Crackdown on major phishing gang leads to the arrest of 24 people behind the attacks on thousands of websites used to commit identity theft. Police in Italy have arrested 24 people thought to be behind a hacking attempt that saw 10,000 websites compromised and used to launch phishing attacks. The members of the alleged phishing ring were tracked by the authorities for several weeks. The operation, called “Phish and Chip” snared 18 Italians and eight people from Eastern Europe. The phishing campaign targeted users of the Italian post office as well as several other European financial institutions.
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If we believe what researchers said at Black Hat USA conference held in Las Vegas then websites deploying Ajax definitely need to fear about web based threats. Ajax imparts richness to the website and at the same time refreshes the content without the need for reloading the whole page. Poorly coded websites can give a chance to hackers to change the order in which the function is executed by the program. JavaScript leads to increased possibility of attracting the attention of hackers and chances of mistakes in an Ajax application are more as compared to traditional web applications since the client plays a larger part in data processing, presentation and possibly storage.
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Four US journalists have filed a lawsuit against Hewlett-Packard (HP) claiming they suffered mental anguish and emotional distress because the computer company illegally spied on them last year.
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Microsoft’s update to Windows Vista’s PatchGuard, a kernel protection scheme designed to keep malicious or unproven code at arm’s length, has nothing to do with recent hacks of another Vista defence, Microsoft claims. The update to Kernel Patch Protection (KPP), also known as PatchGuard, was issued on Tuesday to Vista 64-bit users, but the description of the enhancement was unclear. All Microsoft said at the time was “this update adds checks to this protection for increased resiliency in Windows”.
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Storm, the Trojan that Hoovers PCs into hacker-controlled botnets, roared back into life last month in several waves, security researchers said earlier this week, and has blown by 2005′s Sober to become the most prolific e-mail-borne malware ever. âThis is the biggest since Sober in mid-to-late 2005,â said Sam Masiello, the director of threat research at MX Logic, referring to a long-lasting worm whose variants struck repeatedly in the second half of 2005, often in extremely high numbers. In November 2006, for instance, e-mail filtering companies reported malware-laden e-mail counts spiking 1,500 per cent in a week, and said they were intercepting four times the usual number of infected messages.
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A British Web designer has been given a suspended jail sentence after hacking into a rival’s Web site. Mark Hopkins, of Bromsgrove, near Birmingham, pleaded guilty to unauthorised access to computer systems. He was sentenced on Thursday to 20 weeks in custody suspended for two years. The victim was ME Publishing, which publishes the respected Motorcycle Trader magazine.
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Jonathan “c0mrade” James shocked the computing world when he hacked into Pentagon and NASA systems in 1999 at age 15, becoming the youngest person to be incarcerated (for six months) under the federal cybercrime law. Now 23, James talks about his motives and the state of online security.
Q: What were your reasons for targeting the U.S. Department of Defense and NASA back in 1999?
A: Well, I had read the book The Cuckoo’s Egg [by Clifford Stoll], which probably had a lot to do with it. Also, my choice of who to hack was pretty much government targets or corporate targets, and corporate targets didn’t have the intrigue of the military ones. It was a good feeling knowing I had access to the computers of the most powerful military in the world. I’m surprised my head didn’t explode.
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LIKE SPIES in a John LeCarrĂŠ novel, network security professionals inhabit an ethically shadowy world.
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A California death row inmate’s fate depends in part on the word “hacker.” Enrique Zambrano, a former Berkeley, Calif., government bureaucrat, was convicted of murdering a fellow waterfront commissioner to prevent him from testifying against Zambrano in a 1988 assault case. The killing was brutal. A hiker in the Lafayette hills found the headless body of Luis Reyna, the other Berkeley Waterfront Commission member, hacked to pieces. A forensic pathologist later testified that the neck vertebrae had been sawed off and the lower jaw was missing.
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The web is getting bigger, but also more dangerous. In the early days, it was like the Wild West â there were dangers out there, but if companies kept their wits about them and knew the basics of self-defence, they could get by.
Not anymore. Security experts are already looking back on 2006 as the year that web threats matured and became increasingly sophisticated. It was a year in which organised cyber criminals increasingly turned their attention away from email towards web traffic as their target of choice.
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