The Guardian reports that a private investigator broke into the phone of a missing teen, deleting messages that may have interfered with investigation into her disappearance.
(Credit: The Guardian reports that a private investigator broke into the phone of a missing teen, deleting messages that may have interfered with investigation into her disappearance.)A private eye working for U.K. tabloid News of the World is accused of interfering with a police investigation and giving a murder victim's family false hope by breaking into the teen victim's cell phone and deleting voice mail messages nine years ago, according to The Guardian.
Scotland Yard is investigating the case, which involves the phone of 13-year-old Milly Dowler, whose body was discovered in September 2002, six months after she disappeared on her way home from school. Detectives allegedly found evidence of the account tampering of the Dowler phone among 11,000 ... Read full post & comments
Hackers have posted a document that allegedly has user names and passwords for an Apple server.
The find, posted via the AntiSec hacking campaign, appears to be a warning that Apple "could be a target too."
The bigger picture here is that Apple will become an increasing target for these hacker groups if the company provides the right trigger. Apple could represent the Holy Grail for malicious hackers given its stash of iTunes customer data. If Sony, AT&T; and the CIA can bring hackers headlines just imagine what Apple could do.
According to the Wall Street Journal, AntiSec includes hackers from Anonymous and the now-decommissioned LulzSec. ZDNet's Jason O'Grady noted that 9to5 Mac considers the document posted by AntiSec to be relatively benign.
That take looks to be roughly correct, but there's a warning embedded here. Hackers apparently are too "busy elsewhere" to mess with Apple,
... Read full post & comments
A Fox News Twitter feed was hacked and used to publish false items that President Obama had been killed.
(Credit: screenshot by Stephen Shankland/CNET)Fox News has alerted the U.S. Secret Service that the cable news show's Twitter feed was used today to publish false reports that President Obama had been killed.
The attack apparently was completed about 11 p.m. PT Sunday, when a tweet appeared that said, "Just regained full access to our Twitter and email. Happy 4th."
Shortly afterward came the first of several Obama-related tweets: "@BarackObama has just passed. The President is dead. A sad 4th of July, indeed. President Barack Obama is dead."
The tweets were still live on the Twitter Web site more than nine hours after being posted. The attack was on a verified Twitter account, one that Twitter has verified to belong to a specific person or organization.
Fox News said it alerted the Secret Service, ... Read full post & comments
(Credit:
Arizona Fraternal Order of Police)
For the third time in a week, hackers have released information pilfered from compromised online accounts of Arizona law enforcement officers.
Under the "AntiSec" umbrella, the combined Anonymous-LulzSec hacker group is targeting government agencies, financial institutions, and other high-profile targets. AntiSec first released e-mails, phone numbers, passwords, and other information belonging to the Arizona Department of Public Safety on June 23. The hackers said they are targeting the police organization to protest "racial-profiling anti-immigrant" policies, specifically SB1070, which makes it a crime to be in Arizona without documentation proving United States residency.
Earlier this week, AntiSec released information from personal e-mail accounts of officers. And last night, the hackers defaced eight Fraternal Order of Police (FOP) Web sites (the FOP sites for Arizona, Phoenix, Mesa, and Tucson were inaccessible today) and released e-mail messages, passwords, and other information for more than 1,200 officers ... Read full post & comments
Google's Chrome OS
(Credit: Google)Google may see its Chrome operating system as more secure than traditional alternatives, but one security researcher believes the cloud-based OS is vulnerable, according to a Reuters story published yesterday.
WhiteHat Security researcher Matt Johansen said he found a flaw in a Chrome OS application that he was able to exploit to gain control of a Google e-mail account. Though Google fixed the flaw after it was reported, Johansen claims to have discovered other applications with the same flaw, Reuters said.
In citing the security holes in Chrome OS, Johansen specifically pointed to the ability of hackers who can steal data as it moves between the cloud and the Chrome OS browser instead of hacking directly into a user's PC.
