After the spectacular hacking of The Sun newspaper and News International websites that took place earlier this week, hacking collectives like Anonymous, LulzSec and AntiSec seem unstoppable. This air of invulnerability was part of LulzSec’s gloating the night the attack on The Sun’s web services took place. [blackbirdpie url=”https://twitter.com/LulzSec/status/93093868379193344″] However, Read more…
There has been a lot said about the PlayStation Network hack, enough to warrant its own Wikipedia page. With a calculated total of 77 million accounts affected, and a breach that has compromised both personal and sensitive financial details, this has been a PR disaster of epic proportions for Sony. Read more…
A couple of days ago we wrote a small post thinking about ways in which Wikileaks could be taken off the Web. The conclusion was that Wikileaks might survive almost any type of concerted effort to remove it from the Internet. I was not really expecting the strength with which Read more…
SocialMediaLand has been flooded in the last couple of days with stories about Firesheep. In case you have not heard about it, Firesheep is a Firefox add-on that allows anyone to hijack other people’s social network accounts in open wifi zones. The way the application works is staggeringly simple. If Read more…
Anyone who has ever heard me speak about Internet regulation will know of my barely contained scepticism with regards to Barlow’s Declaration of Independence of Cyberspace, and all that it represents. In fact, the Declaration speaks of a more innocent time in Internet history, and it is usually considered to Read more…
For some time now English law firm ACS:Law has been in the middle of controversy for its use of dubious tactics against copyright infringers. ACS:Law’s cause célèbre is that they became famous when they teamed-up with porn producers and then they started sending cease-and-desist letters to people claiming that they Read more…
Interesting start of the afternoon. Twitter has been hit by an XSS exploit which makes use of Javascript mouseover function in a browser, so that every time people browsed over a tweet, it opened a screen, sent an RT which propagated the vulnerability. The purpose was spam, the browser would Read more…
Much virtual ink has been spent in describing the breaking of hostilities between Google and the Chinese government, after the search engine company claimed that it had been the victim of a targeted attack in order to obtain information about Chinese dissidents. In condemning the attack, Google clearly pointed an Read more…
(Thanks to Lilian for inspiring the title). August 5 2009 could very well come to be known as the Day of the Zombie. Earlier in the day, the press reported that Twitter had been knocked offline by a large distributed denial of service attack (DDoS). Besides the obvious comments about Read more…
Are hackers a real threat to the security of nations? The Pentagon seems to think so, which is why it is updating its computer security systems to respond to more sophisticated threats. This at the time that the U.S. Secretary of Defense warns that his country is under constant “cyberattacks”, Read more…