2012-09-27

Anonymous Philippines Attacks Their Govt

More government websites defaced. Anonymous strikes again.

phpMyAdmin Backdoored


When a free/opensource tool gets compromised and backdoored, it is a sure sign of war

Snoopy: A distributed tracking and profiling framework

Snoopy:  A tool which sounds both scary and technically interesting:
There have been recent initiatives from numerous governments to legalise the monitoring of citizens' Internet based communications (web sites visited, emails, social media) under the guise of anti-terrorism. Several private organisations have developed technologies claiming to facilitate the analysis of collected data with the goal of identifying undesirable activities. Whether such technologies are used to identify such activities, or rather to profile all citizens, is open to debate. Budgets, technical resources, and PhD level staff are plentiful in this sphere.

2012-09-26

Source of data breaches


Only 25% of data breach cases are the work of external attackers. And only 12% of them were perpetrated by insiders with ill intent. That leaves 63% of the issues caused by something more mundane [“inadvertent misuse”]
Full Story

Android phones can be reset to factory default by clicking on links

I usually don't cover vulnerabilities on mobiles, but this one is pretty interesting. Youtube video here

How Safe Is Your Bank ATM PIN?

The blog says thieves have a 20-percent chance of guessing your ATM code, by using those first 3 [most popular] combinations.  
Full story here

2012-09-16

Australia's IT Sec contest

In case any one is interested in story writing.

Domino's India Hacked

The website of Domino's Pizza India was hacked, but customers' information was not compromised, the local franchisee Jubilant FoodWorks said on Wednesday.
Story Here

Mr. Ankit Fadia Continues To Be The Joke of the Town

Update 13-Jan-2012:
Ankit Fadia, who is a famous self acclaimed hacker, but with tons of controversies to his name, doesn't seem to have a good start in 2012. He has already been hacked numerous times.

Update 12-Sep-2012:
And he is hacked again, this time his hosting company, cancels his account.

Hacker Cosmo's Story

A biography of  a hacker.

2012-09-11

Slowhttptest

“SlowHTTPTest is a highly configurable tool that simulates some Application Layer Denial of Service attacks. It implements most common low-bandwidth Application Layer DoS attacks"
Website

GoDaddy Attacked

Update 10-Sep-2012:
GoDaddy, one of the largest domain registrar was under a DoS attack from Anonymous. "The outage started around 10:25 AM Pacific time, and services for the bulk of affected customers were restored at 2:43 PM."
The surprising bit is that the hackers took down the DNS server of GoDaddy. This is pretty unusual. Would like to read more details about it.

Update 11-Sep-2012:
GoDaddy blames outage on corrupted router tables, and say they were not attacked??!!

2012-09-09

Hackers hold Mitt Romney's tax returns for ransom

USA is gearing up for the elections, and so are the hackers. Presidential Candidate Mitt Romney being asked for a ransom.

2012-09-07

Laptop fingerprint readers vulnerabale

Looks like the biometric readers are insecure, opposite to the popular belief.

Sony Hacked (again)

Update 07-Sep-2012:
Sigh... I lost count as to how many times these guys have been hit just in 2011 and 2012..!!
Hackers Pastebin Post  &  Sony's Statement

2012-09-04

Anonymous Attacks FBI - Leaks Apple Records

Update: 04-Sep-2012:
FBI has been chasing Anonymous members for a while now. I guess this is their way of counter-attacking. Some time back the hackers intercepted one of the meetings of FBI and released the recording. Now, they have hacked them and released some confidential user Apple records. Question is why is FBI keeping this information, and what do they intend to do with it?

Story Here;  Hacker's pastebin release (with links to the dump);
Copy of the file, in case it disappears from these links.

Update: 05-Sep-2012:
Not surprisingly, FBI has denied that any FBI laptop was hacked.

Update: 11-Sep-2012:
New report suggests that the leaked data came from a publishing company, called Bluetoad.

Update: 13-Sep-2012:
A spokesperson of Anonymous, Barrett Brown, was raided by FBI and arrested. Unfortunately, the guy at that time was on a video chat, and hence the whole thing got recorded (at least the audio).