hack

Ally Financial sees 'unusual traffic,' cyberattack fears abound

Ally Financial is experiencing some odd traffic issues that have prompted some to wonder if there's more there than meets the eye.

In a statement to CNET today, an Ally Financial spokeswoman confirmed that the company has witnessed some unusual activity across its site, but so far, no major issues have erupted.

"Ally has seen some unusual traffic on our Web site, which we continue to monitor; however, we have not experienced the type of disruption that has been associated with the denial of service attacks," the spokeswoman told CNET in an e-mailed statement. "There has … Read more

Deadly exploit briefly massacres World of Warcraft

Imagine your virtual character relaxing in the confines of the massive World of Warcraft city Orgrimmar, when suddenly, zero health points. Upon spinning the mouse cursor around, everything around you also simultaneously perishes. Not long after the death, countless skeletons of fallen players stack up upon the city streets.

While this sounds like a bad dream that might strike someone who plays World of Warcraft too much, the deadly scenario played out yesterday across many WoW servers around the world. Entire Horde and Alliance megacities -- including Stormwind -- suddenly became graveyards for thousands afflicted by an in-game exploit carried out by malicious players. … Read more

Hackers post data from dozens of breached college servers

A group of hackers claims to have stolen thousands of personal records by breaching the servers of more than 50 universities around the world, including Harvard, Stanford, Cornell, and Princeton.

A group calling itself GhostShell posted to text-sharing site Pastebin more than 120,000 records from the breached servers, including thousands of names, usernames, passwords, addresses, and phone numbers of students and faculty. While most hacker activity is motivated by a desire to steal identities or pranksterism, GhostShell said the goal of its data dump was to focus public attention on the state of higher education:

We wanted to bring … Read more

Facebook and Gates Foundation host education hackathon

Facebook partnered with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation today to host an education-centered hackathon called "HackEd."

The goal of "HackEd" is to kick-off the Gates Foundation's new $2.5 million investment fund called the College Knowledge Challenge. The fund is dedicated to getting developers to build apps for students that would assist them in navigating the college process -- this means helping young folks get into school and stay there.

"At Facebook, we believe that a more open and connected world can have a big impact in addressing some of society's biggest … Read more

Multiple Samsung handsets vulnerable to remote wipe hack

A number of Samsung smartphones have been found to be vulnerable to a remote factory reset, according to details surfacing today. The hack, which was detailed at a recent Ekoparty security conference, shows that the Galaxy S3 is susceptible to the simple reset.… Read more

Oracle databases easy to hack, says researcher

A researcher showed today that Oracle's databases could be hacked with brute-force attacks using only the database's name and a username, according to Kaspersky Lab Security News.

Esteban Martinez Fayo, who works for AppSec Inc., was demonstrating his discovery at a security conference in Argentina and said that within just five hours on a regular PC using a special tool he could hack through easy passwords and access users' data.

"It's pretty simple," Martinez Fayo told the security blog Dark Reading. "The attacker just needs to know a valid username in the database, and … Read more

Two men plead guilty to hacking Subway stores

Two Romanian men pled guilty to working with others to hack into point-of-sale terminals at hundreds of Subway stores in the U.S. to steal credit card data from more than 146,000 accounts between 2009 and 2011, federal prosecutors said.

Iulian Dolan, 28, and Cezar Iulian Butu, 27, entered guilty pleas Monday in federal court to one count of conspiracy to commit computer fraud, the Department of Justice said in a statement.

Dolan also pleaded guilty to two counts of conspiracy to commit credit card fraud and has agreed to spend seven years in prison. He admitted helping the … Read more

Man hacks Kinect to help his mother e-mail after stroke

It's been 12 years since Chad Ruble's mother suffered a stroke that led to aphasia, a disorder that affects language processing but not intelligence. Most of the one million Americans who have the disorder experience difficulty both reading and writing, according to the National Aphasia Association, and Chad's mother Lindy was unable to recognize text and thus unable to use a keyboard.

So Chad did what any computer-savvy son should: he hacked a Kinect to help her.

After designing a visual dashboard of emoticons (happy, sad, angry, tired, etc.), each of which can be further qualified by an amount (expressed as signal strength -- one, two, three, or four bars), Chad says he turned to a Kinect, some gesture recognition code, and the simple OpenNI library for Processing to track the position of his mother's hand. A green arrow button sends the email and a red X resets the screen.… Read more

Phony Al-Jazeera text messages sent by pro-Syrian gov't hackers

Al-Jazeera has become the second news agency in a little more than a month to be targeted by pro-Syrian government hackers.

The Qatar-based satellite TV station revealed in a tweet this morning that its short messaging service had been compromised and used to send false news reports, including a report that Qatar's prime minister had been assassinated:

"We'd like to inform our subscribers that Aljazeera SMS service is being compromised by pirates and they've sent fake news with no basis," the news organization said, according to a translation by The Hacker News.

A group calling … Read more