"I can get at your online banking or your Facebook profile or your e-mail as it is being loaded in the browser," ... Read full post & comments
Security researchers at Kaspersky Lab have detailed a new botnet--a collection of infected computers controlled by cybercriminals--called TDL-4, that might just be "indestructible."
TDL-4 gets its name by being the fourth generation of the botnet. In 2008, the original TDL appeared. It has been altered over the last several years. With TDL-4, Kaspersky has found, the malware creators have drastically improved the botnet over its predecessors.
"The malware writers extended the program functionality, changed the algorithm used to encrypt the communication protocol between bots and the botnet command and control servers, and attempted to ensure they had access to infected computers even in cases where the botnet control centers are shut down," Kaspersky wrote on its SecureList blog earlier this week. "The owners of TDL are essentially trying to create an 'indestructible' botnet that is protected against attacks, competitors, and antivirus companies."
Central to TDL-4's updates is an improved ... Read full post & comments
GeoHot posted a video about Sony's lawsuit against him earlier this year.
(Credit: YouTube; screenshot by CNET)Now that he's all rested--albeit presumably no longer tanned--from his spring break skedaddle to South America, Sony PS3 jailbreaker George Hotz must be laughing all the way to the bank.
The 21-year-old Hotz, best known for unlocking the iPhone and for hacking the PlayStation 3--and then being sued by Sony (they've since settled)--now works at Facebook.
We're not sure about the job, though one would have to assume the job description has something to do with security. Hotz apparently has been on the payroll since May, just one month after Sony announced a settlement with the hacker to never publish more codes. Facebook has not yet responded to a request for comment.
For Hotz, it's a great gig, especially for someone with a claim to ... Read full post & comments
An Ohio male may be linked to the recent cyberattacks that hit government and corporate sites in the U.S. and U.K and led to the arrest of U.K. teen Ryan Cleary, according to Ohio news sources.
Stories from Cincinnati's WKRC and the Hamilton Journal-News in Ohio reported that the FBI conducted a search on Monday of a home on Jackson Road in Saint Clair Township.
Mike Brooks, a spokesman for the FBI's Cincinnati office, told CNET today that he couldn't comment beyond the fact that on Monday the FBI executed a sealed federal search warrant in Saint Clair Township. He also said he couldn't comment on the identity of the target of the investigation.
"I've been asked questions if that's related to the LulzSec case or to the arrest of Ryan Cleary in Great Britain, and I can't comment, either ... Read full post & comments
Hackers today released data they said was from the governments of Zimbabwe and Brazil, entertainment giants Universal Music Group and Viacom, and a municipal government in Australia.
Meanwhile, the Anonymous group also reportedly temporarily shut down a tourism Web site for Orlando, Fla., with a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack today to protest the arrest of Food not Bombs volunteers for serving food in public in Orlando without a permit.
Later in the day the data dump, which the hackers said was the first official release from the AntiSec campaign launched by Anonymous and LulzSec last week, appeared on The Pirate Bay file-sharing site. It purports to offer for download nearly 380 megabytes of data, including information from: the Zimbabwe government, Mosman Municipal Council (mosman.nsw.gov.au), Universal Music Group Partners and umusic.com's user:passwords, internal mapping of Viacom and its servers, Brazil government passwords and other data. ... Read full post & comments
This is a screenshot of a phishing page that is stealing Tumblr users' login credentials.
(Credit: GFI Labs)For the past few days users of microblogging site Tumblr have been targeted with phishing scams that require people to type in their login credentials to see adult content, GFI Labs warned today.
"The data we saw contained 8,200 lines of text stretched across 304 pages of Microsoft Word, and even accounting for the inevitable duplicates and fake data that's still quite the goldmine of pilfered login credentials," the post says.
The attack displays pages of Tumblr users whose accounts have been compromised and converted into fake login pages and the Web addresses are redistributed, the post says, adding that some of the compromised accounts were prompting people to login on that same page while others were redirecting people to a different Web site.
The problem has become so ... Read full post & comments
