hack

Hackers steal customer data from Barnes & Noble keypads

Hackers broke into keypads at more than 60 Barnes & Noble bookstores and made off with the credit card information for customers who shopped at the stores as recently as last month.

The company discovered the breach on September 14 but kept it quiet while the FBI attempted to track the hackers. Hackers broke into the point-of-sale terminals at 63 stores across the country, including locations in New York City, San Diego, Miami, and Chicago.

Since discovering the breach, the company has uninstalled all 7,000 point-of-sale terminals from its hundreds of stores for examination. Although only one terminal in … Read more

Sony PSN hacking lawsuit dismissed by judge

A California district judge has dismissed a handful of charges that plaintiffs brought against Sony, including negligence, restitution, and unjust enrichment in its handling of a PlayStation Network data breach last year.

Several lawsuits were filed against Sony PlayStation Network in the wake of a major security breach of the personal data of more than 75 million customers in April 2011.

On Friday, Judge Anthony Battaglia of the U.S. District Court in Southern California ruled that one of those class action suits is invalid, according to Courthouse News.

When the attack happened in 2011, more than 75 million customer … Read more

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