It’s a common little meta-game for those of us who are technically competent: keep your eye out in the movies for the most egregious technical misrepresentation you can find. And while its one thing to just keep tossing of reference after reference to “the mainframe,” this complication of hacktastic scenes put together by the folks at Hack a Day is particularly cringe-worthy. More »
“Hacker” is one of the most loaded Internet words getting thrown around these days. To many (hi cable news), the label is inherently malicious, and goes hand in hand with threats to blow up the interwebs. Others who self-identify as such, will never ever stop whining about how it means just the opposite. But are hackers of either flavor heroes? Can they be? More »
In the summer of 2011, it was revealed that Koch Industries was one of several big-oil-and-coal names shoveling out money to climate change skeptic Dr. Willie Soon of the Harvard-Smithsonian Centre for Astrophysics, something that made his research seem more than a tad questionable. Shortly before this, however, were attacks on Koch Industries’ website by the hacker collective Anonymous, with one Wisconsin man being indicted yesterday for helping them.
The accussed man is Eric J. Rosol, aged 37, hailing from Black Creek, Wisconsin. According to charges made yesterday by the Witchita attorney’s office, Rosol was took part in the late February attacks on two of Koch’s websites: Kochind.com and Quiltednorthern.com, something that eventually took them offline.
As you may have suspected, the attacks were of the DDOS variety. Rosol is the only individual who has been indicted in the attacks, and has been charged with one count of damaging a protected computer, and another count of conspiracy to damage a protected computer. If the book is thrown at him, the participant could face a total of ten years in prison and a half a million dollar fine.
Although the website attacks came during a time when Koch and his brother came under fire for their support of union cutbacks in Wisconsin, it is possible that Koch Industries’ hand in climate change research could also have been a motivating factor for Roscol. According to the LA Times, the day the attack took place, Rosol linked on his blog the Greenpeace report that shined an unpleasant light on the business.
[via LA Times]
Man charged in 2011 Anonymous attack on Koch Industries is written by Brittany Hillen & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.
Earlier today, we reported on a cyber-battle between two groups that ended up dragging the entire internet along with it. The week-long battle between Spamhaus, an anti-spam group, and Cyberbunker, a web host known for hosting spam sites, led to a “global internet slowdown”, and it looks like the battle is long from being over. Spamhaus has no intention to stop until Cyberbunker is brought down.
A couple of security experts have stated that cyber attacks, like the one on Spamhaus, are a sign of many similar attacks that will show up in the future. Kaspersky has stated that the attack is the largest DDoS attack to date. It stated that the scale of the attack was speculated to be operating at speeds of 300Gbps. It also states that attacks like these will be occurring more in the future due to the “development of the Internet itself” as well as two major motives. The first motive being “monterary profit”, where cyber criminals use DDoS attacks to disrupt a corporation’s services in order to extort money from them. The second motive revolves around cyber criminals launching DDoS attacks against companies to satisfy their own personal agendas.
Joakim Sundberg, part of F5 Networks, stated that he expected to see an attack like the one on Spamhaus for some time now. He called the attack “domain name service reflection”. He states that DNS Reflection attacks will start becoming more mainstream in DDoS attacks in the future, especially as more cyber criminals and hacktivists need to come up with more new, and better ways to launch their attacks.
Sundberg also states that while the Spamhaus attack may be the largest DDoS attack right now, it’s “just one among many that we will see throughout 2013.” He says that a DDoS attack is “just a smoke screen for a more sophisticated attack that can potentially cost the company even more money.” Whatever the attack may be, Spamhaus is confident that they will be able to withstand it. The group says, “We can’t be brought down. Spamhaus has more than 80 servers around the world. We’ve built the biggest DNS server around.” Whatever is going on between the two companies, it’ll just end up hurting innocent consumers in the end.
[via The Telegraph]
Experts say Spamhaus attack is first of many to come is written by Brian Sin & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.
This week you may well have thought your connection to the internet was slowing down – in fact you would be right, and it’s not just you! According to security specialists Spamhaus, a multi-national group based in both London and Geneva, there’s a war going on outside no one is safe from. The beastly battle between Spamhaus and a supposed nefarious web host by the name of Cyberbunker have resulted in what the former says is a global internet slowdown.
What we’ve got going on here is a battle on several tiers. The first is the blocking of Cyberbunker by the powers that be – with Spamhaus, that is. The second is the retaliation that a variety of hacker groups are taking on Cyberbunker as well as a collection of other sites for having blocked Cyberbunker in the first place. Cyberbunker is being accused of hosting SPAM websites and sources that Spamhaus has dedicated themselves to kicking out of the web.
