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The FBI on Wednesday announced that it had charged 53 defendants, the largest number ever charged in a cybercrime case, following a multinational investigation into a phishing scheme that operated in the United States and Egypt. Thirty-three of the 53 defendants named in the indictment have been arrested, the FBI said, and several others are being sought. The investigation, dubbed "Operation Phish Phry," began in 2007. Authorities in Egypt have charged 47 defendants linked to the phishing operation. Phishing is a form of social engineering that attempts to convince Internet users, via e-mail or other means, to provide online credentials...

A computer hacker who was once a federal informer and was a driving force behind one of the largest cases of identity theft in U.S. history pleaded guilty Friday in a deal with prosecutors that will send him to prison for up to 25 years. Albert Gonzalez, 28, of Miami, admitted to pulling off some of the most prominent hacking jobs of the decade -- invading the computer systems of such retailers as TJX, BJ's Wholesale Club, OfficeMax, Boston Market, Barnes & Noble and Sports Authority. Federal authorities say tens of millions of credit and debit card numbers were stolen....

WASHINGTON -- Russian hackers hijacked American identities and U.S. software tools and used them in an attack on Georgian government Web sites during the war between Russia and Georgia last year, according to new research to be released Monday by a nonprofit U.S. group. In addition to refashioning common Microsoft Corp. software into a cyber-weapon, hackers collaborated on popular U.S.-based social-networking sites, including Twitter and Facebook Inc., to coordinate attacks on Georgian sites, the U.S. Cyber Consequences Unit found. While the cyberattacks on Georgia were examined shortly after the events last year, these U.S. connections weren't previously known. "U.S. corporations...

A Briton wanted in the United States for breaking into NASA and Pentagon networks in "the biggest military hack of all time" lost an appeal against his extradition Friday, making a U.S. trial more likely. Gary McKinnon, 43, has fought a three-year battle to avoid extradition, including going to the European Court of Human Rights, but he appeared to have run out of options as Britain's High Court ruled against his latest appeal Friday. The court rejected arguments by McKinnon's lawyers that extraditing McKinnon, who was recently diagnosed with Asperger's Syndrome, a form of autism, would have disastrous consequences for...

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...

Security Warning Issued by DHS for Possible Terrorist Cyber Attack on U.S. Financial Institutions Friday, December 01, 2006 WASHINGTON — The government warned on Thursday of a possible Internet attack on U.S. stock market and banking Web sites from a radical Muslim group, but officials said the threat was unconfirmed and seemed to pose no immediate danger. The notice was issued to the U.S. cybersecurity industry after officials saw a posting on a "Jihadist Web site" calling for an attack on U.S. Internet-based stock market and banking sites in December, said Homeland Security Department spokesman Russ Knocke. There is no...

The son of a Democratic Tennessee state legislator surrendered to authorities in connection with the hacking of Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin's e-mail, the Justice Department said Wednesday.

Posted: 8:24 AM Oct 8, 2008 Last Updated: 8:51 AM Oct 8, 2008 Reporter: Brian Gregory KNOXVILLE, Tenn (WVLT) -- A University of Tennessee student is due in federal court this morning to answer charges in connection with the hacking of Republican Vice-Presidential candidate Sarah Palin's e-mail. David C. Kernell, 20, was indicted by a federal grand jury in Knoxville, Tennessee on October 7th, but the indictment was not unsealed until this morning. Federal prosecutors allege Kernell intentionally accessed without authorization Palin's e-mail account. Kernell, the son of Tennessee State Representative Mike Kernell (D-Memphis), turned himself into federal authorities for...

The way I read it, no indictment was returned today, but the process is not over.

Two days after someone broke into the email account of vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin, unknown intruders have hacked the website of conservative commentator Bill O'Reilly and posted personal details of more than 200 of its subscribers. The breach into BillOreilly.com came as retaliation for remarks O'Reilly made on FoxNews condemning the attack on Palin's Yahoo email account, according to Wikileaks, a site that makes it easy for whistleblowers, hackers and anyone else to leak documents. As proof, Wikileaks posted a screenshot of the BillOreilly.com administrative interface that showed the names, email addresses, passwords, and home town of 20 subscribers...

See story at: http://www.wbir.com/news/breaking/story.aspx?storyid=64033&catid=29

Chicago news conference: Obama author Andy Martin says Barack Obama has declared war on the First Amendment and unleashed his "Obamabots" on the opposition "Factually Correct, Not Politically Correct" FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: ATTENTION DAYBOOK/ASSIGNMENT EDITORS ANNOUNCEMENT OF CHICAGO NEWS CONFERENCE Obama opposition leader Andy Martin says "Obamabots" have launched an unprecedented "cyberwar" against anyone who stands up against or speaks out against Barack Obama Obama author Andy Martin is under attack from Obama's cyberwar minions (CHICAGO)(September 18, 2008) Legendary Chicago Internet columnist, public interest lawyer and Obama opposition leader Andy Martin will hold a Chicago news conference today to charge...

