Tag Archives: hacking

Reuters reports: Senior government officials in multiple U.S.-allied countries were targeted earlier this year with hacking software that used Facebook Inc’s WhatsApp to take over users’ phones, according to people familiar with the messaging company’s investigation. Sources familiar with WhatsApp’s internal investigation into the breach said a “significant” portion of the known victims are high-profile government and military officials spread …

ZNet reports: Cyber criminals are increasingly turning their attention to hacking Internet of Things devices as connected products proliferate – and there’s one smart device in particular that is catching hackers’ attention. This new target was uncovered by by researchers at Trend Micro, which carried out an examination of dark web marketplaces in five different languages – Russian, Portuguese, English, …

Buzzfeed News reports: The Twitter account of Jack Dorsey, the CEO of Twitter, appears to have been hacked. On Friday afternoon, the @jack account tweeted a link to a Discord chat and RT’d a series of tweets, including one that read, “follow me i am jacks daddy.” The account also tweeted the N-word, and antisemitic remarks. Discord took down the …

The Philadelphia Inquirer reports: A Haverford College student who used a campus computer to attempt to hack into an IRS database to obtain Donald Trump’s tax returns days before the 2016 presidential election pleaded guilty Tuesday to two misdemeanor crimes in federal court. Justin Hiemstra, 22, who finished his studies in May but will not get his degree until he …

The New York Times reports: A software engineer in Seattle hacked into a server holding customer information for Capital One and obtained the personal data of over 100 million people, federal prosecutors said on Monday, in one of the largest thefts of data from a bank. The suspect, Paige Thompson, 33, left a trail online for investigators to follow as …

USA Today reports:  Credit-reporting company Equifax will pick up the tab in a deal with the Federal Trade Commission, Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and 50 states and territories to settle allegations that it did not implement sufficient security measures to protect its network. The deal calls for Equifax to pay at least $575 million, including $300 million for free credit …

The Guardian reports: The report from Agnes Callamard, the UN special rapporteur, sets out in forensic detail concerns about the behaviour of Saudi Arabia, both before and after the murder of the dissident journalist Jamal Khashoggi. It also details the potential threats posed to journalists and academics by the kingdom’s use of intrusive spyware. This is a threat the Guardian …

Hello, old friends. Let’s try this again, shall we? Rather obviously, the last couple of days have been a nightmare on wheels as your beleaguered host and his tireless tech team have battled a malicious malware attack that essentially forced a rewrite of this here website thingy. As I may have made clear in the past, my knowledge of coding …

Axios reports: U.S. Army whistleblower Chelsea Manning has been jailed again on civil contempt charges for refusing to cooperate with a grand jury subpoena on Thursday. Manning told reporters earlier on Thursday from in front of the courthouse that she’d rather remain in jail “forever,” than testify before a grand jury on the details of Wikileaks. “I’ve already been to …

The New York Times reports: Chelsea Manning, the former Army intelligence analyst who provided secret military documents to WikiLeaks in 2010, was released from jail Thursday after being held for two months for refusing to testify before a grand jury investigating the online leak-publishing organization. Ms. Manning’s release came on the day that the term of the grand jury that …

Just in from the Department of Justice: Julian P. Assange, 47, the founder of WikiLeaks, was arrested today in the United Kingdom pursuant to the U.S./UK Extradition Treaty, in connection with a federal charge of conspiracy to commit computer intrusion for agreeing to break a password to a classified U.S. government computer. According to court documents unsealed today, the charge …

An interesting profile from Reuters: While a teenager, Beto O’Rourke acknowledged in an exclusive interview, he belonged to the oldest group of computer hackers in U.S. history. The hugely influential Cult of the Dead Cow, jokingly named after an abandoned Texas slaughterhouse, is notorious for releasing tools that allowed ordinary people to hack computers running Microsoft’s Windows. It’s also known …

The Washington Post reports: Chelsea Manning has been subpoenaed to testify before a grand jury in the investigation of Julian Assange, officials said, one of several indicators that prosecutors remain interested in WikiLeaks’ publication of diplomatic cables and military war logs in 2010. Prosecutors in Virginia have been pursuing a case based on conduct that predates WikiLeaks’ publication of hacked …

Deutsche Welle reports: Germany’s digital defense body is “intensively” investigating the apparent data leak that saw data of hundreds of politicians from across the political spectrum being published online, a spokesman for the Federal Office for IT Safety (BSI) said on Friday. The hack targeted all of Germany’s political parties currently represented in the federal parliament, except for the far-right …

The Associated Press reports: A computer virus hit newspaper printing plants in Los Angeles and at Tribune Publishing newspapers across the country. Tribune Publishing said a computer virus disrupted production of the Chicago Tribune and its other newspapers, the Chicago Tribune reported. Tribune Publishing also reported the attack to the FBI on Friday, the Chicago Tribune said. The virus that …

CNBC reports: The Justice Department on Thursday announced charges against Chinese two nationals accused of conducting a global hacking campaign. The defendants, Zhu Hua and Zhang Shilong, are charged with conspiracy to commit computer intrusions and conspiracy to commit wire fraud as part of multiple years long campaigns to steal from numerous foreign governments and dozens of companies. Through a …

Talking Points Memo reports: The National Republican Congressional Committee was hacked this election cycle, it admitted Tuesday afternoon. “The NRCC can confirm that it was the victim of a cyber intrusion by an unknown entity. The cybersecurity of the Committee’s data is paramount, and upon learning of the intrusion, the NRCC immediately launched an internal investigation and notified the FBI, …

CNBC reports: Marriott International said on Friday that a guest reservation database of its Starwood Hotel brand was breached, potentially exposing information on about 500 million guests. The company said its investigation showed that an unauthorized party had copied and encrypted information, and that there had been unauthorized access to the Starwood network since 2014. The company said it had …

Reuters reports: Facebook Inc said on Friday attackers stole names and contact details of 29 million users in the mass security breach disclosed by the social media network late last month. The breach, Facebook’s worst ever, has exacerbated concerns among users, lawmakers and investors that the company is not doing enough to safeguard data, particularly in the wake of the …

The Associated Press reports: North Korea’s nuclear and missile tests have stopped, but its hacking operations to gather intelligence and raise funds for the sanction-strapped government in Pyongyang may be gathering steam. U.S. security firm FireEye raised the alarm Wednesday over a North Korean group that it says has stolen hundreds of millions of dollars by infiltrating the computer systems …