Showing posts with label computer hacking. Show all posts
Showing posts with label computer hacking. Show all posts

Monday, December 21, 2009

7-Eleven Hack From Russia Led to ATM Looting in New York


From Threat Level:

Flashback, early 2008: Citibank officials are witnessing a huge spike in fraudulent withdrawals from New York area ATMs — $180,000 is stolen from cash machines on the Upper East Side in just three days. After a stakeout, police arrest one man walking out of a bank with thousands of dollars in cash and 12 reprogrammed cards. A lucky traffic stop catches two more plunderers who’d driven in from Michigan. Another pair are arrested after trying to mug an undercover FBI agent on the street for a magstripe encoder. In the end, there are 10 arrests and at least $2 million dollars stolen.

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Thursday, December 3, 2009

My Favorite Hackers

Photo: Hacking is a labor of love. iStockphoto

From Discover News:

As a self-proclaimed hacker, who means you no harm, I stand on the shoulders of giants. The following people have set the standard for hacking and have given all of us newbies something to the strive for. These are some of the Great Ones, the ones we admire, emulate. These are my favs.

1. Kevin Mitnick

The Man. The Myth. The Legend. This guy was the top hacker in the world for a good part of the late 70s and early 80s. He was one of the first, and in his time, gave the pre-silicon valley tech bigwigs a good shakedown. He broke into systems owned by Sun Microsystems, IBM, DEC, Motorola, and even managed (allegedly) to wiretap FBI conversations. He did time for it, but now works as a security consultant. Though most hackers today consider his technical knowledge to be archaic, he has one of the sharpest minds in social engineering even today.

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Friday, September 18, 2009

Real-Time Hackers Foil Two-Factor Security

Credit: Technology Review

From Technology Review:

One-time passwords are vulnerable to new hacking techniques.

In mid-July, an account manager at Ferma, a construction firm in Mountain View, CA, logged in to the company's bank account to pay bills, using a one-time password to make the transactions more secure.

Yet the manager's computer had a hitchhiker. A forensic analysis performed later would reveal that an earlier visit to another website had allowed a malicious program to invade his computer. While the manager issued legitimate payments, the program initiated 27 transactions to various bank accounts, siphoning off $447,000 in a matter of minutes. "They not only got into my system here, they were able to ascertain how much they could draw, so they drew the limit," says Roy Ferrari, Ferma's president.

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Friday, May 1, 2009

Hackers Weigh In: 8 Big Things To Do With A Mini Server

MINI SERVER: Marvell Technology's SheevaPlug is a two-inch by four-inch (five- by 10-centimeter) box that plugs into any wall outlet and is almost indistinguishable from an oversize power supply. © MARVELL TECHNOLOGY

From Scientific American:

We weren't sure what to do with a SheevaPlug, a cheap and powerful home server stuffed into a package the size of a power brick, so we asked a bunch of uber-geeks--Here's what they said.

Tiny computers are everywhere—our cell phones, handheld gaming devices and set-top boxes, to name a few—so it should be no surprise that Marvell Technology in Santa Clara, Calif., one of the companies that makes the chips that go into such devices, managed to cram an entire home server into the SheevaPlug, a two-inch by four-inch (five- by 10-centimeter) box that plugs into any wall outlet and is almost indistinguishable from an oversize power supply.

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Monday, March 16, 2009

Botnet Back-Up Gives Glimpse Into Hackers' World

Photo: Coromandel teen Owen Thor Walker last year admitted to running a botnet that controlled a million computers worldwide. Photo / Alan Gibson

From New Zealand Herald:

SAN FRANCISCO - Getting hacked is like having your computer turn traitor on you, spying on everything you do and shipping your secrets to identity thieves.

Victims don't see where their stolen data end up. But sometimes security researchers do, stumbling across stolen-data troves that offer a glimpse of what identity theft looks like from criminals' perspective.

Researchers from U.K.-based security firm Prevx found one such trove, a website used as a stash house for data from 160,000 infected computers before it was shut down this month.

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Monday, February 16, 2009

World's Greatest Hacker Says Obama's BlackBerry Can Be Breached

Jan. 29: President Obama checks his BlackBerry as he walks along the West Wing Colonnade towards the Oval Office at the White House in Washington. Photo AP

From FOX News:

There's a new "holy grail" for hackers — President Obama's super-secure BlackBerry.

Despite warnings from his advisers, the president insisted on keeping his beloved PDA, which now has specially designed superencrypting security software.

But that just makes cracking into it more challenging — and, yes, it can be done, says the world's most famous hacker.

"It's a long shot, but it's possible," Kevin Mitnick told FOXNews.com. "You'd probably need to be pretty sophisticated, but there's people out there who are."

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