China labels US the ’real hacking empire’ after Pentagon report

behindthewall

chinhdangvu.blogspot.com

By Sui-Lee Wee, Reuters

BEIJING -- China on Wednesday accused the United States of sowing discord between it and its neighbors after the Pentagon said Beijing is using espionage to fuel its military modernization, branding Washington the "real hacking empire.”

The latest salvo came a day after China's foreign ministry dismissed as groundless a Pentagon report that accused China for the first time of trying to break into U.S. defense computer networks.

The Pentagon also cited progress in Beijing's effort to develop advanced-technology stealth aircraft and to build an aircraft carrier fleet to project power further offshore.

The People's Liberation Army Daily called the report a "gross interference in China's internal affairs.”

"Promoting the ‘China military threat theory’ can sow discord between China and other countries, especially its relationship with its neighboring countries, to contain China and profit from it," the newspaper said in a commentary that was carried on China's Defense Ministry website.

The United States is "trumpeting China's military threat to promote its domestic interests groups and arms dealers,” the newspaper said, adding that it expects "U.S. arms manufacturers are gearing up to start counting their money.”

The remarks in the newspaper underscore the escalating mistrust between China and the United States over hacking, now a top point of contention between Washington and Beijing.

A U.S. computer security company, Mandiant, said in February a secretive Chinese military unit was likely behind a series of hacking attacks that targeted the United States and stole data from more than 100 companies.

That set off a war of words between Washington and Beijing.

China has said repeatedly that it does not condone hacking and is the victim of hacking attacks -- most of which it says come from the United States.

"As we all know, the United States is the real 'hacking empire' and has an extensive espionage network," the People's Daily, a newspaper regarded as a mouthpiece of the Chinese Communist Party, said in a commentary.

"In recent years, the United States has continued to strengthen its network tools for political subversion against other countries,” the article said.

"Cyber weapons are more frightening than nuclear weapons," the People's Daily said. "To establish military hegemony on the Internet by repeatedly smearing other countries is a dangerous and wrong path to take and will ultimately end up in shooting themselves in the foot."

BREAKING NEWS: AP Twitter account hacked, posts false White House scare

NBCNews.com

Visit NBCNews.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Following a hack attack, the Associated Press' verified Twitter account posted "an erroneous tweet" claiming that two explosions occurred in the White House and that President Barack Obama is injured. Moments later, the @AP Twitter account — with nearly 2 million followers — was suspended. Immediately following the false tweet, the Dow Industrial Average lost about 140 points. These losses were immediately recovered. (See chart below.)

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Following the false @AP tweet, the Dow Industrial Average lost about 140 points. These losses were immediately recovered.

"That's a bogus tweet," an AP spokesperson initially told NBC News, a statement that was repeated by the company's corporate communications account. Though the false tweet disappeared, the false message continued to exist on the service in over four thousand retweets. In a briefing that occurred after the erroneous tweet appeared, White House spokesman Jay Carney told reporters that "the president is fine, I was just with him." Julie Pace, AP's chief White House correspondent, reiterated during the briefing that "anything that was just sent out about any incident at the White House is actually false." AP media relations director Paul Colford is quoted, in a blog post, as saying that the company had also suspended other AP Twitter feeds, "out of a sense of caution." He added, "We are working with Twitter to sort this out." A wire statement issued later explained that the mid-day tweet "came after hackers made repeated attempts to steal the passwords of AP journalists." The New York Times revealed a tweet by a group called the Syrian Electronic Army claiming credit for the hack. The group's Twitter account is currently suspended. Social media accounts associated with CBS News programs "60 Minutes" and "48 Hours" were compromised on Saturday. The same group, known for its pro-Assad politics, took credit for that attack too, as well as earlier attacks on the Twitter accounts of NPR and the BBC. The group is not to be confused with the hacking collective known as Anonymous — in fact, they have previously clashed online. Passwords are weak link Because password theft is the culprit behind social-media account takeovers, security experts say that better protection is needed. Responsibility for security is shared between the user and the service. "The challenge (with corporate-owned Twitter accounts) is, we share the password," Chester Wisniewski, senior security advisor at Sophos, told NBC News. "Once you get enough people with the password, bad things are going to happen," he adds. "There's no good way of isolating or limiting access these high-profile accounts." Wisniewski said it is up to Twitter to strengthen security by using two-factor authentication, a log-in technique used by Google, Apple, Facebook and others that requires the pairing of a password with a code delivered to a user's cellphone. "In my opinion, this is overdue for Twitter, especially for verified accounts," he said, regarding how incidents like this could be prevented. "Humans are the weakest things when it comes to a phish [attack]." NBC News has reached out to Twitter for additional comment. — with additional reporting by NBC News' Stacey Klein, Helen Popkin and Patrick Rizzo

