News

Copied from LA-Times: A man who hacked the email accounts of celebrities should pay movie star Scarlett Johansson $66,179.46 in compensation, federal prosecutors said. The hacker also should serve 71 months in prison and pay a total of $150,000 in compensation to all his victims, prosecutors said in court papers filed this week. Christopher Chaney, 35, of Jacksonville, Fla., who pleaded guilty in Los Angeles federal court to nine counts of computer hacking, for two years hacked almost daily into email accounts of 50 people in the entertainment industry. ...

v3.co.uk: Card processing firm Global Payments has provided more detail on the attack on its computer systems earlier this year, warning that the attackers may have had access to unspecified personal data. Global Payments confirmed the attackers had access to details of 1.5 million cards, but it said the attack had now been contained. Global Payments also revealed the attacks had gained access to servers containing personal information “from a subset of US merchant applications”. While it could not ascertain whether the data had been copied, it would be notifying affected customers in the coming days. ...

H-Online: Hackers developed a script which was able to crack Google’s reCAPTCHA system with a success rate of better than 99 per cent. They presented the results of their research at the LayerOne security conference in Los Angeles last weekend; however, their demonstration was somewhat frustrated as, just an hour before the presentation, Google made improvements to its CAPTCHA system. Of the various CAPTCHA (Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart) systems, Google’s reCAPTCHA is considered to be one of the most reliable for differentiating man from machine. By requiring users to enter visually distorted alphanumeric sequences, web service providers can, for example, ensure that their registration forms are not flooded by spam bots. Rather than trying to analyze these distorted characters, the script, code-named “Stiltwalker”, analyzed the audio version of the CAPTCHAs, which Google provides for individuals who are visually impaired. ...

Petr Chocholous in response to Iranian users contacting avast saying they are unable to open website or update their antivirus said: AVAST Software a.s. is currently blocking access to port 80 (that effectively means websites and updates of avast! software) of its servers from following countries: Iran, Sudan, Cuba, Syria, North Korea and Burma/Myanmar. AVAST Software a.s. [and its subsidiaries/sister companies] must not provide any services in these countries because of policies and regulations that are applicable to AVAST Software a.s. ...

H-Online: UK regulator PhonepayPlus (fomerly known ICSTIS) has imposed a fine of £50,000 on a payment provider used for an Android malware-based fraud and forced it to reimburse customers’ losses. Last December, unknown perpetrators posted fake versions of popular applications on Google’s Play store (formerly the Android Market) which sent out expensive premium rate text messages. According to Android virus experts Lookout, the applications in question were based on the RuFraud malware and were customized to disguise themselves as 30-plus titles such as Angry Birds, Assassins Creed and Cut the Rope. These apps were downloaded an estimated 14,000 times, and sent out three premium rate text messages, costing £5 each, every time the user tried to open the app. Total losses to customers in the UK were estimated at £27,850. ...

Naked Security wrote: The Iranian Computer Emergency Response Team (MAHER) claims to have discovered a new targeted malware attack attacking the country, which has been dubbed Flame (also known as Flamer or Skywiper). In a statement, researchers say that they believe the malware is “a close relation” to Stuxnet, and claim that Flame is not detected by any of 43 anti-virus products it tested against, but that detection was issued to select Iranian organizations and companies at the beginning of May. ...

theregister.co.uk wrote: A Brit who distributed a Trojan horse that posed as a patch for popular shoot-em-up game_Call of Duty_ has been jailed for 18 months. Lewys Martin, 20, of Deal in Kent, used the malware to harvest bank login credentials, credit card details and internet passwords from the compromised Windows PCs of his victims. Martin then apparently laundered the credentials via underground cybercrime forums, earning $5 or less for every credential, directing proceeds of his criminal activity towards an offshore account in Costa Rica, funds which remain beyond the reach of UK police. ...

File-sharing website The Pirate Bay (TPB) has been hit by a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack. The site has been largely inaccessible for the last 24 hours, and the service is intermittent in the UK. The Pirate Bay has confirmed the attack on its Facebook page, saying that it did not know who was behind it, although it “had its suspicions”. A provider of DDoS defense systems said that it was unlikely that the attack came from hacking group Anonymous. ...

The H-Online: Avira says that it has resolved the problems caused by a Service Pack that was released for its Windows products earlier this week. Users are advised to trigger a manual update to download the fix. Once installed, the update should prevent the program from blocking legitimate Windows applications on systems running Avira. On Monday, Avira released “Service Pack 0” for all of its Windows products. Once the update was installed, the “ProActiv” behavioral monitoring component in Avira Antivirus Premium 2012 and Avira Internet Security 2012 blocked the execution of essential programs and trusted system processes. For example, ProActiv blocked the Windows registry editor (regedit.exe) and the task scheduler (taskeng.exe). ...

Google’s Knowledge Graph will display summaries of topics when your query is related to one of the 500 million items in Google’s new database of things. Google has long sought to index the world’s information — and it’s now taking things a step farther with an effort to create “a database of everything in the world.” And it’s bringing this effort to your search results pages. The new Knowledge Graph project, rolling out to English-language Google Search users over the next few days, provides more data snippets alongside its query results than the search engine currently provides. The results are based on Google’s new database of 500 million people, places, and things, says Jack Manzel, Product Management Director of Search at Google. Manzel says there are 3.5 billion attributes and connections between these things in the database. ...