Gawker, a site best known for its catty observations about important subjects like celebrity clothing faux pas and stalker celebrity sightings, claims to have obtained screen shots from one of Sarah Palin's private Yahoo e-mail accounts. Now, of course, Gawker isn't the New York Times, so it's only reasonable to be skeptical, but there are reasons to think this report is legitimate. According to Gawker, numerous anonymous individuals managed to hack their way into one of Palin's private accounts, gov.palin@yahoo.com. This is a different e-mail than gov.sarah@yahoo.com, which Palin allegedly used to send work-related messages, including e-mails about her involvement...

John McCain's campaign said Wednesday it has contacted "appropriate authorities" over a report that Republican VP candidate Sarah Palin's personal e-mail had been hacked. "This is a shocking invasion of the Governor's privacy and a violation of law," campaign manager Rick Davis said in a statement. "The matter has been turned over to the appropriate authorities and we hope that anyone in possession of these emails will destroy them. We will have no further comment." The statement came hours after a user on the Web site WikiLeaks said he had gained access to Palin's Yahoo e-mail account and gained access....

Per a contact with the DOJ, an investigation will begin into the group who hacked into Sarah Palin’s email and posted messages on the internet. Intercept of private email communication - even of a public figure - is a federal offense. Not only can the original hackers be charged, but all those who posted the messages as well. The website Gawker may be in further trouble for going beyond the email to post pics from the Palin’s personal message box, as well as other personal information that may be afoul of laws dealing with identity theft.

A group of Greek hackers broke into the particle accelerator's systems just as scientists were turning it on in front of the world's media Monday, 15th September 2008 Even as the scientists at CERN, the centre for nuclear research, were switching on the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) particle accelerator under Geneva last week, a group of Greek hackers were one step away from controlling a 12,500-ton electromagnet that serves as one of the machine’s four detectors. The intruders posted a lengthy note in Greek on the machine’s network introducing themselves as ‘the Greek Security Team’, mocking the system’s poor security...

Pentagon Makes Fighting Extremism Top Priority Seven years after the Sept. 11 attacks, the Pentagon on Thursday officially named "the long war" against global extremism as its top priority and pledged to avert any conventional military threat from China or Russia through dialogue. The Defense Department, in a new national defense strategy, also emphasized the need to subordinate military operations to "soft power" initiatives to undermine Islamist militancy by promoting economic, political and social development in vulnerable corners of the world. Defense Secretary Robert Gates said he hoped the change would help establish permanent institutional support for counterinsurgency skills...

Russian researcher claims vulnerabilities can be exploited in less than a day, but others disagree... Patches meant to fix a flaw in the Internet's Domain Name System (DNS) don't completely protect the Web's traffic cop from attack, a Russian research claimed Friday. The head of the non-profit that maintains the most commonly used DNS software, however, said there was little to worry about. In a blog post , Russian researcher Evgeniy Polyakov said he had created an exploit able to insert bogus routing information into systems running the most-up-to-date version of BIND (Berkeley Internet Name Domain), the popular open-source software...

Marisel Garcia is one of eight or nine women in the Gainesville, Florida who is a victim of a Webcam Spy Hacker voyeurism scandal, orchestrated by Craig Feigin. Craig Feigin, a computer programmer, worked on Marisel Garcia's computer to fix her laptop. When she got her machine back from Feigin, it had a slew of other problems so she brought it to another area repair man. One of the new problems was that the computer's built-in camera light came on every time she was near the machine. When Marisel Garcia got her computer back, she learned that Craig Feigin had...

A criminal gang is using software tools normally reserved for computer network administrators to infect thousands of PCs in corporate and government networks with programs that steal passwords and other information, a security researcher has found. The new form of attack indicates that little progress has been made in defusing the threat of botnets, networks of infected computers that criminals use to send spam, steal passwords and do other forms of damage, according to computer security investigators. Several security experts say that although attacks against network administrators are not new, the systematic use of administrative software to spread malicious software...

Confederate Yankee notes further possible examples by Obama supporters getting Google to suspend sites for “Terms of Service” violations. Instapundit tries to douse the theories, but here is one fact that can’t be explained away. On July 22-25 Macsmind was DOS’d (Denial of Service) that originated from three IP addresses that are assigned to Barack Obama’s website. This isn’t a theory but was confirmed via law enforcement through an inspection of the site logs from those dates. The IP address in question; 66.39.4.254 66.39.143.229 216.146.206.181, are all registered via “Go Daddy” under the name barackobama.com. On those dates, beginning at...