Visit NBCNews.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Report: Chinese army tied to US hacking

behindthewall

Carlos Barria / Reuters

A general view of 'Unit 61398,' a secretive Chinese military unit on the outskirts of Shanghai on Feb. 19. The unit is believed to be behind a series of hacking attacks, a U.S. computer security company said, prompting a strong denial by China and accusations that it was in fact the victim of U.S. hacking.

By Ed Flanagan, Producer, NBC News

BEIJING – A group of hackers linked to the Chinese military has stolen reams of sensitive data from more than 100 prominent American companies and organizations, according to an explosive new report.

“The details we have analyzed during hundreds of investigations convince us that the groups conducting these activities are based primarily in China and that the Chinese Government is aware of them,” U.S. computer-security firm Mandiant Corp. said in a 74-page report released on Tuesday.

The story was first reported by The New York Times.

One group originating from China that Mandiant had been tracking since 2006 and identified in the study as “APT1” allegedly swiped data from 141 companies in 20 industries ranging from aerospace to telecommunications, according to the report. More than 110 of those companies were American, according to Mandiant.

Mandiant said that the data suggests that the hacker group was either working for or sponsored by China’s People’s Liberation Army. Indeed, according to the organization’s information, APT1’s activity originated from a People’s Liberation Army cyberware division known as “Unit 61398.”

“Our research found that People’s Liberation Army (PLA’s) Unit 61398 is similar to APT1 in its mission, capabilities, and resources,” it said, according to the report.  “PLA Unit 61398 is also located in precisely the same area from which APT1 activity appears to originate.”

Mandiant said that the hacking originated from a drab 12-story office building on the outskirts of Shanghai. Hundreds, maybe even thousands, of operatives performed covert corporate espionage and extracted trade secrets, blueprints, pricing data and other corporate information from countless American servers from the innocuous tower, according to Mandiant.

The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times reported on Thursday that Chinese hackers repeatedly penetrated their computer systems. NBC's Pete Williams reports.

The hackers used techniques like “spear-phishing” -- using spoof emails to trick users into granting access to internal servers --demonstrating a strong proficiency in the English language and advanced understanding of computer security and network operations, the organization said.

Media blackoutThough the story exploded on Twitter and in the foreign news media, it has hardly made any waves in China. Twitter has long been blocked in the country and foreign media companies that broadcast on the mainland like CNN were blacked out when the report was mentioned on air. 

Coverage of Mandiant’s report was also absent from Chinese news websites, but some discussion of the report could still be found on China’s Twitter-like service, Weibo.

“Chinese hackers are so capable! I always thought Americans are very powerful!” exclaimed one user.

“Reports by foreign media cannot be fully trusted,” warned another user, “but there must be something.”

Related: Wall Street Journal infiltrated by Chinese hackers

This was a sentiment partly shared by China’s Foreign Ministry spokesman, Hong Lei, who responded today to questions about the hacking report by calling them “groundless” and reiterating the government’s unwavering position on the matter.

“To make groundless accusations based on some rough material is neither responsible nor professional,” he said, before noting that China was also the victim of hacking attacks.

Hong also argued that the new evidence provided by Mandiant and the New York Times will not withstand closer scrutiny.

But China’s cyber activities have been under increasingly closer scrutiny in recent weeks, as a slew of news stories have come out about Beijing’s reported hacking ambitions. Last month, the New York Times reported that its own servers had been attacked by hackers originating in China, possibly in response to an embarrassing expose it published showing the hidden riches of out-going Chinese premier, Wen Jiabao.

