Twitter Attacked By "Iranian cyber army"

The BBC is reporting that Twitter was attacked by a group of hackers calling themselves the "Iranian cyber army". Visitors to the site last evening were being redirected to a page showing a message declaring it had been hacked.

According to the article the "It showed an image of Arabic text overlaid on a green flag carrying the name of the third Shi'i Imam, Imam Husayn.

It also included a poem in Persian which said: "We shall strike if the leader orders, we shall lose our heads if the leader wishes."

Also included were the words: "Those that wage fight on the path of God win."

For it's part Twitter has admitted that it's Domain Name Server (DNS) records had been "temporarily compromised".

Twitter Execs Hacked - Secrets Leaked

In what I would call a severe blow to cloud computing, a major breach of Twitter executives e-mail, calendars, and documents was reported yesterday by company officials after the hacker sent documents about Twitters plans and finances, confidential contracts, and job applicants to two tech blogs, TechCrunch and Korben. The breach occurred about a month ago with a simple breach of a password providing access to an administrative employee’s e-mail account from where access was gained to the employee’s Google Apps account, where Twitter shares spreadsheets and documents with business ideas and financial details.

This must have a lot of IT managers saying I told you so!

Source: NYTimes

Twitter Porn-star Game Could Be Attempt At Identity Theft

According to Canada's privacy commissioner, a game being plaid by Twitter users that asks them to combine their first pet's name with the name of the first street they lived on, in order to come up with a "personalized adult-film star pseudonym" for them, could actually be an attempt by hackers to obtain information that password protected websites often use to identity people. Agreed, this does sound phishy...

Source: Globe and Mail

Xbox Live Gamers Targeted

Using a traditional denial of service style attack, hackers are seeking revenge on players who pown them during game play on the Xbox Live network according to Chris Boyd the director of malware research at Facetime Communications. "They get your IP address, put it in the booter tool and they attempt to flood the port that uses Xbox traffic," said Mr Boyd. "Flooding that port prevents any traffic getting out." The tool doesn't attack the Xbox live network but idividual gamer's Xbox's because many of the games played on the network are actually hosted by the players themselves. In order to carry out the attack the hacker might interconnect their PC and Xbox and then deploy packet sniffing software to sift through the traffic flowing in and out of their consoles for IP addresses. Microsoft promises to ban the offenders.

Source: BBC

Fake Parking Tickets - Real Viruses

Using a clever bit of social engineering, hackers in in Grand Forks, North Dakota have placed tickets on vehicles citing fake traffic violations and referring the "offender" to a website that claimed to have photos of the alleged violation, but which actually tricked users into downloading a virus.

"According to internet security watchdog The SANS Institute, the website then had photos of cars in various car parks around Grand Forks and instructed users to download a tool bar to find photos of their own vehicle.

But the tool bar was actually an executable file which installed a Trojan virus that then displayed a fake security alert when the PC was rebooted. The fake alert then prompted the user to install fake anti-virus software."

It still amazes me how easily we are duped into falling for these tricks... clever though!

Source: BBC

Student Faces Charges After Revealing Security Hole

A 20-year-old Carleton University student, Mansour Moufid, has been charged under the Criminal Code with mischief to data and unauthorized use of a computer after a letter was sent to the university with a list of the students' accounts and their passwords. The letters author claimed he easily broke into student accounts using a keystroke logging program. According to the Ottawacitizen.com "The breach allowed access to the Campus Cards that students use as debit cards for campus purchases, including photocopiers, food kiosks and the bookstore." It seems the student was trying to make a point about the IT departments security procedures, looks like they didn't take kindly to his constructive criticism!

British Courts Won't Block Hacker's Extradition

Gary McKinnon, the Scottish born hacker who broke into 97 US military and Nasa computers allegedly seeking proof of the existence of UFO's will be extradited to the U.S. within 2 weeks after losing his appeal to the British courts. McKinnon's lawyer, Karen Todner said "He is absolutely devastated by the decision," and "He and his family are distraught. They are completely beside themselves. He is terrified by the prospect of going to America." I guess he should have considered that before he hacked into all of those sensitive computer systems! BBC Story here.

