Hacker Decries U.S., Israel On Vietnam Memorial Site
89137
A computer hacker promoting Turkish nationalism posted a video and message on a U.S. Vietnam memorial Web site in recent days, blocking one of the site's search functions while defacing the site with a statement against the United States and Israel.
587711
Hackers could bypass security warnings and download malicious content.
95492
Did you notice when Slashdot's  search was down for the past few days? (It's back up now.)  Turns out that in a stunning case of irony, it had been hammered into  submission by thousands of people attempting to use it.        However, unlike CmdrTaco's regimented DDoS attacks, this one is carried out  with malicious intent as opposed to mere sociopathic inconsiderateness.  It also highlights a potential threat from one of the biggest weblogging  services out there.
765105
Science & environment: The auction site has been the target of a hacker called Vladuz, whose actions are causing concern.
86315
The security vendor has fixed the damage, but the site briefly redirected visitors to a malicious site in China.
57973
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.
612363
(InfoWorld) - Computers belonging to the U.S. government, contractors, and companies in the transportation industry were hit by a targeted computer attack in July that yielded password information for hundreds of Internet and intranet Web sites, a computer security vendor said Tuesday. The malicious code behind the attacks was first detected by computer intrusion prevention vendor Prevx on July 5. In total, the criminals were able to cull 200MB ofÂ information from about 500 computers, including password and login data, Prevx said. All but one of the computers was located in the U.S., and many of the computers that were infected were associated with air transportation, according to Mel Morris, CEO of Prevx. "This was a well-coordinated attack by someone wanting to get information on the related sites." PCs at the U.S. Department of Transportation (DOT), American Airlines, and DOT contractor Booz Allen Hamilton all were compromised, Morris said. If DOT systems were compromised, the department is unaware of the situation. "We haven't found any record of a problem," a DOT spokeswoman said Tuesday. Prevx obtained a sample of the Trojan used in the attacks on Friday of last week. By Saturday, it had tracked down a Web site, hosted by YahooÂ in Sunnyvale, California, where information from the compromised PCs was dropped. Because Prevx found a "massive amount" of job applications on the Web site used by the criminals, the company believes that victims may have downloaded the malicious software while thinking they were applying for a job. That Web site, which had probably been hacked by the criminals behind the scam, was shut down on Tuesday, Morris said. It hosted about 200MB of password information, and log-files on the server showed the IP addresses of the infected PCs. Victims of the Trojan, called Win32.PSWSteal.Gen , are told that their hard drive has been encrypted and that they will need to pay $300 to for a decryption tool. Morris believes this extortion threat is actually a ruse designed to conceal the attacker's true motivation: data gathering. "We think the ransomware is to point anyone investigating this down the wrong alley," he said. Morris said he is troubled that such a high percentage of the infected PCs are related to the transportation sector, which has been the target of terrorist attacks. "When we reverse-engineered the IP addresses of those computers, we couldn't believe that this was a daisy chain that led to government-associated sites and to other defense contractors, and to American Airlines," Morris said. "This was a very highly targeted attack." Criminals have increasingly turned to this type of targeted attack in order to collect and eventually sell data from corporations and government agencies, said Marcus Sachs, deputy director of research group SRI International's Computer Science Laboratory. But while Prevx's list of compromised organizations is "kind of scary," it's still hard to characterize what was motivating the attack, Sachs said. "I wouldn't necessarily associate it with terrorists," he said.
175751
Several nations and groups are trying to break into the US military&#39;s computer system, the Pentagon said Tuesday after reports China&#39;s military had successfully hacked into the network.
736922
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.
461104
Heidi Montag wants to set the record straight about a surprising posting that went up on her Web site Mondayâshe didnât post it.  âMy Web site was hacked last night, so Iâm not sure what was posted up,â she said Tuesday during an event at a Lo...
362334
(InfoWorld) - The personal details of thousands of mostly U.S.-based PC users have been discovered stashed on a server located in France, another indication of use of the Internet to collect personal data on a vast scale. The Web page, which was live as of Monday morning, does not contain financial details of the users. But other Web pages associated with the same domain indicate the site could be connected to a group of hackers based in the Middle East known for their involvement in other Internet financial crime as well as defacing Web sites, said Chris Boyd, research manager for FaceTime Communications Inc., a security company. He posted more details on a company blog . The ISP (Internet service provider) that hosts the page has been contacted, Boyd said. The data appears to have been collected in April 2006, according to timestamps in the file, and includes the full names of people, their address and their IP address. Also included are the names of the Web sites from which the details were apparently collected. The names of those Web sites, most of which are now not active, appear to offer a freebie, with names such as www.likefreestuff.com and www.freebgift.com. The offer of a free gift is often made in exchange for data, Boyd said. There's nothing illegal about collecting data that users voluntarily submit. Likewise, the storing of personal details for marketing purposes is also not illegal. But leaving those details open on a server could violate European or U.S. data protection laws. It's not clear how that data on the French server is being used, but various hackers forums are aware it has been exposed, Boyd said. The e-mail addresses could immediately be used to send spam, while the addresses of the users could potentially be used for identity fraud. Research into the domain name hosting the data has also turned up clues that it may be connected to well-known hacking groups, he said. The server the domain is hosted on also hosts nearly 24,000 other domain names, another indication of possibly either phishing or other scam activity, Boyd said. One page on the same server contains a hacking tool that can be used for a variety of other nefarious activity, such as building custom Web pages with exploit code. The tool, called King IE Exploiter, is an application that can be used to find malicious software that can be incorporated into malicious Web pages, Boyd said. The application has been linked with Trojan horse programs aimed at stealing bank details and other malware that sends spam, he said. Interestingly, when King IE Exploiter starts running, it lists several usernames of hackers, Boyd said. "They're got quite a history for being known for all sort of elaborate scams and attacks," he said. Those attacks include a worm found two years ago that installed a fake BitTorrent client on targeted computers that distributed large video files. The users whose data is now circulating on the Internet in this incident may be less protected that other victims of large data breaches. In the U.S., some states have laws where businesses must contact those affected by a loss of data. However, user may be unaware how their data is now circulating or is used if it was collected by scammers, Boyd said. "It is quite worrying," Boyd said. "Obviously, they are quite happily gathering up all of this information."
417532
A Republican Party Web site has been hacked, and for some time it spread a variation of the long-running Storm Trojan horse to vulnerable visitors.
46376
The Bush-Cheney reelection campaign has barred people outside the United States from viewing its Web site following an electronic attack that took down the campaign&#39;s Internet address for six
443005
The US Federal Bureau of Investigation is reported to be checking the possibility that a Pentagon employee has been passing secret information to Israel.
260535
A Vietnamese-born U.S. citizen was  detained in mid-August, a government spokesman said on Thursday  as rights groups complained he was arrested after using the  Internet to call for alternatives to one-party communist rule.
178847
A bug in Microsoft&#39;s Internet Security and Acceleration (ISA) Server 2000 and Proxy Server 2.0 can let hackers spoof Web content, such as a trusted site, with their own fake content, the Redmond
103206
This unedited e-mail below, sent privately to friends by Wall Street Journal correspondent Farnaz Fassihi, was posted on pointer.org, a site run by the Poynter Institute journalism school.