Spamhaus is a non-profit group that helps email providers filter unwanted content from users across the web. They do this with a collection of block lists of known Spammers and malicious organizations. Spamhaus recently blocked servers maintained by Cyberbunker and said that the business was working in cooperation with “criminal gangs” of the Eastern Europe and Russian variety in their retaliation for the blocks.
Cyberbunker is known for being a server of all manner of web content, with only a couple of choice exceptions. Spam is not one of them. Speaking with the BBC this week, Steve Linford, chief executive for Spamhaus, noted that the retaliatory attacks happening now have been unheard of in scale.
“We’ve been under this cyber-attack for well over a week. But we’re up – they haven’t been able to knock us down. Our engineers are doing an immense job in keeping it up – this sort of attack would take down pretty much anything else. If you aimed this at Downing Street they would be down instantly. They would be completely off the internet.” – Linford
Speaking about the effect this attack has been having on the rest of the web, Prof Alan Woodward also let the BBC know that the internet was, indeed, slowing down as a result. Woodward is a cybersecurity expert at the University of Surrey.
“If you imagine it as a motorway, attacks try and put enough traffic on there to clog up the on and off ramps. With this attack, there’s so much traffic it’s clogging up the motorway itself.” – Woodward
According to Spamhaus’ Linford, Google and a variety of other helpful companies with the capacity to assist have been making their resources available in an effort to “absorb” the traffic this event is generating. Linford has also added that they’re quite confident that they’ll prevail eventually.
“They are targeting every part of the internet infrastructure that they feel can be brought down. We can’t be brought down. Spamhaus has more than 80 servers around the world. We’ve built the biggest DNS server around.” – Linford
Sound like a fun battle to you? We’ll be following this story with a close eye as it continues to affect us all. Let us know if you’ve felt the impact yourself – or if you think it’s all bullocks, instead insisting that your internet is just slower than everyone else!
Internet slows as historically unprecedented cyber-battle ensues is written by Chris Burns & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.
The term ‘mainframe’ doesn’t get thrown around as much as buzzwords like ‘cloud computing’ these days; except in Hollywood. The movies are still obsessed with the idea of someone hacking into the mainframe. Or, to be more specific, “hacking the mainframe” is still a convenient but lazy plot device that lets characters discover vital expository backstory, or escape a seemingly inescapable situation. More »
Have you turned on your Apple ID two-step verification yet? You’ll want to get on that. A report from The Verge indicates that if you haven’t, hackers can change your password with nothing more than your email address and your birthday. More »
BBC had three of its Twitter accounts hacked early this morning by a group that calls itself the Syrian Electronic Army, which accessed its BBC Weather, BBC Arabic, and Radio Ulster accounts to post somewhat strange public proclamations. The tweets have since been deleted, and BBC is back to being in control of its social accounts.
Instead of ranting about overt political motivations or other such common tweets that appear on hacked accounts, the Syrian Electronic Army posted fake weather snippets for various Middle Eastern locations, some with their own between-the-lines statement, while others were just altogether odd, such as the tweet: “Saudi weather station down due to head-on collision with camel.”
Other tweets read: “Chaotic weather forecast for Lebanon as the government decides to distance itself from the Milky Way.” and “Tsunami alert for Haifa: Residents are advised to return to Poland.” According to the BBC, this same group, which shortens its name to SEA, has in the past proclaimed support across digital mediums for the Syrian President Bashar al Assad.
In the announcement, the media company stated that a phishing email had been sent to some BBC email addresses. The email contained a link that would help the responsible party gain “password details,” but the email has not been tied to the attack at this time. The BBC issued an apology to its Twitter followers, saying that it “strongly condemns” such actions.
Three BBC Twitter accounts hacked by Syrian Electronic Army is written by Brittany Hillen & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.
Apple begins rolling out two-step authentication for Apple ID and iCloud users, highlighting the growing importance of security as our digital lives move to cloud-based services. Here’s how to set it up (and why it’s important).
Cyber-warfare is all well and civilized when it’s confined to a tit-for-tat hacking of banks, but it’s got the potential to spiral out of control real fast. To try and prevent that, and save the world from a hacked-WoW-account-induced apocalypse, NATO’s comissioned a set of international laws to try and make cyber-warfare more…civilized. More »
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