Tag Archives: hacking

Tampa’s NBC News affiliate reports: A Tampa teenager is in jail, accused of being the “mastermind” behind a hack on the social media website Twitter that caused limited access to the site and high-profile accounts, according to jail records and the Hillsborough State Attorney’s Office. Hillsborough State Attorney Andrew Warren filed 30 felony charges against 17 year-old Graham Clark this …

Politico Europe reports: Russia’s ambassador to the U.K. said there is “no sense” in the claim that Russian intelligence services attempted to steal British coronavirus vaccine research. Speaking on the BBC’s “Andrew Marr Show” on Sunday, Andrey Kelin said it was “impossible” to link hackers to any one country and that he doesn’t believe the allegations. On Thursday, the U.K.’s …

TechCrunch reports: A number of high-profile Twitter accounts were simultaneously hacked on Wednesday by attackers who used the accounts — some with millions of followers — to spread a cryptocurrency scam. @apple had its account hacked to push the same scam, as well as Amazon co-founder @jeffbezos and Democratic presidential candidate @joebiden. Many other accounts were quickly hijacked, including @elonmusk. …

Bloomberg News reports: WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange conspired with hackers affiliated with the “Anonymous” and “LulzSec” groups, which have been linked to numerous cyber attacks around the world, according to new indictment by the U.S. Justice Department. Assange, who’s detained in the U.K. on a U.S. extradition request, gave the leader of LulzSec a list of targets to hack in …

The Wall Street Journal reports: Campaign staffers working on the presidential campaigns of Donald Trump and Joe Biden have been targeted with online attacks coming from Iran and China respectively, Google said Thursday. These so-called phishing attacks are often an attempt to gain access to online email accounts. They raise the specter of a repeat of the 2016 campaign, during …

Reuters reports: Government-backed hackers are attacking healthcare and research institutions in an effort to steal valuable information about efforts to contain the new coronavirus outbreak, Britain and the United States said on Tuesday in a joint warning. In a statement, Britain’s National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) and the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) said the hackers had targeted …

The Associated Press reports: Four members of the Chinese military have been charged with breaking into the networks of the Equifax credit reporting agency and stealing the personal information of tens of millions of Americans, the Justice Department said Monday, blaming Beijing for one of the largest hacks in history. The 2017 breach affected roughly 145 million people, with the …

The Sacramento Bee reports: Amazon and Ring, the home security company owned by Amazon, will soon have to answer for their hacking incidents, according to a new lawsuit brought against the companies. John Baker Orange filed a class-action lawsuit on Dec. 26 in California, alleging that Amazon and Ring’s “lax security standards” and “defective design” left their cameras vulnerable to …

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 …