn in the side of major institutions ranging from Sony to the CIA, says it is going away -- but not quietly. The group said late Saturday it would disband. In what it says is its final act of mayhem, it publicly unloaded a trove of documents containing a significant amount of compressed data. "Our planned 50-day cruise has expired, and we must now sail into the distance...our crew of six wishes you a happy 2011," LulzSec says in its final message. . The group says it chose to end its campaign...

A hacker known as “The Jester” claims to have revealed the identity of a LulzSec member who may be the group’s leader. Thirty-year-old Xavier Kaotico, also known as Xavier de Leon or “sabu,” has been outed as the hacker prankster group’s leader, though his role and involvement with LulzSec has not been confirmed. The man allegedly lives or has recently lived in New York City, and is an independant IT consultant specializing in Python programming, Linux development, network security and exploit development. LulzSec, a small group of hackers that has become the focus of the international technology media over...

A child becomes computer literate at primary school. Meanwhile, North Korea's most prodigious young students are identified and trained in advanced cyberwarfare techniques As South Korea blames North Korea for a recent slew of cyberattacks, two defectors share their experiences, as a hacker and trainer of "cyberwarriors" in the reclusive communist country, with Al Jazeera shedding some light into the inner workings of the North's cyberwarfare programme. In the process, Kim Heung-kwang and Jang Se-yul also warn of the regime's concentrated efforts to bolster its cyberwarfare capabilities. The hackers' professor Kim Heung-kwang was a computer science professor in North...

DEVELOPING: NEW CASTLE, Del. -- Police on Friday afternoon came to the home of a 17-year-old high school junior to ask her about direct online communications she has had with Rep. Anthony Weiner. Two officers from the New Castle County Police Department arrived at the girl's home around 4:30 p.m. and asked to speak with the girl's mother about the daughter's contact with Weiner. Another officer appeared at the home a short time later. A FoxNews.com reporter was at the home when the police arrived. The girl, whose name is being withheld because she is a minor, told FoxNews.com, "I'm...

Has Anthony Weiner taken so many pictures of his tumescent crotch that he can't remember them all?  That would seem to be the implication of his statement to NBC today.  Stephanie Condon of CBS reports:Rep. Anthony Weiner (D-N.Y.) said today that he did not send a lewd photo to a college student from his Twitter account, but he evaded questions as to whether the photograph was of him."Well, the main question that a lot of people are asking is did I send the photograph," Weiner said in an interview with CBS News. "I did not. This was a prank,...