While the White House has largely remained silent on the hacking issue -- President Barack Obama mentioned hacking in his State of the Union but did not specifically cite China -- the government has been noticeably increasing efforts to strengthen cyber security.

Last week Obama issued an Executive Order calling for the improving of critical infrastructure tied to cyber security. That the move came on the eve of the publication of two similar exposes -- last week Bloomberg printed another story demonstrating PLA hacking of American systems -- suggests the administration could be taking a long called for tougher stance on Chinese hacking by “naming and shaming” known mainland hacking groups. 

Experts: Hackers CAN [WILL?] crack election systems

WND/ Steve Elwart

The result of an election will be changed by hackers, the only question remaining for an online security expert is which election will it be.

“I’m somewhat surprised it hasn’t happened yet,” said Stephen Cobb, a security evangelist for ESET-North America, an IT security company, in a recent article in Dark Reading.

With the U.S. presidential election turning into a dead heat, every vote is going to count, but if some hackers had their way, your vote won’t matter.

Hacktivist groups like Anonymous and LulzSec are growing more sophisticated every day with their use of new collaborative hacking techniques, such as “crowdsourcing.” Meanwhile, voter databases are increasingly being put online on state and local computer systems that are often insecure and administered by part-time IT personnel.

“If big, Internet-based companies like Yahoo, LinkedIn, or Sony can fall to hackers, then, yeah, big government databases and local authorities who actually administer the election process can be hacked,” said Cobb.

While the voter databases carry mostly innocuous information, such as name and address, a hacktivist group could create havoc in an election if they were to make changes to that database.

A hacker could, for example, switch the addresses of people on a voting roll, putting them in a different precinct than where they actually live. An error like this could be done close to the election and could very well not be noticed until the day of the election. By then it would be too late. That person would be ineligible to vote that day.

Combining a voting database with other database information, such as those collected by supermarkets, coupon offers, and consumer polling data, hackers could target an area for disenfranchisement by simply looking at the demographic breakdown of a voting precinct.

In a close race, as this presidential contest is shaping up to be, shifting the election turnout in a few precincts in a swing state (i.e. Ohio) could change the outcome of an entire election. One only needs to look at the 2000 election results in Florida to see how the voting results in one or two precincts would have given the country President Gore.

In the 2008 senatorial race in Minnesota, Al Franken won by 312 votes, the equivalent of one precinct. Tampering with just one machine could have changed the outcome of the election.

Such a scenario is not fanciful. States like Washington and Maryland putting voter registration data online make the threat all too real.

“Any system that is networked, especially to the Internet, is inherently vulnerable to attacks on its availability, and the confidentiality and integrity of its data,” says Steve Santorelli, director of global outreach for the security research group Team Cymru.

According to Dr. Hugh Thompson, program committee chairman for RSA Conference, one of the biggest dangers of voting-related cybercrime is its undermining of voter confidence.

“Interestingly, the wrong person winning is not the worst thing that can happen,” he says. “The real worst case is a hacker proving that the vote was compromised and ultimately undermining the entire voting process.”

Many political observers are already saying that this election could be even more contentious than the 2000 contest without the added complexity of electronic voter fraud. The new reality is that a candidate may not have to just win an election, but to win it convincingly enough to avoid a challenge in court.

If a hacktivist group were to prove that their activities changed the outcome of the presidential election, it could throw the legitimacy of the outcome of all levels of election results into question.  More on WND.com. >>

Is Flame virus fallout a Chinese, Russian plot to control the Internet?

By Bob Sullivan

AFP - Getty Images

This undated screen grab taken released by the Kaspersky Lab site shows a program of the computer virus known as Flame.

Has the U.S. government been caught with its virtual hands in the world's cookie jar? And might it lose control of the Internet as a consequence?

If you were among the forces on the planet wanting to wrest control of the Internet from the U.S.-friendly agencies that manage it, that's the story you'd surely want to tell. 

But things are rarely what they seem.  The barrage of Flame news – including word that Flame and Stuxnet appear to have common authorship -- should not be viewed in a vacuum.

