According to a decision by the Frankfurt Court of Appeal the victims of WiFi theft can’t be held responsible for the thieves’ copyright infringement. The same court that previously ruled parents can’t be held responsible for the flle sharing activities of their children overturned a lower court’s decision, and potentially dealt a blow to the campaign being waged by a UK lawfirm against several hundred people for alleged copyright infringement.
CHENNAI: Police on Tuesday arrested a college student for purchasing electronic goods online using credit card details of card holders from across the world.
T Bharathwaj Purohit (20), a resident of MKB Nagar and a member of a community of hackers, had been buying electronic goods online using other people’s credit cards since April.
Police recovered an electric guitar, a printer, an LCD TV, a digital camera, a weighing scale, a mobile and a laptop all worth Rs 3 lakh, and Rs 38,500 in cash from him. Purohit met Charu Sharma of Mumbai and Hathi Gogaiyan of Ahmedabad online a few months ago. They introduced him to an online hackers’ community on the net and gave him credit card details to make purchases.
A Chilean hacker posted sensitive information about six million of his compatriots on the Internet, apparently in an act of protest against the government’s lax data security.
According to Chilean newspaper El Mercurio, details including people’s address’, phone numbers, ID numbers, email addresses and even academic records were all laid bare for the world to see on a popular technology blog called FayerWayer. Links to additional information was also posted on a website called “ElAntro”.
Ethical hacking group GNUCitizen.org has warned that the default settings on one of the UK’s most widely used wireless routers is leaving customers open to attack.
The group showed in a blog posting that the BT Home Hub, the wireless router supplied to BT Broadband customers, uses algorithms that make the device easy to crack when in default mode.
Using reverse-engineering techniques the group said that the hub’s Wired Equivalent Privacy (WEP) keys can be predicted in just 80 guesses, but had decided against making its automated guessing program publicly available.
Hackers continue trying to exploit a patched vulnerability in Microsoft’s Graphic Display Interface (GDI), researchers said this week.
Craig Schmugar, threat researcher at McAfee, reported that the first exploit was discovered on Friday, three days after the issue was patched by bulletin MS08-021.
“One method the bad guys use is to take the patch and reverse engineer it,” Schmugar said on Tuesday. “They look at the files on the computer prior to installing the patch and then after, and try to compare the two and see how they can take advantage of the change.”
Thousands of chief executives in the United States were targeted Monday by new round of phishing emails that claim to contain a subpoena ordering recipients to testify in federal court.
Instead, the executable file said to contain the subpoena actually is an information-stealing trojan, John Bambenek, a handler at the SANS Internet Storm Center and an information security researcher at the University of Illinois in Champaign, told SCMagazineUS.com.
“The idea was a very good one,” he said. “People see a subpoena and they’re like, ‘Oh crap,’ especially a CEO.”
Hackers attacked the websites of two organisations campaigning against the smoking ban last week, redirecting UK users to the NHS Smokefree site.
The attack, which targeted British organisation Freedom2Choose and Forces International, lasted 11 hours. Freedom2Choose webmaster Steven Cross said the redirect appeared to have been caused by a DNS poisoning attack.
“One hour after the attack we received a phone call about what was happening, but there was not much we could do since it was not our server that had been attacked,” he explained.
A team of experts headed by security guru Ira Winkler was hired by an anonymous power company to test the security of a power grid’s network. The door was practically held open for them.
In a matter of hours, the team infiltrated the grid’s supervisory, control and data acquisition (SCADA) networks using simple phishing tools: social engineering and browser exploits.
Last summer, hackers manipulated the Coast Guard’s E-Learning system so that users were redirected to a Web site operated by al Jazeera, an Arab news organization, said the service’s chief information officer.
Field information systems security officers informed the Coast Guard Computer Incident Response Team of the problem, and the service took the E-Learning system offline to mitigate risks to its network while the response team conducted an investigation, said Rear Adm. David Glenn, assistant commandant and chief information officer. He spoke at a meeting of the Armed Forces Communications and Electronics Association in March.
Dmitri Galushkevich, a 20-year-old Estonian student, launched the DoS (denial-of-service) attacks from his own PC last year. Although he’s a native Estonian, Galushkevich was angry over his government’s plans to move the statue, and launched the attack as a means of protesting the decision. The fact that a single angry student was able to impact international relations between two countries is an startling development. Understanding why Estonia and Russia got into a tiff about a war memorial statue in the first place, however, requires that we take a trip down history lane.