Criminal Hackers

Hackers today released personal information for Goldman Sachs Chief Executive Officer Lloyd Blankfein.

The document, posted to the Pastebin Web site (which had been deleted by Wednesday morning), includes the CEO's age, recent addresses, details of litigation he has been involved in, as well as registration information for businesses, but no sensitive information such as financial data.

Goldman Sachs representatives did not immediately respond to a call seeking comment.

A group using the handle "CabinCr3w" took credit for the data dump, but did not say why Blankfein was targeted. Goldman Sachs benefited from the U.S. government'… Read more

Microsoft has put a halt to the Kelihos botnet and is accusing a Czech resident of hosting the botnet and using it to deliver spam and steal data, the company said today.

Kelihos, also known as "Waledac 2.0" after a previous botnet that Microsoft shut down last year, comprised about 41,000 infected computers worldwide and was capable of sending 3.8 billion spam e-mails per day, according to Microsoft.

The complaint filed last week in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia accuses Dominique Alexander Piatti, Dotfree Group SRO and John Does 1-22 of infecting victim computers with malware to create the Kelihos botnet, using it to send unregulated pharmaceutical and other spam, harvest e-mails and passwords, conduct fraudulent stock scams and, in some cases, promote sites dealing with sexual exploitation of children.

Meanwhile, subdomains were allegedly used to infect Mac computers with MacDefender scareware, according to the complaint. Piatti could not immediately be reached for comment.… Read more

The MySQL site, whose open-source repository serves some of the most popular Web sites, has been hacked and was being used to serve malware to visitors running Windows before it was cleaned up today, a security firm said.

Armorize Chief Executive Wayne Huang and some of his firm's researchers warned about the attack in a blog post today.

MySQL.com acted quickly to remove the malware so computers would stop getting infected, but Huang told CNET he did not know how long site visitors were vulnerable or how many may have been infected. Armorize estimated that MySQL.com gets … Read more

A 47-year-old homeless man has pleaded not guilty to charges that he joined in an Anonymous-organized cyberattack that temporarily shut down Santa Cruz County servers.

Chris Doyon was arrested yesterday and is being held until a bail hearing scheduled for Thursday in U.S. District Court in San Jose, Calif., his lawyer, Jay Leiderman, told CNET this afternoon. "Hopefully he will be released on Thursday," Leiderman said.

Also listed as a defendant on the indictment with Doyon is 26-year-old Joshua John Covelli of Fairborn, Ohio. And in a separate case that involves cyberattack charges linked to Anonymous spin-off … Read more

An Arizona man was arrested today for allegedly stealing data from Sony Pictures Entertainment earlier this year, and two others were indicted on charges of participating in a denial-of-service (DoS) attack that temporarily shut down Santa Cruz County servers late last year.

Cody Andrew Kretsinger, 23, of Phoenix was indicted September 2 by a federal grand jury on charges of conspiracy and unauthorized impairment of a protected computer, the FBI said in a statement. Kretsinger could not be reached for comment.

Separately, 47-year-old Christopher Doyon of Mountain View, Calif., was arrested and appeared before Magistrate Judge Howard Lloyd in U.… Read more

In an increasingly digital world, the real threat to citizens' privacy is data collection by corporations and not the Patriot Act, said former U.S. cybersecurity and counterterrorism advisor Richard Clarke.

Clarke, who ruffled Bush administration feathers when he complained that U.S. officials ignored warnings about the al Qaeda threat before the attacks, says Americans are safer from terrorism now, partly because of the Patriot Act. Critics, however, have maintained that the law, enacted after September 11 to root out terrorists, has been interpreted broadly to include citizens with no links to terrorism.

U.S. companies, meanwhile, are facing … Read more

I had hoped that, after Ricky Gervais said whatever he felt like at the 2010 Golden Globes, award show hosts could joke about anything.

It appears not.

After a revelation by Deadline, "30 Rock" actor Alec Baldwin tweeted today that Fox (aka News Corp) had, indeed, removed a little joke that he had created with the writers specially for the occasion.

No, it wasn't a joke about Tom Cruise's height, James Franco's presentational skills, or Brad Pitt's exciting personal life.

It was a joke about the News of the World phone-hacking scandal. You might … Read more

Hundreds of Web sites hosted by Go Daddy were found to be compromised this week and were redirecting visitors who'd arrived at the sites from search engines to a site with malware on it, the hosting provider told CNET today.

"Wednesday, Go Daddy's Security Team detected that approximately 445 hosting accounts were compromised," said Todd Redfoot, chief information security officer at Go Daddy. "The accounts were accessed by using the account holder's username and password."

"We are still investigating the issue, but so far our security team is confirming this was not … Read more

The FBI office in Los Angeles is investigating a series of hacking incidents targeting high-profile victims.

"The FBI is investigating a person or group responsible for computer intrusions of high-profile figures," FBI spokeswoman Laura Eimiller told CNET in a phone interview today.

Eimiller said she couldn't say how many alleged victims there may have been, but estimated that there were "dozens." The investigation has been going on since late 2010, she said.

Yesterday, photos of Scarlett Johansson were posted to BuzzFeed that appeared to have been taken by the star of herself. Johansson asked the FBI to investigate, the Los Angeles Times reported.

The news follows leaks of celebrity photos reported in previous months. In March, Vanessa Hudgens met with the FBI after nude photos of her were allegedly stolen from her Gmail account and released online, TMZ reported at the time.

It's unclear who is behind the Johansson incident and whether all of the reported cases are linked or even legitimate.

Unlike corporations, which typically shun publicity for hacking, celebrities--whose careers seem to rise and fall with headlines--may have a motivation for going public with hacking claims, either to get attention or to deflect bad publicity. Meanwhile, celebrities are an attractive target for headline-seeking hackers. Sometimes it's difficult to link the attack to a specific party. … Read more