Hack

Nude photos and videos of Vanessa Hudgens, the star of “High School Musical”, have surfaced on the net, with speculation rife that they have been released by a hacker who broke into the 22-year-old’s Gmail account. So far, so normal for saucy celebrity news. But what’s different on this occasion is that not only has Vanessa Hudgens reported to have met law enforcement officers to discuss the crime, but as many as 50 other celebrities are said to have been targeted by a hacking gang dead set on stealing compromising snaps and information. ...

Just a day after Dutch police arrested a 16-year-old boy in connection with WikiLeaks-related denial-of-service attacks, websites belonging to the Netherlands computer crime cops and prosecutors have been struck with a similar assault. Dennis Janus, a spokesman for the National Police Service confirmed that both the police website, and that of the National Prosector’s Office had been offline for much of the day, with many theorizing that the likely reason is a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack similar to that which was launched against MasterCard, PayPal and other firms. ...

Semi-nude pictures of Christina Aguilera leaked onto the internet earlier this week, causing fans of the pint-sized pop diva to feverishly run to their search engines in the hunt for the private snaps. Regular readers should know only too well about the dangers that can be associated with hunting for such material – with nude pictures of Twilight star Ashley Greene and snaps of princess-to-be Kate Middleton recently being used as bait for the unwary. ...

Mashable: Facebook is known for its hackathons — all-night coding sessions designed to help create new products or improve others. Now the company has announced its first Hacker Cup. Facebook says it’s “bring[ing] engineers from around the world together to compete in a multi-round programming competition.” The Hacker Cup is very similar to Google’s popular Google Code Jam. Contestants will be challenged with solving algorithmic-based problem statements. Those who successfully solve the problems in the allotted period of time will advance to the next round. ...

The Register: Windows source code tapped, say WikiLeaked docs The Chinese government may have used its access to Microsoft source code to develop attacks that exploited weaknesses in the Windows operating system, according to a US diplomatic memo recently published by WikiLeaks. The June 29, 2009 diplomatic cable claims that a Chinese security firm with close ties to the People’s Republic of China, got access to the Windows source under a 2003 agreement designed to help companies improve the security of the Microsoft operating system. Topsec allegedly worked with a government organization known as CNITSEC, short for the China Information Technology Security Center, which actively worked with “private sector” hackers to develop exploits. ...

According to The Telegraph, German prosecutors are accusing two local hackers of breaking into the computers of over 50 pop stars, including Lady Gaga, Kelly Clarkson, Justin Timberlake and Ke$ha. (Wouldn’t you have to be pretty brave to blackmail Lady Gaga? She can be, um, scary. ) Ralf Haferkamp, from the Duisburg prosecutor’s office, said in an interview with Deutsche Welle that the hackers, two boys of 17 and 23 from the West of Germany, infected the machines with malware in order to steal all sorts of files. ...

According to The Telegraph, German prosecutors are accusing two local hackers of breaking into the computers of over 50 pop stars, including Lady Gaga, Kelly Clarkson, Justin Timberlake and Ke$ha. (Wouldn’t you have to be pretty brave to blackmail Lady Gaga? She can be, um, scary. ) Ralf Haferkamp, from the Duisburg prosecutor’s office, said in an interview with Deutsche Welle that the hackers, two boys of 17 and 23 from the West of Germany, infected the machines with malware in order to steal all sorts of files. ...

The Anonymous group takes revenge after legal decision against Pirate Bay founders v3.co.uk: An online collective known as Anonymous has carried out a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack on the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI) after the trade body welcomed the new court ruling against the founders of The Pirate Bay. The Swedish appeals court decision saw the jail terms of the men reduced but their fines increased in a move that IFPI chief executive Frances Moore argued should be the end of the debate around the issue. ...

Controversial whistleblower website WikiLeaks was hit by another massive distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack earlier this morning. On Sunday, the site was taken down for several hours via a sustained DDoS attack, just hours before the release of thousands of secret U.S. documents. Responsibility for Sunday’s attack was claimed by a single hacker, the Jester, though many are skeptical that it was the work of just one person. Today’s attack, which was initially focused on http://cablegate.wikileaks.org/, has been much more intense. At 9:00 a.m. ET, WikiLeaks tweeted, “DDOS attack now exceeding 10 Gigabits a second.” ...

Mashable: The distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack that took down WikiLeaks as the site published secret U.S. embassy cables over the weekend could be the work of a single hacker, working for his own agenda. The hacker, called the Jester (or th3j35t3r), describes himself as a “hacktivist for good” and posts the message “TANGO DOWN” after a successful attack, together with a link of the sites he takes down. The focus of his attacks, the Jester claims in his Twitter Bio, is “obstructing the lines of communication for terrorists, sympathizers, fixers, facilitators, oppressive regimes and other general bad guys.” ...