A group of nations led by China, Russia and several Middle Eastern countries would love to see the end of U.S. dominance over the operational control of the Internet, and these nations think they have found their vehicle for accomplishing that: A U.N. body called the International Telecommunications Union. 

More >>

#Anonymous knocks out FBI, DOJ sites

By msnbc.com staff and news services

Hacking group Anonymous said Thursday it knocked out the websites of the FBI, U.S. Department of Justice, and several entertainment industry sites as retribution for anti-piracy efforts by both the government and the entertainment industry. The group said it was "the largest attack ever," with 5,635 participants involved in bringing down the sites.

In addition to the FBI and DOJ, the Recording Industry of America, Motion Picture Association of America, Universal Music and BMI.com websites were also attacked. Said the DOJ in a statement: "The Department of Justice web server hosting justice.gov is currently experiencing a significant increase in activity, resulting in a degradation in service. The department is working to ensure the website is available while we investigate the origins of this activity, which is being treated as a malicious act until we can fully identify the root cause of the disruption."

An MPAA spokesman said, in an emailed statement to the AP, that despite the attack, the site was working by Thursday evening. "The motion picture and television industry has always been a strong supporter of free speech," the spokesman said. "We strongly condemn any attempts to silence any groups or individuals."

The RIAA confirmed its site had been attacked, but said it was operating normally by evening.

The FBI's site, as of 9 p.m. ET Thursday, was back up. About 45 minutes earlier, however, it could not be accessed and resulted in an error message:

The FBI.gov site could not be accessed at at 8:15 p.m. ET Thursday.

"Get some popcorn," Anonymous said on Twitter. "It's going to be a long lulzy night," indicating more was to come. "Lulz" is Internet slang for "laughs," and the hacking group LulzSec, or Lulz Security, is allied with Anonymous.

Anonymous' actions, its biggest in a single swoop, comes a day after an Internet protest against two proposed anti-piracy bills, the Stop Online Piracy Act, and the Protect IP Act, before Congress, and on the same day as a federal indictment of employees of a major Internet content-hosting site, Megaupload.com. More >>

'Anonymous' hackers target US security think tank

Yahoo news.com/ By CASSANDRA VINOGRAD and RAMIT PLUSHNICK-MASTI/

LONDON – The loose-knit hacking movement "Anonymous" claimed Sunday to have stolen thousands of credit card numbers and other personal information belonging to clients of U.S.-based security think tank Stratfor. One hacker said the goal was to pilfer funds from individuals' accounts to give away as Christmas donations, and some victims confirmed unauthorized transactions linked to their credit cards.

Anonymous boasted of stealing Stratfor's confidential client list, which includes entities ranging from Apple Inc. to the U.S. Air Force to the Miami Police Department, and mining it for more than 4,000 credit card numbers, passwords and home addresses.

Austin, Texas-based Stratfor provides political, economic and military analysis to help clients reduce risk, according to a description on its YouTube page. It charges subscribers for its reports and analysis, delivered through the web, emails and videos. The company's main website was down, with a banner saying the "site is currently undergoing maintenance."

Proprietary information about the companies and government agencies that subscribe to Stratfor's newsletters did not appear to be at any significant risk, however, with the main threat posed to individual employees who had subscribed.

"Not so private and secret anymore?" Anonymous taunted in a message on Twitter, promising that the attack on Stratfor was just the beginning of a Christmas-inspired assault on a long list of targets.

Anonymous said the client list it had already posted was a small slice of the 200 gigabytes worth of plunder it stole from Stratfor and promised more leaks. It said it was able to get the credit card details in part because Stratfor didn't bother encrypting them — an easy-to-avoid blunder which, if true, would be a major embarrassment for any security-related company.

Fred Burton, Stratfor's vice president of intelligence, said the company had reported the intrusion to law enforcement and was working with them on the investigation.

Stratfor has protections in place meant to prevent such attacks, he said.  More >>

Iran says has detected Duqu computer virus

TEHRAN — Iran said on Sunday it had detected the Duqu computer virus that experts say is based on Stuxnet, the so-called "cyber-weapon" discovered last year and believed to be aimed at sabotaging the Islamic Republic's nuclear sites.

