Criminal Hackers

In December 1998, a U.S.-based hacker group called Legions of the Underground declared cyberwar on Iraq and China and prepared to protest human rights abuses in those countries by disrupting their Internet access.

About a week later, a coalition of hackers from groups including Cult of the Dead Cow (cDc), L0pht, Chaos Computer Club in Germany, and hacker mags 2600 and Phrack issued a statement condemning the move. "We - the undersigned - strongly oppose any attempt to use the power of hacking to threaten to destroy the information infrastructure of a country, for any reason," … Read more

Someone compromised the free-speech, antisurveillance repository Cryptome.org and hid malware on the site that infected Web surfers over the weekend, Cryptome.org reported.

A malicious PHP file was added to the site on Wednesday and a new directory was created that had logged nearly 3,000 IP addresses between Wednesday and Sunday, according to a post on the site.

The Cryptome.org post said thousands of HTML files in the site's main directory were found to be contaminated with a malicious script that appeared to download exploits from the Blackhole Toolkit "that may compromise a computer though … Read more

Editors' note: This story was originally published June 17, 2011.

The number of hacking events of late is making our heads spin at CNET. There were scores of computer attacks, network intrusions and data breaches in 2011 and the trend shows no signs of abating in 2012.

In previous coverage, we've noted that it seems to be open hacking season, written about some of the hackers and groups who are behind the attacks,and speculated on their motives, so we thought we'd provide a chronological chart listing the attacks so we could all keep up on them. We … Read more

Attackers repeatedly hacked VeriSign's network and stole information in 2010, the company revealed in a quarterly regulatory filing.

The Internet infrastructure provider did not disclose what information was stolen or other details of the attacks in its 10-Q report filed in October with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission that was reported on by Reuters today.

"In 2010, the Company faced several successful attacks against its corporate network in which access was gained to information on a small portion of our computers and servers," the company wrote. "Information stored on the compromised corporate systems was … Read more

A 20-year-old Romanian has been arrested on charges of hacking into Pentagon and NASA servers, stealing confidential data, and posting it on his personal blog, according to a statement today from the Romanian prosecutors office.

Razvan Manole Cernaianu, an information technology student who allegedly used the online alias "TinKode," offered a software program for sale on his blog and also showed a video that demonstrated how he compromised the servers, officials said.

Romanian officials said they were working with the FBI and NASA representatives on the case. An FBI spokesman in Washington, D.C., did not immediately have … Read more

Symantec is urging customers to disable PCAnywhere until it issues a software update to protect them against attacks that could result from the theft of the product's source code.

Someone broke into Symantec's network in 2006 and stole source code for PCAnywhere, which allows customers to remotely connect to other computers, as well as Norton Antivirus Corporate Edition, Norton Internet Security and Norton SystemWorks, the company said last week. Earlier this month, hackers in India affiliated with the Anonymous online activist group said they had gotten the code off servers run by Indian military intelligence.

Hackers have threatened … Read more

If you clicked a link distributed by Anonymous yesterday, you may have unwittingly helped the online activists in their attacks against U.S. government and entertainment industry sites that were organized to protest proposed antipiracy legislation.

Anonymous has launched distributed denial-of-service attacks, designed to shut down Web sites, against government and corporate sites in the past. Typically, supporters download software called Low Orbit Ion Canon (LOIC) that directs their computer to repeatedly try to connect to a target Web site. So many digital knocks on the door, as it were, can shut a site down so no one can get … Read more

Online activists angered over antipiracy legislation in Congress as well as today's indictment of operators of popular file-hosting site MegaUpload attacked the sites of the U.S. Department of Justice, the FBI, Universal Music, and the Motion Picture Association of America, shutting them down at least temporarily, and were targeting many others.

"The Largest Attack Ever by Anonymous - 5,635 People Confirmed Using #LOIC Bring Down Sites!" the AnonDaily Twitter account read, referring to the Low Orbit Ion Cannon (LOIC) tool Anonymous supporters use to launch distributed denial-of-service (DDOS) attacks on sites.

Apparently Anonymous tried a … Read more

Authorities arrested a computer programmer today and charged him with stealing source code worth $9.5 million from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.

Bo Zhang, 32, is accused of taking the software last summer while he was working as a contract employee assigned to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.

Zhang allegedly admitted that in July 2011 he checked out and copied the code onto an external hard drive and on to his own computers, according to the complaint unsealed today. He said he used the code in connection with a computer programming training company he operated, … Read more