A former Gizmodo employee had his Twitter account breached, and the hackers then used it to crack the gadget site's Twitter account and send out racist tweets yesterday. Talk about a bad day. Emil Protalinski at CNET sister site ZDNet has the story.
Every year at Defcon there are rumors of some network being hacked. It would be unusual if such tales didn't crop up at the world's largest hacker conference. But this year there were reports from a number of credible sources of strange behavior on phones -- reports that had people more paranoid than normal.
Here's what people said they were seeing last weekend, along with some possible explanations for the scenarios:
Voice mail messages that led to unknown numbers instead of to the standard phone number that points to the user's automated voice message recovery system.… Read more
The 19th century military theorist Carl von Clausewitz famously asserted that war was an expression of politics by other means. A 21st century postscript: add cyber hacking to the list of means.
With Syria in the midst of a raging civil war, somebody hacked the Reuters.com Web site on Friday with a phony post purporting to carry an interview with Free Syrian Army head Riad al-Asaad.
"Our blogging platform was compromised and fabricated blog posts were falsely attributed to several Reuters journalists," the company said in a statement and later tweeted. "We are working to address … Read more
When a few hundred Dropbox users began receiving spam emails about online casinos and gambling sites two weeks ago, it seemed like something was up. And indeed there was.
The online file storage service confirmed today that hackers accessed usernames and passwords from third party sites and then used them to get into Dropbox users' accounts.
"Our investigation found that usernames and passwords recently stolen from other websites were used to sign in to a small number of Dropbox accounts. We've contacted these users and have helped them protect their accounts," the company wrote in a blog … Read more
LAS VEGAS -- A young hacker here at Defcon 20 has pulled back the dense curtain of text and ambiguity surrounding warranties to show consumers how they can hack the warranty system -- and to tell companies how to improve their warranty management.
"Darkred," as he prefers to be called, explained to a standing-room only session that it's the way manufacturers manage serial numbers and warranties that allows the system to be hacked.
"The serial number makes you the owner of a product," said the 17-year-old, a high school senior from Texas. Darkred declined to … Read more
LAS VEGAS -- While Apple was making its decidedly lackluster Black Hat debut just one floor up, security researcher Jonathan Zdziarski was explaining the dark art of iOS app hacking to a smaller but still crowded room.
A senior forensics scientist at viaForensics, he clearly didn't have much faith in the security of apps running on iOS. "iOS can be infected through a new zero-day, or you can take a phone and run real fast. Apparently, bars are a great way to pick up iPhones," he said as the audience chuckled, clearly remembering the two separate lost iPhone prototype incidents. … Read moreFacebook is to widen its "bug bounty" program to reward researchers who spot holes in its corporate network.
According to a Bloomberg report today, the move will be announced at the Defcon hacking conference in Las Vegas.
Facebook already pays a bug bounty to outside hackers who report weaknesses in its products, but the move extends the program to its own infrastructure, too.
Rewarding "white hat" companies and individuals who unearth vulnerabilities in Web services and report them, rather than exploit them, is "not a new concept. The reasoning is thus: entice individuals with cash … Read more
LAS VEGAS -- There's much more to hacking than just the Hollywood portrayal of a speed typing contest, say the computer security professionals who've developed a new hacking-themed card game called Control-Alt-Hack.
Control-Alt-Hack is based on Steve Jackson Games' Ninja Burger, but from the characters to the mission cards to the entropy cards, the demystification of white hat computer security is the name of this game. Game co-designer, security researcher, and University of Washington Computer Security and Privacy Research Lab honorary member Adam Shostack said at the Black Hat 2012 confab here that when it comes to teaching … Read more
LAS VEGAS -- Researchers have uncovered a huge amount of malware and registered domains being used by criminals linked to China who are conducting cyber-espionage on a wide range of government, industry, and human rights activists.
The growing menace from these "Advanced Persistent Threats" is detailed in a report unveiled today called "Chasing APT." In an interview at the Black Hat security conference here, Joe Stewart, director of malware research at Dell Secureworks Counter Threat Unit, said that over the last 18 months he's been monitoring attacks designed to steal data from organizations around the … Read more
You may not be as safe in your locked hotel room as you think.
Keycard door locks from Onity -- used in more than 4 million hotel rooms around the world -- are susceptible to vulnerabilities that could lead to a security bypass, according to Cody Brocious, a 24-year-old Mozilla developer and security researcher. Brocious, who is expected to present his findings at the Black Hat security conference tomorrow, showed Forbes how he is able to open hotel doors with a gadget he built with materials costing less than $50.
Brocious' device spoofs a portable programming device used to control … Read more
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