The head of Iran's civil defense organization told the official IRNA news agency that computers at all main sites at risk were being checked and that Iran had developed software to combat the virus.

"We are in the initial phase of fighting the Duqu virus," Gholamreza Jalali, was quoted as saying. "The final report which says which organizations the virus has spread to and what its impacts are has not been completed yet.

"All the organizations and centers that could be susceptible to being contaminated are being controlled," he said.

News of Duqu surfaced in October when security software maker Symantec Corp said it had found a mysterious virus that contained code similar to Stuxnet.

While Stuxnet was aimed at crippling industrial control systems and may have destroyed some of the centrifuges Iran uses to enrich uranium, experts say Duqu appeared designed to gather data to make it easier to launch future cyber attacks.More >

Key European Nuclear Firms Attacked By Variation On Stuxnet Virus

Image: Flickr Swobodin

Adam Taylor

Several European firms that create software that controls industrial facilities, including nuclear reactors, have been hit by a virus that extracts information from their systems, The New York Times reports. The virus, known as Duqu, appears to have been made by the same people who made the Stuxnet virus, an infamous cyber weapon that attacked the Iran nuclear program last summer.
Internet security organization Symantec describe Duqu on their website:

Duqu is essentially the precursor to a future Stuxnet-like attack. The threat was written by the same authors (or those that have access to the Stuxnet source code) and appears to have been created since the last Stuxnet file was recovered. Duqu's purpose is to gather intelligence data and assets from entities, such as industrial control system manufacturers, in order to more easily conduct a future attack against another third party. The attackers are looking for information such as design documents that could help them mount a future attack on an industrial control facility.

One key point outlined by Systemac is that whoever created the file has access to the source code of Stuxnet, and is likely the creator of the previous virus.
But who created Stuxnet? While initial reports suggested Israel, other reports suggested China or even the United States. Could any of them have an interest in European nuclear security?
Vikram Thakur of Symantec told the Times, “This is extremely sophisticated, this is cutting edge.”

Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/duqu-stuxnet-nuclear-europe-2011-10?nr_email_referer=1&utm_source=Triggermail&utm_medium=email&utm_term=Business%20Insider%20Select&utm_campaign=BI%20Select%20Recurring%202011-10-19#ixzz1bGi6XpiK

Former Secretary of Homeland Security Michael Chertoff on Cyber Threats

Five Things To Know About Operation Shady RAT

Professional Hacking Tricks

On Tuesday, Vanity Fair published a scoop explaining that cybercriminals have spent more than five years cautiously working to obtain data from more than 70 government agencies, corporations and non-profit groups.

The campaign, named “Operation Shady RAT” — RAT as in “remote access tool” – was discovered by Dmitri Alperovitch, vice president of threat research at security firm McAfee.

While most of the targets have removed the malware, the operation persists. The good news: McAfee gained access to a command-and-control server used by the attackers and has been watching, silently. (U.S. law enforcement officials are working to shut down the operation.)

This morning, McAfee published a 14-page report (.pdf) summarizing its findings.

Here are five things you need to know:

1. 72 organizations were compromised. Among them: the U.S., Canadian, South Korean, Vietnamese, Taiwanese and Indian governments; the United Nations; industrial and energy corporations; electronics and IT firms; news media; defense contractors; real estate firms; sports groups and think tanks.
2. It’s not just North America and Europe. Sure, 49 of the targets were American, but Asian interests tallied 13 targets. Why? Political motivation: Targets that include Olympic committees and political non-profits show that the group was not “interested only in economic gains,” Alperovitch writes in the report.
3. When the coast was determined to be clear, the attackers struck. There were only eight intrusions in 2006, when the logs began, but the pace of activity jumped 260 percent the following years, striking 29 targets. It jumped to 36 victims in 2008 and 38 in 2009 before slowing down, likely because of the availability of countermeasures for these kinds of intrusions.
4. This was a single operation by a single group. But it’s not for the reason you think: “The key to these intrusions is that the adversary is motivated by a massive hunger for secrets and intellectual property; this is different from the immediate financial gratification that drives much of cybercrime, another serious but more manageable threat.”
5. “The only organizations that are exempt from this threat are those that don’t have anything valuable or interesting worth stealing.” Alperovitch said he divides Fortune Global 2000 firms into two categories: those that know they’ve been compromised and those that don’t yet know.

