Image: World Economic Forum/Flickr (Creative Commons)
The phone hacking scandal appears to be widening to an overall hacking scandal with revelations by a British newspaper that emails of the former British Prime Minister Gordon Brown were illegally accessed by “private investigators commissioned by national newspapers”.
A British newspaper has acquired and released leaked logs supposed from a private IRC chat room purported to be LulzSec’s own chat room – the group responsible for several known attacks on Sony, Nintendo, Sega and more-recently, the Arizona State Government.
Image: chispita_666/Flickr
Websites for the South Korean President, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade, and the largest bank in the country Kookmin Bank, among 40 or so sites, have been reported to have been attacked with a denial-of-service attack at 10am local time.
Image: chispita_666/Flickr
Canada has been the target of a cyberattack that could have given highly sensitive federal information to foreign nationals and has taken off two key financial departments of the Internet since early January, according to CBC News.
Five alleged hackers have been arrested by Pakistani authorities in raids that led to the closure of the website Pakbugs, known for being a community site for hacking and carding – a technique to verify if stolen credit card details are still valid by purchasing something.
Symantec has announced that it will appoint Adam Palmer to become the Lead Cybersecurity Advisor for its Norton department, where he will be the public face of preventing cybercrime via education, empowerment and by reinforcing online rights with the assistance of law enforcement and other key organisations.
China isn’t getting any good news within the technology sector, especially when Google just pulled Google.cn from the country and moved it to Hong Kong. Now, Symantec has identified a city in China to be the world’s capital of cyber-espionage, after identifying and tracing 12 billion e-mails that were “target attacks” coming from China – a higher number than what Symantec initially thought.
A Chinese Newspaper has written a critical editorial about Secretary of State Hillary Clinton about her speech about the freedom to access information on the Internet. The newspaper, the Global Times, labelled her speech as a “disguised attempt to impose its values on other cultures in the name of democracy”.
Reports are coming in that Twitter had been hacked with a message from a supposed group called the “Iranian Cyber Army”, with Twitter admitting that their DNS records were compromised – allowing the group to deface the site with the following message:
South Korea have said that the attacks that caused denial of service attacks on several websites based in the United States and South Korea were from 86 IP addresses from 16 different countries, including from Japan and Guatemala, according to the AP.
A widespread cyber attack beginning in July 4 has knocked out several United States agencies’ websites, including those responsible for fighting cyber crime. Also reported was on the same day, several sites belonging to the South Korean government and other private sites were knocked offline from the same cyber attack.
You should be careful on who has your contact details, especially after watching this video; as a hacker, with the right tools, can and take your personal details and possibly hijack your phone remotely by using a simple SMS message, according to Trust Digital.
A spy network, mainly based in China, has been said to have infiltrated computer networks from government offices around the world, according to Canadian researchers. However, even though they are located in China, there is no conclusive evidence of China being involved.
A new report written by a group of cyber-security experts has claimed that Russian intelligence agencies were linked or probably involved in the 2008 cyber attack on Georgia during the 2008 invasion of the country by Russia in July and August of 2008.
The BBC has said that it had purchased a network of 22,000 infected computers and used it spam its own e-mail accounts on Hotmail and GMail, used the computers for a denial-of-service test and then changed the infected computer’s wallpaper with a message saying that they were infected.