Tag: HACKER

20-something firmware magician GeoHot (George Hotz) has already been sued by Sony for jailbreaking the PlayStation 3, and caused a major stir in the iPhone dev community when he released limera1n. So what next for the ambitious young hacker? How about taking a stab at Windows Phone 7? The invitation has been handed out, with WP7 lead Brandon Watson offering to ship Hotz a device so that he can ...

Some internal Twitter documents were recently compromised by a hacker who offered them to various tech websites for publication. Other than the illicit way they were obtained - via some weak passwords set by Twitter employees, Biz Stone suggests in a blog post - the documents are pretty boring. TechCrunch, as you might expect if you're at all familiar with that blog, has gone ahead and published ...

Louis Suarez-Potts, the community manager for the open-source Open Office project, says software piracy also hurts the open-source community, and though it can be argued that open-source is bad for innovation, most of us love the open source community. So does the occasional pirated piece of software really hurt our beloved open source projects? Suarez-Potts thinks it's bad for everyone including ...

Sometimes the cure can be more painful than the disease. Case in point: the federal government tried to help a California county website recover from a hacker's attack yesterday and wound up knocking every California state website offline for 7 hours. Here are the details. A hacker had diverted traffic from the Marin County website so that visitors found themselves looking at porn. That's bad. But ...

Your open Gmail account could be in severe jeopardy, thanks to a malicious script that initiates itself when a website is viewed, The tables have turned from hacking your computer, to hacking your virtually stored information. Supposedly hackers are not seeing the benefits of attacking your protected and firewalled computer these days, and are much happier to go after hacking Web 2.0 API's. Such ...

Yahoo! owned RightMedia has been serving ads to popular networks such as MySpace, Bebo and Photobucket that could wreak havoc on visitors' machines. The Trojan which was reported to have been inserted by a third party ad server, was tracked down to RightMedia. The infected banner ad supposedly ran several million times over a three week period after it was first spotted on August 8th by a web ...

Pfizer is a pretty big drug manufacturer is it not? Then why have they been hawking Viagra and fake Rolex watches through their email network? Apparently some of Pfizers computers have been sending out emails that are not part of their marketing efforts. Malware has infected a number of the drug giant's computers and instructed them to send out spam on behalf a very ingenious hacker that has ...

Some Google Blogger users have been stung with attacks over the past little while, causing disturbing infections. Or is it just a case of the splogs. Malicious hackers have supposedly been successful in gaining access to some blogs and posting fake entries with weblinks that lead to infectious downloads on Windows PC's. A security researcher started noticing the corrupt links turning up in Blogger ...

People applying for federal jobs recently had their personal information stolen by a crafty hacker that nailed the USAJobs web site, operated by the Office of Personnel Management. Some 146,000 job applicants hoping to get a job with the fed instead may find themselves the victims of identity theft. Although the fed insists no social security numbers were compromised, the information stolen is ...

Government and embassy email accounts were penetrated by a 'hacker' recently, with passwords posted live for all to see. This 100 email account information highjacking involved government agencies and embassies worldwide. Accounts penetrated include foreign ministries in Iran, Indian embassies in the US, the UK visa office in Nepal, and the Russian embassy in Sweden. The 'Hacker', a so called ...

More hack attacks originate from inside the US than from anywhere else on earth and, increasingly they're coming from more organized and focused groups. Those are the findings of a report released yesterday by security firm Symantec. The US was the source for 31 percent of attacks, with China following a distant second at 10 percent according to the report. To make matters worse, thanks to this ...

Ever want to see MySpace crash and burn? Or, are you at least a little tired of the horrific design/coding/everything nightmare that is MySpace? A couple of hackers plan to introduce security vulnerabilities in MySpace next month, revealing one a day as part of the "Month of Bugs" tradition. However, Mondo Armando and Müstaschio, in a kind of satirical, cynical, and humorous fashion, will ...

Woops, seems like our friends at Apple had left a back door open for hackers to enter through QuickTime. It seems like no matter what companies do, hackers always find a way to penetrate and drop harmful code in. Don't worry, Apple has it fixed now with a patch, but the issue in question stemmed from a concern about a buffer overflow. When QuickTime processes a Real Time Streaming Protocol URL it ...

Yahoo! fixed a little flaw this week in Yahoo! Messenger for Windows that could have been used by hackers. The flaw was in the ActiveX control and allowed hackers to crash a chat session and Internet Explorer. Worse, it could have executed malicious code on the victim's machine. The initiation could have taken place if hackers prompted users to view HTML code that linked to a web site with ...

Christopher Maxwell, of California was sent to prison for 37 months (3 years) for using viruses to plant adware on people's computers, netting over $100,000. His ring of hackers broke into 629,000 PCs (most running Windows) including several at government installations. Chris is the latest criminal and hacker (no they aren't the same thing) to be jailed for computer crimes in recent months. Botnet ...