Tag archive: attack

Ten minutes before the Porter Ranch Walmart opened in Los Angeles, California, a mother of two used a can of pepper spray to attack other shoppers waiting in line for the early, Black Friday door-buster sales according to the Los Angeles Times. The woman was specifically looking to get the $100 discounted price on a Xbox 360 as well as a few Xbox 360 games. With both children in tow, she began spraying other customers as soon as the store… Read More

A fraudulent Google security certificate has found its way onto the web, making it possible for hackers to access the accounts of Gmail users, reports CNet. The certificate is reportedly being used to target Gmail users located in Iran. The Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) certificate was issued by Dutch security authority DigiNotar to unidentified attackers on July 10. The attackers apparently tricked DigiNotar into thinking the request for the SSL… Read More

Sony's nightmare continues this week, with with news out today that hackers infiltrated the Sony BMG Greece on May 5, and stole users' personal data, some of which was then posted online this weekend. News of the hack comes via Hacker News, which reports that an anonymous user, who goes by the name b4d_vipera, uploaded a database of user information to pastebin.com. The database includes the names and email addresses of people… Read More

The government of Iran has been accused of sponsoring an attempted cyber-attack on Google, Microsoft, Mozilla, and Skype, reports Time. If not discovered, the attacks could have left these major websites open to impersonation. The claim comes from New Jersey-based company Comodo Group, which sells digital authentication certificates that guarantee a website is legitimate through the use of a protocol called Secure Sockets Layer (SSL). Comodo… Read More

Westboro Baptist Church (WBC) is not a target of Anonymous, according to a new press release by the elusive hacker group. In fact, says Anonymous, the open letter that targeted Westboro Baptist was actually written by the church itself — not Anonymous — in order to gain publicity. To recap: Late last week, an open letter addressed to WBC appeared on the Anonymous website AnonNews.org declaring all-out war on the Kansas-based congregation for… Read More

Over the last couple days, a total of 26 sites in South Korea and the United States—including the White House—have been targeted by a denial-of-service attack designed to prevent users from accessing the sites, at times effectively taking the sites offline. Now South Korea's National Intelligence Service has said the attacks are the work of an organization or state—quite possibly North Korea. What makes the attacks… Read More

According to the BBC, China’s Xinhua news agency has reported that a massive spam attack hit 200 million people in the country, sending unwanted advertising text messages to their mobile phones.   All of those affected were subscribers to either China Mobile or China Unicom, and both companies have since set up hot lines to handle consumer complaints.   But the size of the attack has meant that the state has become involved. Liu Yue, deputy… Read More

The new generation of botnet attacks is here, and it was unveiled with an attack on the gambling sites of Gala Coral that forced them offline for almost half an hour. Perhaps the most worrying aspect isn’t that it was carried out, but the way it was conducted. The attack, which involved around 30,000 PCs and Macs, was disguised by the criminals who analyzed and reproduced the behavior of the site’s typical customers, meaning the… Read More

According to a front page report in the Financial Times, the Pentagon claims to have found the source of a cyber attack in June that stole data and shut down thee-mail system of the Defense secretary.   An anonymous source said the culprits were the Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA). According to the report, the attackers, working from anumber of locations, spend several months probing Pentagon defences before hacking in. The… Read More

Although the motivation for the attack remains unknown, early Tuesday attackers launched a distributed denial-of-service attack against the Internet's core DNS servers, which are ultimately responsible for converting human-friendly site names (like www.digitaltrends.com) to IP numbers (like 209.85.60.103) which computers, routers, and software uses behind the scenes. Think of DNS as the ever-updating address book for the millions of… Read More

It scans your DSL, cable, or dial-up Internet connection looking for hacker activity, much like antivirus programs scan your hard disk looking for viruses. BlackICE will not slow down your PC or your Internet experience. BlackICE Defender protects you in ways the other personal firewalls or antivirus software don't: it detects the attack, identifies and blocks the malicious activity before it can reach your computer, and identifies… Read More

The problem began about 8:45 a.m. EDT and lasted about two hours, said Jeff Young, a spokesman for Akamai Technologies Inc., whose network of servers mirror some of the Web's top destinations to improve their performance. Young called it a “large scale, international attack on Internet infrastructure.” However, there was no evidence that non-Akamai infrastructure was affected. Amit Yoran, head of the Department of… Read More

Several peer-to-peer (P2P) networks, including Kazaa and eDonkey, are bracing for an anticipated attack by the latest variant of the Netsky-Q worm, the latest example of virus writers taking direct aim at specific companies and Web sites. As of Thursday morning, both networks were still operating, although eDonkey had established a mirror site to keep traffic moving in case it was brought down. A note on the eDonkey homepage said… Read More