hacker

It's been three months since the arrest of a handful of people accused of conducting denial-of-service and other attacks on police and corporate networks as part of the notorious LulzSec hacking crew.

Yet rather than laying low following the arrests, hacker activists are still going strong and, in fact, regrouping, taking up the baton from the Lulz crew or citing dissatisfaction with the schizophrenic nature of all the various Anonymous operations. Suddenly, there is "LulzSec Reborn," "MalSec," and "SpexSec," fresh names for groups of malicious hackers using old techniques.

It's unknown if … Read more

Credit card processor Global Payments said today that in the course of investigating the theft of 1.5 million credit card numbers, it has discovered that hackers may also have stolen consumer data from servers.

"Our ongoing investigation recently revealed potential unauthorized access to personal information collected from a subset of merchant applicants," the company said in a statement on its Web site.

"It is unclear whether the intruders looked at or took any personal information from the company's systems; however, the company will notify potentially-affected individuals in the coming days with helpful information and make … Read more

Last.fm today urged its users to change their passwords because of a compromise that may be related to a huge password leak involving LinkedIn and eHarmony.

"We are currently investigating the leak of some Last.fm user passwords. This follows recent password leaks on other sites, as well as information posted online," a Last.fm blog post said. "As a precautionary measure, we're asking all our users to change their passwords immediately."

The blog post did not say how many users were affected or how the passwords were leaked. A Last.fm executive did … Read more

Update 1:11 p.m. PT: LinkedIn confirms that passwords were "compromised."

So far, LinkedIn has come up empty on the password leak reported earlier today.

The company's latest tweet simply states that "our team continues to investigate, but at this time, we're still unable to confirm that any security breach has occurred. Stay tuned here."

Assuming the initial report was authentic, LinkedIn's failure to find any sign of compromise in its system doesn't jibe with the number of people on Twitter who say they've found their own hashed LinkedIn passwords … Read more

Hacktivists from the online group Anonymous claim to have taken down the Chicago Police Department's Web site in the wake of violent clashes between the police and protesters.

Members of AntiS3curityOPS, which claims to be affiliated with Anonymous, posted a video on YouTube taking credit for a hacking that allegedly brought down the page and accusing Chicago police of brutality during clashes Saturday night with protesters, who were demonstrating against the NATO summit discussing the ongoing war in Afghanistan.

"We are actively engaged in actions against the Chicago Police Department, and encourage anyone to take up the cause … Read more

Ustream was hit with a distributed denial-of-service attack today that apparently was designed to interfere with the streaming of video from antigovernment demonstrations in Russia, the CEO of the live streaming site told CNET.

"We are 100 percent confident that they were targeting a specific channel on Ustream of a Russian citizen journalist. This is the third time in the last six months that a specific Russian citizen journalist was directly targeted through this complex and highly adaptive attack," Brad Hunstable, co-founder and CEO of Ustream said in a phone interview from Budapest. "We get DDoS attacks … Read more

Twitter is investigating the release of what appear to be thousands of user account passwords and e-mail addresses.

"We are currently looking into the situation. In the meantime, we have pushed out password resets to accounts that may have been affected," Twitter spokesman Robert Weeks told CNET in an e-mail. "For those who are concerned that their account may have been compromised, we suggest resetting your passwords and more in our Help Center."

The user data, so vast that it took five Pastebin pages to post, was released yesterday and blogged about on Airdemon.net, putting … Read more

YoVille players starting posting complaints on the gaming company's forum about a month ago. Strange happenings were afoot -- players' virtual items were stolen and not returned and some players' property supply was completely depleted.

Apparently, the game had been hacked. According to the tech news site VentureBeat, hackers disrupted YoVille's gameplay for about 1,000 players during a couple weeks of April. "The Best YoVille Hackers" claimed responsibility for the hack.

"We detected unusual activity in YoVille, and it coincided with reports from a small number of users," Zynga's chief security officer … Read more

The British military's head of cybersecurity, Jonathan Shaw, admitted that there have been a number of successful attacks into the Ministry of Defense's computer systems, according to the Guardian.

"The number of serious incidents is quite small, but it is there," Shaw told the Guardian in a final interview before he retires. "And those are the ones we know about. The likelihood is there are problems in there we don't know about."

He wouldn't say how many attacks there have been, but he did emphasize that it was serious enough to make … Read more