The Podium
Blog posts tagged with 'Hackers'
Friday, August 07
By Brad
That collective Internet freakout you heard yesterday was the sound of people worldwide realizing many of their favorite social networking sites were experiencing major technical difficulties—difficulties stemming from hackers targeting just one individual. CNet reports:
A Georgian blogger with accounts on Twitter, Facebook, LiveJournal, and Google’s Blogger and YouTube was targeted in a denial-of-service attack that led to the sitewide outage at Twitter and problems at the other sites on Thursday, according to a Facebook executive.
The blogger, who uses the account name “Cyxymu,” (the name of a town in the Republic of Georgia) had accounts on all of the different sites that were attacked at the same time, Max Kelly, chief security officer at Facebook, told CNET News.
Whether the attack had something to do with the long-brewing conflict between Georgia and Russia in unknown. But this certainly wouldn’t be the first time the conflict between the two nations spread online.
Thursday, July 30
By Brad
Add British intelligence agency MI5—the home of James Bond—to the growing list of government agency websites that have been hacked. ZDNet has the scoop:
Last week, a hacker with the handle ‘[-TE-]-Neo’ wrote that the MI5 website was vulnerable to cross-site scripting and Iframe injection. The hacker put the post on the Team Elite hacker forum last Tuesday, claiming the site was breachable through the search engine. Team Elite notified MI5’s administrator of the flaw before posting proof-of-concept code.
MI5 says no sensitive material could be accessed through the hack, but they moved quickly to fix the problem anyway.
Wednesday, July 01
By Brad
A hacker from Boston has been sentenced to more than 11 years in prison for his online shenanigans. Reports eWeek:
Matthew Weigman, 19, also known as “Little Hacker,” was accused of being part of a gang of telephone hackers that made more than 60 fake emergency calls and broke into the phone network to make it appear as though the calls came from somewhere else.
Weigman pleaded guilty in February to one count of conspiracy to retaliate against a witness, victim or informant as well as one count of conspiracy to commit access device fraud. According to Wired, which has interviewed Weigman in the past about his activities, the FBI had been chasing the hacker since he was 15, and at times treated him as an informant. As part of his plea, he admitted to conspiring with other hackers to place bogus emergency calls that sent SWAT units to the homes of their unsuspecting victims.
Curious footnote: Weigman is blind.
Thursday, June 11
By Brad
China, known for its strict Internet rules, recently ordered every PC in the country have screening software installed in order to protect citizens from unseemly—and political—content. But via the BBC comes word that the mandated software may, in fact, put computers at risk:
The Chinese government has mandated that all computers in the country must have the screening software installed.
It is intended to filter out offensive material from the net.
The Chinese government said that the Green Dam Youth Escort software, as it is known, was intended to push forward the “healthy development of the internet” and “effectively manage harmful material for the public and prevent it from being spread.”
“We found a series of software flaws,” explained Isaac Mao, a blogger and social entrepreneur in China, as well as a research fellow at Harvard University’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society.
Among the flaws is the fact that communication between the software and the developer’s servers is not encrypted, meaning a hacker could easily install code that would essentially allow them to seize control of almost every computer in China.
Wednesday, May 20
By Brad
Those secret questions websites ask you to answer in order to retrieve forgotten passwords? You know, questions like “What’s your mother’s maiden name?” and “In what city were you born?” Well it turns out that they might no be so secret after all. Technology Review reports:
In research to be presented at the IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy this week, researchers from Microsoft and Carnegie Mellon University plan to show that the secret questions used to secure the password-reset functions of a variety of websites are woefully insecure. In a study involving 130 people, the researchers found that 28 percent of the people who knew and were trusted by the study’s participants could guess the correct answers to the participant’s secret questions. Even people not trusted by the participant still had a 17 percent chance of guessing the correct answer to a secret question.
“Secret questions alone are not as secure as we would like our backup authentication to be,” says Stuart Schechter, a researcher with software giant Microsoft and one of the authors of the paper. “Nor are they reliable enough that their use alone is sufficient to ensure users can recover their accounts when they forget their passwords.”
Tuesday, May 12
By Brad
With the Obama administration making cybsersecurity a national priority (and with hackers from China and elsewhere trying to steal our nation’s secrets every day), preparedness drills are up and running. From the New York Times:
These are the war games at West Point, at least last month, when a team of cadets spent four days struggling around the clock to establish a computer network and keep it operating while hackers from the National Security Agency in Maryland tried to infiltrate it with methods that an enemy might use. The N.S.A. made the cadets’ task more difficult by planting viruses on some of the equipment, just as real-world hackers have done on millions of computers around the world.
Cyber attacks often place America in the unfamiliar position of playing catch-up in technology, making these sort of drills all the more necessary.
