Sony’s Javert-like quest to legally punish a hacker accused of jailbreaking the PS3 continues to take soap opera-like turns, with the company accusing him of fleeing for South America and refusing to turn in key evidence, the latter claim which his lawyer denies. [More]
hackers
Microsoft And Feds Take Down World's Largest Spam Botnet
By 3.21.11
Your inbox might feel a little empty for a while because Microsoft and the Feds have taken down the world’s largest botnet, “Rustock,” estimated to have infected over 1 million computers worldwide. [More]
Sony Can Sift Through Alleged Hacker's PayPal Records
By 3.17.11
In it’s all-out legal quest to stomp an alleged hacker who released a PS3 jailbreak, Sony continues to seem to get whatever information it wants via legal channels. After being allowed to collect the IP addresses of anyone who visited the alleged hacker’s site, Sony has now been given the go-ahead from a federal magistrate to collect the man’s PayPal records. [More]
Judge: Sony Can Have IP Address Of Anyone Who Visited Forbidden Site
By 3.7.11
In its ongoing quest to neutralize the alleged hackers who decimated the PS3’s security, Sony won the legal right to track down the IP address of anyone who visited a site on which the PS3 jailbreak was posted. [More]
Sony To Hackers: 'I'll Get You, My Pretties'… In Legalese
By 2.17.11
Stepping up its war on hackers, Sony is talking tough to those who would break down the PlayStation 3 as though it were the Cleveland Cavaliers’ defense. [More]
Sony's "Kevin Butler" Retweets PS3 Jailbreak Code
By 2.9.11
“Kevin Butler” is the fictional Sony VP who is the face of its recent PlayStation ads, so of course he has a Twitter account. It looks like whoever is running the account hasn’t been reading the news much. When a Twitter user tweeted at him the code used to jailbreak PS3’s, the entity misinterpreted the series of letters and numbers and made a Battleship joke, retweeting the code in the process, reports Engadget. This is ironic because Sony has been cracking down with legal threats and attacks on anyone they can find disseminating the jailbreak information. I wonder if Kevin Butler will be getting one of these C&D’s… [More]
Sony Goes After People Who Spread PS3 Hack
By 2.8.11
First Sony went after alleged PS3 hackers who broke down the console’s firmware, opening it up to gamers to run pirated, copied and unlicensed games. Now it wants information on those who posted details of the hack online, even though they had no hand in its creation. [More]
Sony Goes After Alleged PS3 Hackers, Wants Them To Hush Up
By 1.12.11
Hackers have apparently shredded the security innards that stop people from messing with PlayStation 3 firmware, so Sony is wielding its legal katana. [More]
Badware Hosting Sites Growing More Sophisticated, Offer Menu Of Services
By 11.15.10
The illicit economy of phishers and malware perpetrators is growing more sophisticated, and more brazen. “Bulletproof” hosting sites that offered to protect their users from attacks and takedown requests now have corporate-like web pages offering a menu of a la carte services. The only limit is no spam and no porn. Hey, even they have standards. [More]
Hackers Infiltrate D.C. E-Voting System, Force Testing Delays
By 10.6.10
While testing out its electronic vote-by-mail program for overseas voters, the District of Columbia invited hackers to do their worst to break into the system. The programming geeks answered with decisive force, with someone making the site play the University of Michigan’s fight song after a test subject submitted the ballot. D.C. officials suspended testing before patching things up and getting back online. [More]
Russian Hotties Collared In $3M Bank Hack Scam
By 10.1.10
Several comely young Russian woman were snagged by the feds in New York yesterday for allegedly working as money mules for hackers who stole over $3 mil from American bank accounts using trojan viruses. [More]
Loading A PDF Could Give Hackers Total Control Over Your iPhone
By 8.3.10
Better not load any PDFs on your iPhone for a while, not unless you want to risk handing over total control of your device to hackers. The exploit affects all iOS 4 iOS 3.1.2 and higher devices, including the iPod touch and the iPad. [More]
Hackers Bite Apple, AT&T To Breach 114K iPad Owners
By 6.10.10
Some early iPad adopters got a special bonus prize for buying a device that’s sure to be replaced with a vastly superior model a year from now — a data breach in which hackers unearthed account info from 114,000 users, including newscaster Diane Sawyer, New York mayor Michael Bloomerg and movie kingpin Harvey Weinstein. [More]
Facebook Can Warn You When Someone Else Logs Into Your Account
By 5.12.10
By the time someone hacks into your Facebook account and sends all of your friends plaintive messages about being mugged in London, it’s too late to do anything about it. However, Facebook does have an early-warning system of sorts. Using a security setting, you can have the service alert you whenever your account is accessed from another location, giving you a chance to (hopefully) force the intruder out and change your password.
TJX Hacker May Have Also Been Working For The Secret Service For $75,000 A Year
By 3.23.10
Albert Gonzalez, the mastermind behind most of the multi-million dollar credit card breaches in the past few years, is being sentenced this week. (Feds are asking for 25 years.) Now his former accomplice, Stephen Watt, has told Wired that while Gonzalez was busy stealing and selling credit card data he was also being paid under the table by the U.S. Secret Service to inform on others, earning as much as $75,000 in cash annually. [More]
Credit Card Hacker And ID Theft Forum Overlord Sentenced To 13 Years Prison
By 2.12.10
Max Vision, the security consultant who was first sent to prison in 2001 for messing with the Pentagon, has now been sent to 13 years in prison for “stealing nearly two million credit card numbers from banks, businesses and other hackers,” reports Wired. The FBI took a renewed interest in Vision in 2006 after he successfully made a power grab on several competing black market ID theft websites. “I’ve changed,” Vision wrote in a letter to the court, and although he faced life in prison, he was given the shorter sentence partly because he’d cooperated with the government. With good behavior he’ll be back out in 2018. [More]
Bank Sues Victim To Avoid Replacing $200k In Stolen Funds
By 1.28.10
What constitutes adequate security for a bank? PlainsCapital Bank in Lubbock, Texas says what it currently has is enough, and if after all that some crooks still manage to steal your money, it’s not the bank’s fault. The bank has preemptively sued a business customer, Hillary Machinery, to absolve itself from any liability on what it couldn’t get back from the more than $800,000 that was stolen by foreign hackers last November. [More]
