Hacker leaves explosions on nuclear Web site
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Red-faced officials at Canada's nuclear safety watchdog on Thursday said they were probing how a hacker had managed to litter its official Web site with dozens of colour photographs of a nuclear explosion.
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By TED BRIDIS Associated Press  WASHINGTON -- Hackers briefly overwhelmed at least three of the 13 computers that help manage global computer traffic Tuesday in one of the most significant attacks against the Internet since 2002.
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A massive hack of several hundred legitimate Web sites is spreading malware to visitors' PCs using a new tack that makes detection "extraordinarily difficult,"  security experts said today.
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Several major websites are brought down by the largest denial-of-service attacks ever staged. Compiled by Tony Long.
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A computer hacker accessed names and Social Security numbers of about 1.4 million Californians after breaking into a University of California, Berkeley, computer system in perhaps the worst attack of its kind ever suffered by the
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Gas tank bomb instructions found on home computer of asylum seeker who was linked to al-Qaida figures.
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As the United States' presidential candidates pinball their way across New Hampshire on the day of the state's closely watched primary elections, a new form of grassroots activism appears to be taking root across the Atlantic, in Eastern Europe, that melds dirty pool tactics with the cutting edge of malware technology.Researchers with carrier security specialists Arbor Networks claim that they recently discovered several additional incidents of botnet-driven DOS attacks that were tied to political issues. Danny McPherson, chief research officer at Arbor, will report his group's findings to the assembled computer security and law enforcement experts at next week's Department of Defense Cyber-crime conference in St. Louis.Since April 2007, when a campaign of targeted denial-of-service (DOS) attacks against Web sites controlled by the prime minister of Estonia and several regional banks were carried out with crushing results -- crippling the URLs for a period of several days -- experts have wondered aloud to what extent politics played a hand in the scheme.At the time, press reports and IT security experts speculated that tension between Estonia and Russia -- sparked by Estonia's decision to move a Soviet-era World War II memorial of a bronze soldier -- may have motivated the coordinated DOS attacks. With a number of well-known malware distribution and botnet control networks based out of the region, experts speculated that Russian hackers, either on their own or at the behest of a paying customer, took out the Estonian sites to display their displeasure with the statue's removal.Now new evidence has been discovered that indicates the same sort of political activism believed to have driven the 2007 Estonian Web site attacks not only exists but is becoming more popular."We spent some time after the Estonia attacks looking into this part of the world, and we've found evidence of other politically motivated botnet DOS attacks," said Jose Nazario, senior software engineer at Arbor. "It's hard to tell who is responsible for these campaigns, but they definitely appear to be tied to some recent Russian and Ukrainian elections."According to Nazario, who is known as an expert tracker of botnets -- the armies of malware-infected computers that can be controlled remotely to be used for everything from DOS campaigns to the distribution of spam -- two elections in particular appear to have drawn activity similar to the Estonia incidents.In one instance, Nazario said his team uncovered a botnet-driven DOS threat carried out against several Web sites controlled by Viktor Yanukovych, the recently defeated Ukranian prime minister, during his re-election campaign.In another incident, Nazario said that his team was able to discover a DOS campaign aimed at sites controlled by the "Other Russia" political party led by one-time 2008 Russian presidential candidate Garry Kasparov, who is more widely known as one of the greatest chess players of all time.During each of the individual attacks, banks of botnet-infected computers successfully took the candidates' sites down for several days before they were restored, according to Arbor.Additionally, Nazario said the botnets used in both sets of attacks represent the cutting-edge of the increasingly popular and sophisticated malware sub-genre.Rather than using IRC relays to communicate with each other like most traditional botnets, the politically driven threats utilized Web-based requests to speak to each other -- a much harder form of traffic to differentiate from legitimate network throughput, Nazario said.The same advanced botnets are currently being used to distribute malware and spam, but the systems also appear to have been specifically designed to help their controllers carry out different types of distributed DOS attacks, he said.Nazario said the botnets being used in Russia and the Ukraine closely resembled the zombie PC armies that have been used in years past to attack anti-spam efforts such as Spamhaus and CastleCops -- both of which have previously been targeted successfully and had their sites temporarily taken offline.The activity could also suggest that the systems are being rented out by their creators to other people for the purpose of executing their own threats -- or being built through botnet toolkit technologies being developed in the region, the expert said.Whether or not botnet activism will wash ashore in the U.S. any time soon remains unclear, but it seems apparent the trend is taking off across the pond.Nazario said it remains hard to tell if the botnet campaign tactic has become a weapon of official political entities, or merely a tool of groups acting independently to promote some cause or belief, but lean towards the latter scenario."We don't know who is behind any of this activity, and we don't want to speculate, but you have to ask yourself, is this directed by someone higher in the political organizations, or is it merely somebody who is acting as a lone vigilante?" Nazario said. "It could be that this is something that is being carried out by a handful of individuals that have some sort of belief or disagreement to promote, or it could of course represent something bigger."