In closing, Alperovitch offers a sobering sense of scope for these kinds of cyberattacks, which he notes have occurred “relentlessly for the past decade” but have only recently gained press.

The loss [of this data] represents a massive economic threat not just to individual companies and industries but to entire countries that face the prospect of decreased economic growth in a suddenly more competitive landscape and the loss of jobs in industries that lose out to unscrupulous competitors in another part of the world, not to mention the national security impact of the loss of sensitive intelligence or defense information.

A sinister cyber-surveillance scheme exposed

Barrett Brown
The Guardian
June 23, 2011

When President Eisenhower left office in 1960, he provided the American people with a warning.

“In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.”

Sixty years later, the military-industrial complex has been joined by another unprecedented centre of what has increasingly proven to be “misplaced power”: the dozens of secretive firms known collectively as the intelligence contracting industry.

Last February, three of these firms – HBGary Federal, Palantir and Berico, known collectively as Team Themis – were discovered to have conspired to hire out their information war capabilities to corporations which hoped to strike back at perceived enemies, including US activist groups, WikiLeaks and journalist Glenn Greenwald. That such a dangerous new dynamic was now in play was only revealed due to a raid by hackers associated with the Anonymous collective, resulting in the dissemination of more than 70,000 emails to and from executives at HBGary Federal and affiliated company HBGary.

Read more

Full story...

#Facebook and #PayPal logins released by hacker group #Lulz Security

The hacker group Lulz Security is claiming it released log-in information for 62,000 private internet accounts Thursday, including Facebook, PayPal, dating sites, Xbox Live and Twitter.
The list is mostly American accounts but includes hundreds of Canadians, including a CBC journalist from Prince Edward Island, and employees of all three levels of government, including provincial public servants in Alberta, Nova Scotia, and Prince Edward Island and at least one municipal worker in Whitehorse.
Other countries whose citizens were hacked include the United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand and Brazil.
On its Twitter account, LulzSec said it uploaded the file to a file-sharing site Thursday morning. The site took it down, but it was uploaded again Thursday evening and taken down once more. LulzSec reported thousands of downloads before it was removed.
The group's Twitter feed contains bragging from people who claim to have taken the information and logged on to people's personal sites: taking money from PayPal accounts, replacing dating site profile pictures with pornographic images, and engaging in chats using other people's Facebook accounts.
"Envelope yourself in the sickening realization that you secretly love f--king someone's Facebook life beyond repair," says one tweet from LulzSec.
People concerned that they may be on the list can protect themselves by changing their passwords, provided no one else has already done that using their log-in information. Dazzlepod.com has published a list of emails hacked by LulzSec so people can check if their accounts are at risk.
Lulz Security, also known as LulzSec, was also in the news this week after claiming it had attacked the websites of the CIA and the U.S. Senate. It had previously taken credit for hacking into the systems of Sony and Nintendo and for posting a fake story about dead rapper Tupac Shakur on the PBS website after the public television broadcaster aired a documentary seen as critical of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange.
Responding to the news Friday, PayPal Canada stressed through a spokesman that its site security has in no way been breached. "The hacker acquired usernames and passwords via another, less secure site, and is encouraging criminals to try the username/password combinations on PayPal.com.
"These usernames and passwords are not necessarily associated with PayPal, but if people have used the same usernames/passwords for multiple sites, including PayPal, then their accounts could be accessed by another person."
The spokesman added that PayPal monitors accounts for unusual activity patterns and will contact customers if wrongdoing is suspected.

#LULZ Security Hacks #CIA Website!

LULZ Security Hacks CIA Website!