UK Hacker Facing Extradition To The US To Face Charges

Gary McKinnon aka "Solo", a Glasgow-born systems analyst is facing extradition to the United States to face charges that he gained access to 97 US military and Nasa computers from his London home in 2001 and 2002. Lawyers working on McKinnon's behalf say that US authorities had warned McKinnon that he faced a life sentence rather than a couple of years in jail unless he agreed to plead guilty and to extradition. McKinnon has never denied accessing the networks saying he was motivated by curiosity. I guess it's not really a question of guilt but rather can he receive a fair trial in a US court? BBC story here.

US Congressman Claims Computers Hacked By Chinese

Representative Frank Wolf, a Republican from Virginia, said Wednesday that the FBI found that four of his government computers have been hacked by sources working in China. Wolf is a long-time critic of China's human rights record and a spokesman for the congressman said the four computers were being used by staff members working on human rights issues. “I think this is very bad because you have the Chinese compromising and gaining access to computers of any number of members of the House and a major committee of the House,” Wolf told The Associated Press. “We don't know how many others.”

The Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs had no immediate comment. Last week, China denied accusations that it's officials had secretly copied the contents of a US government laptop during a visit to China by Commerce Secretary Carlos Gutierrez and used the information to try to hack into Commerce Department computers.

Globe and Mail story here.

Hacker Attack Phoenix Mars Lander Web Site - Phoenix Finds Ice

Sara Hammond, a spokeswoman for the Phoenix Mars Lander mission, says a hacker took over the mission's public Web site during the night and changed its lead news story. The site which is hosted by the University of Arizona was taken offline while administrators worked to rectify the problem.
Wired News.

In the mean time, Scientists are excited about the possibility that Phoenix's thrusters may have uncovered ice near the surface of the planet during touchdown. "We were worried that it may be 30, 40, 50 centimeters deep, which would be a lot of work. Now we are fairly certain that we can easily get down to the ice table," said Peter Smith, a University of Arizona scientist and chief project investigator. CNN.

Spanish Police Arrest Hackers

Five hackers being described as "being among the most active on the internet" have been arrested by Spanish police. The BBC is reporting that "Police say they co-ordinated attacks over the internet and hacked into 21,000 web pages over two years." Two of those arrested are said to be 16 years of age. The arrests took place in Barcelona, Burgos, Malaga and Valencia, the result of an inquiry that began in March after a Spanish political party's site was disabled.

Hackers Warn Big Business That Attacks Are Imminent

A "Hackers Panel" which convened in London this week at the InfoSecurity Europe conference is warning big business that denial of service attacks, the likes of which shut down the websites of banks, governments and political parties in Estonia, are imminent. Big business is seen as definite targets "If someone wants to have a pop at the UK, they are unlikely to go for the government web servers. They will go for the lower hanging fruit - companies which are seen as good representatives of the country." said panelist Steve Armstrong from the SANS Institute for information security training. Some believe that these attacks can be thwarted if ISP's take a more active roll in policing their networks and identifying machines that are compromised and participating in bot-nets, while others say it is not the place of the ISP and that more money needs to be spent by businesses to defend against such attacks. Seems rather obvious that the white hat hackers and security firms would want to support the later... The BBC has more here.

Hacker Attack On Epileptic Support Forum

Wired is reporting that a group of hackers believed to be members of "Anonymous", the group that has targeted the Church of Scientology, injected javascript code last week into a forum run by The nonprofit Epilepsy Foundation. The code caused flashing animations to display in unsuspecting forum viewers browsers, which in some cases was enough to trigger migraines and seizures. "We are seeing people affected," says Ken Lowenberg, senior director of web and print publishing at the Epilepsy Foundation. "It's fortunately only a handful. It's possible that people are just not reporting yet -- people affected by it may not be coming back to the forum so fast." The site shut the forum down approximately 12 hours after the attack. This is a juvenile prank that could have serious consequences, let's hope that the perpetrators come to their senses and find other means of drawing attention to themselves.