Dutch researchers will be able to publish their controversial report on the Mifare Classic (Oyster) RFID chip in October, a Dutch judge ruled today. Researchers from Radboud University in Nijmegen revealed two weeks ago they had cracked and cloned London's Oyster travelcard and the Dutch public transportation travelcard, which is based on the same RFID chip. Attackers can scan a card reading unit, collect the cryptographic key that protects security and upload it to a laptop. Details are then transferred to a blank card, which can be used for free travel. Around one billion of these cards have been sold...

County prosecutors allege Omar Khan, 18, of Coto de Caza, and Tanvir Singh, 18, of Ladera Ranch, broke into Tesoro High School in Las Flores to steal tests and change their own and others' grades on the school computer network.

BEIJING - China denied accusations by two U.S. lawmakers that it hacked into congressional computers, saying Thursday that as a developing country it wasn't capable of sophisticated cybercrime. "Is there any evidence? ... Do we have such advanced technology? Even I don't believe it," Foreign Ministry spokesman Qin Gang told a regularly scheduled news conference. Rep. Frank Wolf, R-Va., and New Jersey Rep. Chris Smith, a senior Republican on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, said Wednesday that their office computers were hacked into by people working from China. Both lawmakers, longtime critics of China's human rights record, said the compromised...

Some months ago, my contacts in the defense industry had alerted me to a startling development that has escalated to the point of near-panick in nearly all corners of Government security and IT infrastructure. The very-real concern, being investigated by the FBI, is that either the Chinese government or Chinese hackers (or both) have had the benefit of undetectable back-doors into highly secure government and military computer networks for months, perhaps years. The cause: a high-number of counterfeit Cisco routers and switches installed in nearly all government networks that experienced upgrades and/or new units within the past 18 months.

From Times OnlineApril 23, 2008 Executives harpooned by online 'whalers' Spies and conmen target bosses in e-mail attacks to install malicious software with access to most privileged data Jonathan Richards Corporate bosses have become the latest target of cyber-criminals, after a string of attacks in which senior management have been singled out to receive fraudulent e-mails. Internet fraudsters have taken to sending personally addressed e-mails to chief executives and other high-level executives with a view to installing malicious software on computers that have access to the most privileged company information. In the latest e-mail scam, known as "whaling" because it...

The site of Freeper EUPHORIADEV was hacked. She has lost over 2 years worth of data. Euphoriadev was covering the Haditha and Hamdania incident extensively she has lost over 2 years worth of data we do NOT believe it is the people who are claiming the hack

A BusinessWeek probe of rising attacks on America's most sensitive computer networks uncovers startling security gaps The e-mail message addressed to a Booz Allen Hamilton executive was mundane—a shopping list sent over by the Pentagon of weaponry India wanted to buy. But the missive turned out to be a brilliant fake. Lurking beneath the description of aircraft, engines, and radar equipment was an insidious piece of computer code known as "Poison Ivy" designed to suck sensitive data out of the $4 billion consulting firm's computer network. The Pentagon hadn't sent the e-mail at all. Its origin is unknown, but the...

Gone in 2 minutes: Mac gets hacked first in contest by Robert McMillan It may be the quickest US$10,000 Charlie Miller ever earned.He took the first of three laptop computers -- and a $10,000 cash prize -- Thursday after breaking into a MacBook Air at the CanSecWest security conference's PWN 2 OWN hacking contest.Show organizers offered a Sony Vaio, Fujitsu U810 and the MacBook as prizes, saying that they could be won by anybody at the show who could find a way to hack into each of them and read the contents of a file on the system, using a...

It seems Scientology is not all that bright, as if we didn't already know that. Having set up a web site called Anonymous Exposed. You would think they would take extreme measures to ensure its security. After all, Anonymous was formed by a group of skilled computer hackers. But it seems Anonymous has had the last laugh. I'm fairly certain THAT is not the video the CoS wants us to be seeing on that page,

Harvard student database hacked, posted on BitTorrent By Robert Vamosi, CNET News.com Friday, March 14, 2008 12:03 PM Harvard University says about 10,000 of last year's applicants may have had their personal information compromised. At least 6,600 Social Security numbers were exposed. Worse, a compressed 125 M-byte file containing the stolen student data is currently available via BitTorrent, a peer-to-peer network. In a statement published Monday night Harvard officials said the database containing summaries of GSAS applicant data for entry to the Fall 2007 academic year, summaries of GSAS housing applicant data for the 2007-08 and 2006-07 academic years, and...