Items tagged with Hacking
Thinking of using those newfound hacking skills to engage in nefarious behavior? Think again. Albert Gonzalez is a name that'll go down in hacking history, but it's not for anything positive. After being charged with stealing some 130 million credit and debit card numbers, Albert plead guilty to previous data-theft charges in New York and Massachusetts. His penalty? Aside from dealing with a stream of media coverage, he'll be forced to cough up $1.65 million in assets. Oh, and then there's a little thing called "jail time." He'll be dealing with 15 to 25 years of that, after Federal prosecutors in Boston charged Gonzalez and others with stealing credit and debit card numbers from companies including...
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In what some might consider the most visible Internet-based prank to date, frequenters of the 4chan image-based bulletin board site's "/b/ - Random" imageboard claim to have rigged Time Magazine's Top 100 online poll, so as to render 4chan's founder, "moot," the winner. And even though some fairly convincing circumstantial evidence points to a hack of epic proportions, Time Magazine is accepting the poll's results as official, and has declared moot as the "new owner of the title World's Most Influential Person." The message hidden in the first letter of the first 21 winnersis very strong proof that the poll was hacked.(Credit: Paul Lamere) This not the first time that 4chan's users have been...
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No less than three different browser platforms have succumbed to zero-day exploits by the end of the first day of the three-day long, third-annual Pwn2Own contest being held at the CanSecWest 2009 digital security conference in Vancouver, British Columbia. Safari on Mac OS X was the first to fall, followed by Internet Explorer 8 (IE8) on Windows 7, and then a second Mac OS X Safari exploit, and finally Firefox (the specific OS-version of Firefox was not supplied in the announcement). Making this even more impressive is that the first winner of the day, Charlie Miller, was the same guy who was the first winner in last year's contest; and the three additional exploits from day one were all cracked...
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Those white-hat-wearing, security-exploit-finding folks over at TippingPoint Digital Vaccine Laboratories are at it again. At the CanSecWest 2009, digital security conference to be held in Vancouver, British Columbia, next month, TippingPoint's Zero Day Initiative (ZDI) team will be sponsoring their third annual Pwn2Own contest. This time around, contestants will be attempting to demonstrate vulnerabilities of smartphones and browsers. At last year's Pwn2Own challenge, a team of three security researchers successfully exploited a vulnerability in the Mac OS version of the Safari browser, and they walked away with a $10,000 and the very MacBook Air they hacked. Also, security researcher, Shan...
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Crackulous is a one-click iPhone / iPod Touch app cracking tool. Previously it was only available to a select few, but it's now been released as a public beta. Obviously not good news for developers, it adds yet another reason to the list of reasons to jailbreak your iPhone or iPod Touch. Some of them are legitimate, such as being able to get functionality (such as Copy and Paste) or tethering that are not available on non-jailbroken iPhones. Being able to spread apps around after cracking isn't legit, of course. Here's the info: CRACKULOUS v.9 We at Hackulous have decided to open up the beta version of Crackulous for the entire community. If you haven't already heard about Crackulous, it's an...
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When we were a teenagers, we might TP the house of someone we disliked. Some Maryland teenagers instead have figured out how to fool speed cameras by spoofing the license plates of their "enemies," resulting in those spoofed receiving unwarranted speeding tickets.Students have dubbed the prank the "Speed Camera Pimping Game." Originating from Wootton High School, students duplicate the license plates by printing plate numbers on glossy photo paper, using fonts that are similar to those on Maryland license plates. They then run by a speed camera, so that those they feel have "wronged them" receive a citation in the mail.Ironically, the school says it is a "Blue Ribbon School of Excellence." Excellence...
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A report, to be presented at a California computer-security conference in May, suggests that pacemakers and defibrillators may be targets for hacking.Millions of Americans have pacemakers, which keeps hearts beating regularly, or an implanted defibrillator, which can restart stopped hearts with an electric jolt. After implanting a defibrillator under a patient's skin, a doctor uses a special device, about the size of a breadbox, to tell the defibrillator what to do -- for example, to instruct it to keep the heart beating at a certain rate or deliver a test jolt.The devices, called programmers, communicate with a defibrillator using radio waves. To prevent tampering, only physicians are allowed...
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According to research provided by the security firm Securina, Mac OS X has approximately 10 times the number of critical vulnerabilities of Windows XP and Vista combined. We'll let the numbers speak for themselves:“While Mac OS X had 234 highly critical vulnerabilities reported in 2007, Vista and XP combined had 23, Ou wrote."This shows that Apple had more than five times the number of flaws per month than Windows XP and Vista in 2007, and most of these flaws are serious," wrote Ou. "Clearly this goes against conventional wisdom."Macs have traditionally been viewed as suffering from fewer vulnerabilities than Windows.”Of course the number of flaws isn't the only important metric...
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Microsoft and Toshiba today announced the formation of a consortium to hype advanced HD DVD interactive technology. They mentioned "interactivity and interoperability" and said they'd "maximize consumer satisfaction," among other things. Long story short: They want to sell you things while you're watching movies. Major Hollywood studios such as Paramount Pictures, Universal Studios and Warner Bros. as well as DreamWorks Animation SKG will join the consortium, which will be established by the end of the year, a Toshiba spokeswoman told Dow Jones Newswires. Technology that will be introduced, for instance, will enable users watching HD DVD movies to purchase goods used by the actors...
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Bank hacking is up, despite new & improved security measures and growing public awareness regarding internet security: “SecureWorks reported that between June 2006 and December 2006, they blocked attacks from about 808 hackers per bank per month. From the beginning of this year through June, there's been an average of 1,462 hackers launching attacks at each of the company's bank clients. As for the credit unions, SecureWorks reported blocking attacks from 1,110 hackers per credit union per month. That number rose to 1,799 this year.” What is the root of the increase in hacking? One of the key reasons is the virus kits that are readily available for purchase.It used to be that it took...
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AMD got a little buzz last week when they talked about the bigtime capabilities of their next-generation processors, code-named Barcelona, due out later this year. As usual, Intel doesn't hesitate to ramp up the pressure on their competitor, and is planning huge price cuts on their existing versions of quad-core processors for desktops and servers. According to DailyTech, the price cuts will kick in on July 22nd. The first part of the price cuts will center on Intel's quad-core desktop processors. The Q6600, which Intel launched in February, currently sells for $530 in quantities of 1000. When the product was originally launched, it was priced at $851 in quantities of 1000. The...
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Intel announced price cuts, as much as 40%, on both its desktop and server processors. Rival chipmaker AMD announced a 611 million dollar loss for the first quarter already. Someone please take AMD's belt and shoelaces away for the rest of the week. For the desktop market, the Core 2 Quad Q6600 has fallen in price to US$530 while CPUs in the Core 2 Duo E6X00-series have been cut by up to 40%. Intel also introduced two new processors, the E6420 and E6320, which share equivalent features to the similarly numbered E6400 and E6300 CPUs but have an increased L2 cache of 4MB. Entire list after the jump. What do you think? Do you like the idea of AMD challenging Intel enough...
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A PS3 or an X-Box 360 is a great big powerful thing. But it's Nintendo's inexpensive Wii that seems to be capturing people's imaginations. Its simple, intuitive controller has already spawned all kinds of little hacks. But some of the more interesting uses of the controller aren't part of Nintendo's official game library. Within weeks of Wii's November launch, videos were making the rounds on YouTube showing the controller used to move a PC's mouse cursor, play Half-Life 2 and even control a music synthesizer and drum machine. Hackers quickly discovered that the controller was using standard Bluetooth signals for its wireless...
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