hacker

Although Twitter hasn't revealed who may have been victimized in last week's suspected massive account hack, an analysis suggests that accounts with high levels of influence may have been among those affected.

Within days of accusations that hackers in China were responsible for network breaches at The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal, the microblogging site revealed Friday that about 250,000 accounts might have been compromised. In e-mails to affected users, Twitter said it reset passwords for accounts it suspected of being compromised after identifying unauthorized attempts to access Twitter user data.

"This attack … Read more

Twitter may have two-factor authentication in the works for its micro-blogging platform to increase its security.

According to a job advertisement first spotted by The Guardian, Twitter is looking for a software engineer to fit in to its product security division.

One of the responsibilities for the new engineer will be to "design and develop user-facing security features, such as multifactor authentication and fraudulent log-in detection." The job listing also says that the new engineer's work will "directly impact the security of hundreds of millions of Twitter users."

Other companies have been gradually introducing multi-factor … Read more

The Wall Street Journal said today that it's been the target of Chinese hackers stemming from its coverage of China, echoing reports from other news organizations.

Hackers infiltrated the newspaper's computer system through its Beijing bureau in order to monitor the paper's coverage of China, according to the report. Paula Keve, chief spokeswoman for the Journal's parent company, Dow Jones, issued a statement that said the hacks "are not an attempt to gain commercial advantage or to misappropriate customer information." The company completed a "network overhaul" on Thursday to increase security.

The … Read more

After a lengthy newspaper investigation on China's prime minister, The New York Times claims, the newspaper's computer systems were infiltrated and attacked by Chinese hackers.

The attacks began four months ago and culminated with hackers stealing the corporate password for every Times employee, according to the paper. The personal computers of 53 of these employees were also broken into and spied on.

The Times discovered the attacks after observing "unusual activity" in its computer system. Security investigators were then able to get into the system and track the hackers' movements, see what the infiltrators were after, … Read more

Anonymous has set its sights on Mexico's Department of Defense.

The group's Mexican legion has claimed responsibility for waging a distributed-denial-of-service attack on the government site, rendering it inoperable for several hours yesterday, according to the Associated Press.

During the attack, the group posted a statement on the media section of the government's Web site. The statement claimed that a "bad government" was running the country.

"Our struggle is for life, and our bad government offers death as the future," the statement read, according to Spanish language tech news site Web Adictos. "… Read more

Facebook bends to no one, particularly not bankers and investors looking for perfection. That's the message Wall Street received with the beta release of Graph Search, the social network's first milestone launch since becoming a public company.

Graph Search is Facebook's experimental take on search and alters the social-networking experience to support discovery through natural language queries on people, photos, places, and interests.

Graph Search is so significant in scope and purpose that Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg anointed the product a "third pillar," which makes it as core to Facebook as Timeline and News Feed. … Read more

Just hours after the Massachusetts Institute of Technology pledged an investigation into its role in events leading up to the suicide of Aaron Swartz, online hacktivist group Anonymous defaced the school's Web site.

Swartz, who championed open access to documents on the Internet, committed suicide on Friday. The 26-year-old was arrested in July 2011 and accused of stealing 4 million documents from MIT and Jstor, an archive of scientific journals and academic papers. He faced $4 million in fines and more than 50 years in prison if convicted.

After MIT President L. Rafael Reif issued a statement this afternoon … Read more

It's hard to imagine a group that adheres to anarchic ideology would want its actions legalized under U.S. law. But that is exactly what Anonymous is doing.

The loose-knit group of hackers submitted a petition to President Obama this week asking that distributed denial-of-service attacks be recognized as a legal form of protest.

The petition, which is posted on the White House's "We the People" Web site, claims that DDoS attacks are not illegal hacking but rather a way for people to carry out protests online. Similar to the Occupy movement when protesters pitched tents … Read more

Microsoft's Windows RT can apparently run unsigned desktops app with a little bit of hacking.

In a blog posted yesterday, a hacker dubbed clrokr described how he was able to change a value in the Windows RT kernel to bypass certain restrictions set up by Microsoft. The blog details how clrokr tracked down the right value to open up the types of apps that RT can run. And it includes his code for other enterprising hackers.

The specific value can't be permanently altered on devices enabled with Secure Boot, but it can be changed in memory. As a … Read more