Concerns over the latest hi-tech security vulnerabilities have been highlighted at a conference in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. There seems to be an unspoken understanding among hackers that dressing in black is cool. Hack in the Box, Asia’s leading hacking and security gathering, is full of geeks in black. And their cloak and dagger looks add a certain frisson to the occasion.
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Hacking group warez has released a patch allowing gamers to run Halo 2 and Shadowrun, both released by Microsoft as Windows Vista-only titles, on the firmâs older Windows XP operating system. It had been claimed that neither title would be able to run successfully using the older DirectX 9 graphics engine, with Microsoft urging gamers to take the plunge and switch to the Vista.
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A computer hacker claims to have discovered the greatest literary mystery of the decade – how J K Rowling ends her Harry Potter epic and which two characters die in the seventh and final book. The hacker, calling himself “Gabriel”, posted a message on a well-known hackers’ site in the early hours of Tuesday, claiming that he had discovered the ending to Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, which is published on July 21, on the computer of an employee of Bloomsbury, Rowling’s publishers.
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WASHINGTON â A federal jury in Phoenix convicted two men today on all counts, including conspiracy, fraud, money laundering, and transportation of obscene materials, Assistant Attorney General Alice S. Fisher for the Criminal Division and Interim U.S. Attorney Dan Knauss of the District of Arizona announced today. The jury convicted, Jeffrey A. Kilbride, 41, of Venice, Calif., and James R. Schaffer, 41, of Paradise Valley, Ariz., on eight counts arising out of the international pornographic spamming business they organized and ran in 2004. The trial, which began on June 5, 2007, was the first to include charges under the Controlling the Assault of Non-solicited Pornography and Marketing (CAN-SPAM) Act of 2003. The law created by the CAN-SPAM Act was designed to crack down on the transmission of pornography in commercial bulk unsolicited electronic mail messages.
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Multiple hacker groups are using a “construction kit” supplied by the author of a Trojan horse program discovered last October to develop and unleash more dangerous variants of the original malware. Already such variants have stolen sensitive information belonging to at least 10,000 individuals and sent the data to rogue servers in China, Russia and the United States, according to Don Jackson, a security researcher at SecureWorks Inc. of Atlanta. The stolen data includes Social Security numbers, online account information, bank account and credit card numbers, user names and passwords and other data that users would usually input during an SSL session.
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INSPECTOR KNACKER of the Belgian Yard has fingered the collar of a teen who hacked into his website. The 17 year-old hacked into the site and managed to shut it down for a bit leaving an on-line note. Apparently, it was not exactly a case for Poirot. The teen’s note said that the “Spycheck Team must be happy that a boy of 17 has hacked the Belgian police website. The security of your site well reflects the police’s lack of competence. Webmaster: You better go and revise the system. Government: Recruit higher calibre police officers…”
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The recently-launched Apple browser, Safari for Windows, has received its second lot of patches since its debut earlier this month. Apple has posted the latest version of the beta software, 3.0.2, on its website, containing security fixes as well as other tweaks. The browser was first released by chief executive Steve Jobs at the company’s Worldwide Developers Conference earlier this month. Within days, security vulnerabilities had been unearthed by researchers, prompting the Mac maker to issue its first patch batch. Just over a week later, and Apple has released a second security upgrade.
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Apple has released patches for a cross-site scripting (XSS) flaw in WebCore and a vulnerability in WebKit that allows arbitrary code execution â as well a third beta version of Safari for Windows. In its third security advisory of the past week, Apple said that the WebCore flaw could be exploited to create a HTTP injection issue.
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Researchers are warning internet users to be on the lookout for website scams appearing on Google Pages. This month, experts at Websense reported a spike in the user-created sites hosting phishing schemes, such as one for eBay, Dan Hubbard, vice president of security research at San Diego-based Websense, told SCMagazine.com today.
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An Australian resident who headed the notorious DrinkorDie software piracy gang has been jailed in the US. The British-born man, Hew Griffiths, had been living in Bateau Bay, New South Wales, before his extradition to face trial in the US earlier this year. Griffiths has now been sentenced to 51 months on one count of conspiracy to commit criminal copyright infringement. However, with the time he has already spent incarcerated in an Australian detention centre fighting extradition, only 15 months of his sentence remain, reports say.
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