Thursday, April 23
By Brad
Hot on the heels of a recent Wall Street Journal report about hackers breaching a U.S. military fighter-jet project comes this chilling article from Popular Science on the rise of Chinese hackers and their targeting of America:
Hackers are pervasive, their imprint inescapable. There are hacker magazines, hacker clubs and hacker online serials. A 2005 Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences survey equates hackers and rock stars, with nearly 43 percent of elementary-school students saying they “adore” China’s hackers. One third say they want to be one. This culture thrives on a viral, Internet-driven nationalism. The post-Tiananmen generation has known little hardship, so rather than pushing for democracy, many young people define themselves in opposition to the West. China’s Internet patriots, who call themselves “red hackers,” may not be acting on direct behalf of their government, but the effect is much the same.
The entire piece is worth digging into.
Tuesday, April 21
By Brad
WIth the Obama administration working to overhaul cybersecurity in the U.S., online hackers and spies keep justifying that overhaul. The latest breach, as the Wall Street Journal reports, is particularly severe:
Computer spies have broken into the Pentagon’s $300 billion Joint Strike Fighter project—the Defense Department’s costliest weapons program ever—according to current and former government officials familiar with the attacks.
Similar incidents have also breached the Air Force’s air-traffic-control system in recent months, these people say. In the case of the fighter-jet program, the intruders were able to copy and siphon off several terabytes of data related to design and electronics systems, officials say, potentially making it easier to defend against the craft.
Even scarier is the fact that snooping on the jet project appears to have been going on since 2007.
Wednesday, April 08
By Brad
Hot on the heels of the Obama administration creating a national cybersecurity czar comes word that the U.S. electrical grid has been hacked. From the Wall Street Journal:
Cyberspies have penetrated the U.S. electrical grid and left behind software programs that could be used to disrupt the system, according to current and former national-security officials.
The spies came from China, Russia and other countries, these officials said, and were believed to be on a mission to navigate the U.S. electrical system and its controls. The intruders haven’t sought to damage the power grid or other key infrastructure, but officials warned they could try during a crisis or war.
“The Chinese have attempted to map our infrastructure, such as the electrical grid,” said a senior intelligence official. “So have the Russians.”
The espionage appeared pervasive across the U.S. and doesn’t target a particular company or region, said a former Department of Homeland Security official. “There are intrusions, and they are growing,” the former official said, referring to electrical systems. “There were a lot last year.”
Monday, March 30
By Brad
Forget James Bond and his ilk. Today’s spies use broadband and malware instead of gadgets and brute force. Via the BBC:
An electronic spy network, based mainly in China, has infiltrated computers from government offices around the world, Canadian researchers say. They said the network had infiltrated 1,295 computers in 103 countries.
They included computers belonging to foreign ministries and embassies and those linked with the Dalai Lama - Tibet’s spiritual leader.
There is no conclusive evidence China’s government was behind it, researchers say. Beijing also denied involvement.
Here’s how the snooping appears to have worked:
By installing malware on compromised computers, hackers were able to take control of them to send and receive classified data.
In this case, the software also gave hackers the ability to use audio and video recording devices to monitor the rooms the computers were in. But investigators said they did not know whether or not this element had been used.
By Brad
Australia is known for its forays into strict Internet filtering. As Ars Technica reports:
In 2006, after conducting a study which determined that ISP-level filtering was not feasible, the nation spent $116 million to develop Internet filtering software that parents could install on computers. When this software was easily circumvented by children, the government decided to try again with an $89 million ISP-level filtering scheme based on a blacklist devised by the Australian Communication and Media Authority (ACMA).
As often happens when government bodies attempt to control the Internet, Australia’s move raised the ire of hackers, who assaulted the website of the classification board and left the following message for visitors to see:
This site contains information about the boards that have the right to CONTROL YOUR FREEDOMZ. The Classification Board has the right to not just classify content (the name is an ELABORATE TRICK), but also the right to DECIDE WHAT IS AND ISNT APPROPRIATE and BAN CONTENT FROM THE PUBLIC. We are part of an ELABORATE DECEPTION from CHINA to CONTROL AND SHEEPIFY the NATION, to PROTECT THE CHILDREN. All opposers must HATE CHILDREN, and therefore must be KILLED WITH A LARGE MELONS during the PROSECUTION PARTIES IN SEPTEMBER. Come join our ALIEN SPACE PARTY.
Bruce P. Mehlman
David Sutphen
Larry Irving
Broadband Fact Book
Special Reports
The Digital Divide
Jobs and Investment
Data Calculator
Sign the Petition
IIA Broadband Symposium - Universal Broadband: Access for All Americans
IIA Internet Academy
Press Releases
Most Recent Posts
Leave a Comment