UPDATE! LulzSec Leader Arrested In Australia

The self-proclaimed leader of international hacking group Lulz Security has been arrested by AFP – Australian Federal Police – on the New South Wales central coast. The AFP says the 24-year-old man was arrested in the Gosford suburb of Point Clare yesterday.

He has been charged with two counts of unauthorised modification of data to cause impairment and one count of unauthorised access to a restricted computer system. The AFP says he claims to be in charge of Lulz Security, or LulzSec, which has previously claimed responsibility for high-profile hacking attacks, includinga DDS attack that took the CIA website offline, and a hack which caused some serious headaches for Sony Corp.

AFP is alleging that the 24 year old IT worker hacked an Australian Government website site last month, the man has been bailed to appear in court later this year.

In June last year the hack-group allegedly broke into Australian Government departments, universities and schools. Some of the targets included AusAid, Victorian Government departments and local councils in Victoria and New South Wales. The group bragged over the Aussie hack, saying in a Twitter post,  ”Releasing 62,000 possible account combinations is the loot for creative minds to scour; think of it like digging a very unique mineshaft.” At the time LulzSec claimed more than 5,000 people had downloaded the leaked files.

Passwords for email accounts within eight Australian universities were leaked, along with the log-ins for two high schools in Queensland and Melbourne. The 24-year-old man is the first alleged member of the group to be charged by the AFP UPDATED :: Read the full article »»»»

UPDATE! Chinese Military Hack Attacks Might Originate in NORTH KOREAN

Last month we reported that security experts from Mandiant believed a Chinese military unit was responsible for multiple hack attacks on US companies. Mandiant released a report that identified ‘Unit 61398′ as the most likely source of attacks on at least US 141 organisations, “across a diverse set of industries beginning as early as 2006″.

“The nature of ‘Unit 61398′s’ work is considered by China to be a state secret; however, we believe it engages in harmful ‘Computer Network Operations’,” Mandiant said in the report. ”It is time to acknowledge the threat is originating in China, and we wanted to do our part to arm and prepare security professionals to combat that threat effectively.”

The Mandiant report said that Unit 61398 is located in Shanghai’s Pudong district, China’s financial and banking hub, and staffed by perhaps thousands of people proficient in English as well as computer programming and network operations.

There are now suspicions that the facility might be shared with North Korean backed hackers? An unnamed source from South Korea’s presidential office was quoted by the Yonhap news agency as saying the discovery of the IP address indicated Pyongyang was responsible for the attack on Wednesday. A previous attack on a South Korean newspaper that the government in Seoul traced back to North Korea also used a Chinese IP address :: Read the full article »»»»

Former Olympus Executives Plead Guilty

UPDATE! 26 September 2012: Japanese camera maker Olympus and three of its former executives have pleaded guilty to charges relating to a $1.7 billion accounting cover-up. The scandal was exposed last October by chief executive Michael Woodford, who was sacked by the Olympus board after querying past acquisitions by the company and the payment of vastly inflated consultancy fees.

It was later revealed that they were part of an elaborate scheme to conceal losses dating back to the mid 1990s.

Olympus initially denied any wrongdoing, but the company later changed its position and sacked the executives it said were involved. Revelations of the huge accounting fraud revived calls for more outside scrutiny of its boardrooms but have failed to trigger sweeping corporate governance reforms.

“The full responsibility lies with me and I feel deeply sorry for causing trouble to our business partners, shareholders and the wider public,” ex-chairman Tsuyoshi Kikukawa told the Tokyo district court at the start of the trial. ”I take full responsibility for what happened.”

Prosecutors charged Kikukawa, former executive vice-president Hisashi Mori and former auditor Hideo Yamada with inflating the company’s net worth in financial statements for five fiscal years to March 2011 :: Read the full article »»»»

Google Fights Deception Verdict in Australian High Court

Australia’s corporate watchdog, the ACCC – Australian Competition and Consumer Commission - has told the High Court that Google is responsible for misleading content in its sponsored links. The behemoth that is Google is fighting a ruling that it engaged in misleading conduct when some advertisers used the names of competitors to attract searchers to their links.

The ACCC says these sponsored links give the false impression the businesses are linked. The ACCC says that Google Advertisements with the headline Harvey World Travel redirected to a competitors – STA Travel – website. The ACCC said that the ads were in breach of section 52 of the Trade Practices Act. Similarly, advertisements headlined with Honda, redirected to car-trading website Car Sales, several more Google Adwords accounts, including the Trading Post were said to be in breach of the Trade Practices Act.

In April this year, the Australian Federal Court found that Google HAD engaged in misleading and deceptive conduct regarding it’s AdWords website. the court said that what appears on Google’s web page is Google’s response to A User’s Query. That it happens to headline a keyword chosen by the advertiser does not make it any less Google’s responsibility

In this latest round of litigation, Google’s barrister Tony Bannon told the court that finding Google responsible for what it produces from an inquiry could have much wider implications, suggesting that a negative ruling may even hail the decline of AdWords :: Read the full article »»»»

UPDATED! Apple vs Samsung vs Apple vs Samsung

UPDATED! August 28, 2012: Apple is seeking speedy bans on the sale of eight Samsung phones, moving swiftly to capitalise on its resounding court victory over its arch-foe. The world’s most valuable company wasted no time in identifying its targets: eight older-model smartphones, including the Galaxy S II and Droid Charge.

Original Post! Just hours apart, in two separate courts – one in the USA and another in South Korea – two absolutely opposing views on the war that is Apple vs Samsung, – or should that be Samsung vs Apple? – have been handed down.

A South Korean court has handed down a split ruling over Samsungs claim that Apple infringed it’s intellectual property, ruling that some element of the iPhone do indeed use patented Samsung telecommunication technology. The court also ruled however that Samsung had – as Apple has been ranting – copy Apples interface for it’s early Galaxy phones and tabs.

The South Korean court found that both companies shared blame, ordering Samsung to stop selling 10 products including its Galaxy S II phone and banning Apple from selling four different products, including its iPhone 4.

Meanwhile across the pacific in San Jose, California, a US jury has found in favour of Apple in a case that was expected to take years to settle, Apples copycat rant has just landed it a $US1 billion dollar win! However, the US ruling runs much deeper than just a huge compensation payout, BILLIONS of dollars in future sales hang in the balance for both tech-behemoths :: Read the full article »»»»