Hack

Mashable: Syrian President Bashar al-Assad has been under fire from world leaders to step down this week. He’s also under fire from hacktivist group Anonymous, who leaked hundreds of his office’s emails on Monday. While Anonymous is infamous for its hacking know-how, it doesn’t take a genius computer programmer to guess one of the passwords commonly used by Assad’s office accounts: 12345. The string of consecutive numbers is the second-weakest password according to a 2011 study. ...

H-Online: Researchers at Ruhr-Universität Bochum in Germany have announced that they have cracked the A5-GMR-1 and A5-GMR-2 encryption algorithms used in satellite phones. Satellite phones are mainly used in areas with insufficient mobile network coverage and in the maritime sector. The researchers obtained the proprietary, and previously undocumented, algorithms by reverse engineering phone firmware updates. Ideally this, in itself, should not compromise the security of the transmitted data. Data security should not depend on the secrecy of the encryption methods, it should only depend on the non-disclosure of the secret key that is being used. ...

v3.co.uk: The uniform infrastructure and predictable behaviors are making corporate retail and restaurant chains the choice targets for cybercriminals. A report from security firm Trustwave found that attackers favor companies with chains of outlets, such as those commonly found in the food and retail industries, when launching targeted attacks. The attackers like the uniform IT infrastructure that large chains deploy at individual sites, Nicholas Percoco, head of the Trustwave’s SpiderLabs team, told V3. ...

The building housing the Dutch company DigiNotar, which issues digital Web site certificates and was hacked last month. The New York Times: He claims to be 21 years old, a student of software engineering in Tehran who reveres Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and despises dissidents in his country. _“I’m totally independent,” he said in an e-mail exchange with The New York Times. “I just share my findings with some people in Iran. They are free to do anything they want with my findings and things I share with them, but I’m not responsible.” _He Said. ...

The H-Security: The BitTorrent company has confirmed that its uTorrent servers were hacked on Tuesday 13 September and, for almost two hours, anyone downloading the uTorrent client software from the servers received a scareware fake anti-virus package instead. The malware package has been identified as belonging to the “Security Shield” family of scareware; once installed, it falsely informs a user that malware has been detected on their machine and requests payment in order to clean the system. ...

SophosLabs: Pop singer Pink has posted an angry message to hackers, who she claims stole photographs from her Facebook page. But was Pink’s Facebook page really hacked, or was she just one of the many people who have been careless with their privacy settings? The Grammy award-winning singer, famous for hit records such as “Get the party started” and “God is a DJ”, posted on Twitter about the incident, but didn’t clarify the nature of the photos the hackers might have accessed. ...

TheHackerNews.com: The hacker warns the Internet community that he has access to 4 other high-profile CAs, among them being GlobalSign, a certification authority from the U.S. He threatens that he will use his power over the companies to issue false certificates, which will later become the weapon of his revenge against countries who deserve it.In his own words, he said “I won’t talk so many detail for now, just I wanted to let the world know that ANYTHING you do will have consequences, ANYTHING your country did in past, you have to pay for it…”. Complete Message here. ...

TechSpot: Wikileaks found itself the victim of a cyberattack on Tuesday, shortly after the release of thousands of US State Department communications. News broke of the attack on their Twitter page, which offered another link to the communications, and a message stating “WikiLeaks.org is presently under attack.” It is likely that they were hit with a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack, the most commonly used method by hackers to cause disruption to websites. It works by flooding the servers with traffic, overloading them, and subsequently causing the servers to crash, or become otherwise unreachable. ...

SophosLabs: Imagine the scene. You buy a second-hand laptop using it to, among other things, have secret sexy video chats with your significant other. Unbeknownst to you, naked photos of you are being taken by a company hired to track down the stolen laptop. Ouch. This is what has happened to Ohio-based Susan Clements-Jeffrey and her boyfriend. Absolute Software is in the business of helping people recover their computers. Fair enough. But is taking nude snaps of the person using the stolen laptop a step too far? ...

SophosLabs: Julianne Hough is famous in the United States not just for being an actress and country music singer, and dating “American Idol” host Ryan Seacrest, but also for having won ABC’s “Dancing with the stars” TV show twice. So, hardly the kind of woman who you would think would need to resort to a cheap publicity stunt to raise her profile. But no doubt there are skeptics who are right now wondering if the news that her mobile phone was “hacked” and one hundred of her private photographs published on the net is nothing more than a way of gaining attention. ...