US Senate has been #hacked by Lulz Security

Internal U.S. Senate Web Server Information

From  Professional Hacking Tricks

Just days after the public release of 26,000 email addresses and passwords, Lulz Security has raised the bar considerably by releasing internal data obtained from a U.S. Senate Web server. To quote their release notes:

Greetings friends,
We don’t like the US government very much. Their boats are weak, their lulz are low, and their sites aren’t very secure. In an attempt to help them fix their issues, we’ve decided to donate additional lulz in the form of owning them some more!
This is a small, just-for-kicks release of some internal data from Senate.gov - is this an act of war, gentlemen? Problem?

The hacking group LulzSec have added Senate.gov to the growing list of organizations whose websites they’ve breached just for the heck of it, including Sony, Fox.com, FBI affiliate Infragard and a porn site. Last night the group released a long list of internal configuration data from the U.S. Senate’s official website, Senate.gov — while none of it appeared to be sensitive, the group appeared to want to show that it could breach the Senate’s computer network.

In a statement LulzSec said: “This is a small, just-for-kicks release of some internal data from Senate.gov – is this an act of war, gentlemen? Problem?” The group’s question refers to recent reports that the U.S. military would respond to cyber attacks against the United States with military force.

The Senate’s deputy sergeant at arms Martina Bradford confirmed to Reuters that LulzSec had broken into a public portion of the Senate site but did not get through a firewall into a more sensitive portion of the network. The hackers also did not compromise any individual senator’s information. “We were responding to their allegations,” Bradford told Reuters. “Basically what we’re saying that the server they got into is for public access and is in the public side.”

“We don’t like the US government very much,” the hacker group which also calls itself The Lulz Boat said. “Their boats are weak, their lulz are low, and their sites aren’t very secure. In an attempt to help them fix their issues, we’ve decided to donate additional lulz in the form of owning them some more!”

The Senate wasn’t LulzSec’s only target–the group also announced a more serious attack against Bethesda Softworks, the Maryland-based game maker behind Brink, yesterday. The group said in a separate statement that it had mapped the company’s internal network and “grabbed all their source code and database passwords, which we proceeded to shift silently back to our storage deck,”Lulzsec said.

The group added they had obtained usernames and passwords for 200,000 gamers but would not publish them. “We actually like this company and would like for them to speed up the production of Skyrim, so we’ll give them one less thing to worry about. You’re welcome!”

US Senate has been hacked by Lulz Security

Seeking Address: Why Cyber Attacks Are So Difficult to Trace Back to Hackers

By Larry Greenemeier

Cyber attacks may not be a new phenomenon but the recent successes scored against high-profile targets including CitiGroup, Google, RSA and government contractors such as Lockheed Martin underscore the targets' current failure to block security threats enabled by the Internet. Malicious hackers use the very same technology that enables online banking, entertainment and myriad other communication services to attack these very applications, steal user data, and then cover their own tracks.

One common practice that attackers employ to evade detection is to break into poorly secured computers and use those hijacked systems as proxies through which they can launch and route attacks worldwide. Although such attacks are an international problem, there is no international response, which frustrates local law enforcement seeking cooperation from countries where these  proxy servers typically reside.

 

Full story...

China paper warns #Google may pay price for hacking claims

By Miral Fahmy

(Reuters) - Google has become a "political tool" vilifying the Chinese government, an official Beijing newspaper said on Monday, warning that the U.S. Internet giant's statements about hacking attacks traced to China could hurt its business.

Full story...

Clinton: FBI to Probe China Email #Hacking Charge

Otro virus informático ataca el plan nuclear iraní

Expertos iraníes detectaron un nuevo ataque a los sistemas de su cuestionada central atómica. El año pasado el virus Stuxnet dio el primer gran golpe a la seguridad del régimen 

 "Afortunadamente, nuestros jóvenes científicos alcanzaron a descubrirlo y ahora el virus fue puesto bajo examen en laboratorio", precisó el jefe de una unidad militar responsable de combatir el sabotaje, Gholam Reza Jalali.

"Stars" es el segundo gusano espía que ataca a Irán en los últimos ocho meses. A finales del año pasado, un poderoso virus conocido como "Stuxnet" agredió las instalaciones nucleares del país y otros sitios industriales.

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