I enjoy hacking. The intrigue, digging through arcane protocol specs in order to discover some new architectural design flaw or idiotic programmer bug, and the excitement surrounding a mysterious hidden world that few are capable of experiencing, in my mind is akin to losing yourself deep in a software coding problem. I consider myself a…
Tag: hacking
Hollywood hacker sentenced to 10 years in prison for hacking personal accounts of celebrity stars
Signalling the conclusion of “Operation Hackerazzi”, a federal judge today sentenced Christopher Chaney, 35, of Jacksonville, Florida to 10 years in prison. Chaney had plead guilty to several counts including wiretapping and unauthorized access to a computer. Chaney allegedly accessed the personal email accounts of more than 50 people in the Hollywood entertainment industry between…
Spate of hotel breakins in Texas attributed to recent Brocious hotel keycard hack
In July 2012 at a Black Hat conference, Cody Brocious demonstrated how he could hack the keycard system used in hotels by spoofing the “portable programmer” device meant to be used for designating master keys and opening Onity brand locks whose batteries had died. With his $50 homemade device, he could insert the plug of…
Baffling Barnes and Noble credit card breach – hacked POS devices discovered in stores across United States [UPDATE]
It’s strange enough that Barnes and Noble did not notify customers about the data breach that leaked the customers’ credit card numbers; but the hack itself appears to be an insider job or a coordinated remote or wireless attack against Barnes and Noble credit card pin devices in stores across the United States. 63 stores…
New wearable personal firewall developed for implanted medical devices – protects insulin pumps and pacemakers from hijacking attacks
News that personal medical devices such as insulin pumps, pacemakers, and other wearable or implanted devices, could be hacked sent shockwaves through the medical community but researchers from Purdue and Princeton were quick to react. They have developed a signal-jamming personal firewall to protect medical devices, such as insulin pumps and pacemakers, from being hacked.
EA game promotion goes haywire – allows gamers to download as many games as they want for free
Department of Homeland Security to form “CyberReserve” volunteer cybersecurity army made of civilian hackers?
According to sources, the Department of Homeland Security was advised last week, to create a “cyber skills task force” that would act as a reserve army of cyber specialists in order to mold top-notch cybersecurity talent to address U.S. cybersecurity emergencies. Called the “CyberReserve” and similar to the National Guard program, CyberReserve would ensure professional…
Akamai’s Real-time web monitor uses 105,000 servers to identify regions with greatest attack traffic
Akamai, who operate one of the world’s largest distributed-computing platforms, monitors global Internet conditions around the clock. With this real-time data they identify the global regions with the greatest attack traffic, cities with the slowest Web connections (latency), and geographic areas with the most Web traffic (traffic density). It does this with a network of…
Botnet discovered that scanned the entire IPv4 address space in less than two weeks
Researchers at the University of California San Diego have monitored a botnet that they believe scanned the entire IPv4 address space, possibly in less than two weeks. Using a network block called the UCSD Network Telescope, also known as the UCSD darknet, researchers noticed the illicit activity in February 2011.