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hacktivism

Tech VIPs, family take to Web with sorrow, anger over Swartz

The suicide of 26-year-old computer programmer and Internet activist Aaron Swartz has inspired expressions of sorrow and anger from the tech community throughout the day today.

World Wide Web creator Sir Tim Berners-Lee wrote a poem in honor of Swartz, which he posted to a forum on the W3C's Web site (he also tweeted an abridged version):

Aaron is dead.

Wanderers in this crazy world, we have lost a mentor, a wise elder.

Hackers for right, we are one down, we have lost one of our own.

Nurtures, careers, listeners, feeders, parents all, we have lost a child.

Let … Read more

Anonymous targets Israeli Web sites in protest over Gaza

Anonymous is in the midst of a hacking campaign against a number of Israeli sites in protest of attacks taking place on Gaza.

The hacking spree, dubbed OpIsrael and begun early Thursday, has resulted in so many Israeli Web sites being defaced or shut down through methods including denial of service (DoS) attacks, that it's hard to keep count. However, some enterprising hacktivists have begun compiling lists of affected Web sites. Targets have included governmental, retail, and business sites -- some belonging to the automotive and fashion industries.

The Bank of Jerusalem, one of Israel's largest financial institutions, … Read more

Old-time hacktivists: Anonymous, you've crossed the line

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

Anonymous invites CIA, others to its weekend party

Anonymous is having a busy weekend.

The loose-knit hacking collective, which last week scored a coup against the FBI, claimed yesterday to have taken down the CIA's Web site, in what appeared to be a distributed denial of service attack (one of the group's specialties, such relatively unsophisticated attacks paralyze Web servers with waves of data requests).

The group also posted information it said was pilfered from police and government servers in Alabama, and, as blog RT reported, took down the Mexican Senate and Interior Ministry Web sites. It also said it had exposed e-mail addresses from the … Read more

McAfee: Spammers exploiting more news stories

"Bomb Blast." "Jackson is still alive: proof." "Obama cursed by Pope." These are just a few of the subjects used by cybercriminals last year to trick people into opening malware-infected e-mails.

Spam that uses the latest news headlines was just one of the hot trends last year in the world of cybercrime, according to McAfee's "Q4 Threats Report" (PDF), released Tuesday. The latest threat assessment also noted a rise in "hacktivism," or politically motivated cyberattacks.

Though spam levels in the fourth quarter actually dropped by 24 percent from the … Read more