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Authorities are trying to determine how a hacker gained access to a University of California computer that contained personal information for up to 600,000 state residents.
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A Russian human rights Web site portal  has been attacked by unknown assailants, forcing it to close  down and move to a new address, the Web site said on Monday.
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Internet hackers crashed the Web  site of Panama's National Assembly and briefly posted an  American flag there, four months after the legislature elected  as its leader a man accused of murdering a U.S. soldier.
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It only takes 20 minutes on the Internet for an unprotected computer running Microsoft Windows to be taken over by a hacker. Any personal or financial information stored
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&quot;Last week&#39;s simultaneous outages of GeorgeWBush.com and RNC.org prompted speculation that an electronic attack may have occurred, as the two sites are hosted on separate Web servers,&quot; Netcraft analyst Rich Miller said.
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Hackers could exploit the vulnerabilities to launch DOS attacks and bypass user authentication on the servers.
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Suspect accused of stealing and distributing source code over the Internet.
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Online intruders hit a server owned by advertising host Falk and use it to distribute a destructive program via banner ads.
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An intruder could manipulate a flaw in how the browsers handle image files to see where the user has been surfing.
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(InfoWorld) - A hacker successfully attacked a Web page within Microsoft's U.K. domain on Wednesday, resulting in the display of a photograph of a child waving the flag of Saudi Arabia. It was "unfortunate" that the site was vulnerable, said Roger Halbheer, chief security advisor for Microsoft in Europe, the Middle East and Africa, on Friday. The problem has since been fixed. However, the hack highlights how large software companies with technical expertise can still prove vulnerable to hackers. The hacker, who posted his name as "rEmOtEr," exploited a programming mistake in the site by using a technique known as SQL (Structured Query Language) injection to get unauthorized access to a database, Halbheer said. The site took SQL queries of a particular form, embedded in URLs (uniform resource locators), and passed them to a database. By embedding a query with an unexpected form in the requested URL, the hacker prompted the server to return error messages, Halbheer said. From those error messages, a hacker can get an idea of how the database is structured and refine a SQL query that the database will process as an instruction to insert, rather than retrieve, data. Eventually, the hacker found the right combination and inserted a link to an external Web site into the database. That meant when the normal Web page was called into a browser, the database would download data from an external link. In this case, it was two photos and a graphic, a screen shot of which is available on Zone-H.org , which tracks hacked Web sites. There are two ways to avoid this style of attack. First, the database should not be allowed to return error messages, Halbheer said. Secondly, the Web application should have validated the URL the hacker entered and rejected ones that should not be processed, he said. If a programmer makes a mistake, "the bad guy can leverage it," Halbheer said. SQL injection attacks are on the rise, overall, since valuable data is held within databases, said Paul Davie, founder and chief operating officer of Secerno, a security vendor that develops technology to protect databases from SQL attacks. "I don't think Microsoft are unique in this respect and shouldn't be held up as particularly slipshod," Davie said. "This could have happened to practically anybody."