Hackers Release Yahoo User Info

Internet company Yahoo! says it is investigating a breach of its system which may have exposed more than 400,000 user IDs and passwords.

The company says hackers have taken advantage of a security vulnerability in its computer systems and thousands of user names and passwords to access its own site and other companies have been stolen.

A US security firm says the hacking group D33D has claimed to be behind the attack and many of the personal details have been posted online.

Yahoo! says less than five per cent of the account data stolen have valid passwords.

The company has apologised for the breach and says it is fixing the defect, changing the passwords of affected users and notifying companies whose user accounts have been compromised :: Read the full article »»»»

SPAIN: Anonymous Hackers Arrested

Spain and three South American countries have arrested 25 suspected hackers associated with the Anonymous activist group on accusations of defacing government and corporate websites, officials said. Spanish police also accused one of four suspects picked up in the cities of Madrid and Malaga of releasing personal data about police officers and bodyguards protecting Spain’s royal family and the prime minister.Other arrests were in Argentina, Chile and Colombia, and 250 items of computer equipment and mobile phones were seized across 15 cities, Interpol said.

It said Colombia’s Ministry of Defence and presidential websites as well as Chile’s Endesa electricity company were among the targets of the hackers. The loosely organised group Anonymous is suspected of being behind coordinated computer hacking against institutions, multinationals and government organisations across the world.

“These cyber attacks were sometimes individual actions but they were supported by many people who joined forces and knowledge to commit them,” Spanish police said in a statement. ”Those arrested … had a high level of knowledge of information technology.”

Earlier this month, anti-secrecy group WikiLeaks began publishing more than 5 million emails from US-based global security analysis company Stratfor believed to have been obtained by Anonymous supporters. Read the full article »»»»

GAWKER: Anonymous Fundraising

In early January we reported: India has had some serious issues dealing with technology over the past decade, the country has gone from a potential tech behemoth to an open joke. An Indian hacking group, calling itself the Lords of Dharmaraja, has threatened to publicly disclose the source code on the internet. So far, there have been two claims related to Symantec’s source code. A document claiming to be confidential information related to Norton AntiVirus’s source code was posted on Pastebin. Symantec says it has investigated the claim, and rather than source code, most of the hackers booty seems to have been documentation dated April 1999, the documentation is related to an API – application programming interface – used by the product.

GAWKER is now reporting that, Anonymous Swears It Was Trying to Extort $50,000 from Antivirus Company for Charity. An Anonymous hacker tried to use stolen source codes to extort $50,000 from antivirus firm Symantec. Turned out it was a law enforcement sting. Now Anonymous is in spin mode, claiming the hacker was trying to raise money for poor kids in India.

The source code for some popular Symantec products, including pcAnywhere and Norton Antivrus, ended up in the hands of an Indian-based hacker named Yamatough, a member of the Anonymous-affiliated group the Lords of Dharamaja. This is a big deal, since the source code can give hackers a map to dangerous vulnerabilities.

RELATED:

Indian Hackers Set to Release Full Antivirus Code

UPDATED: Indian Hackers Set to Release Full Symantec-Norton Antivirus Code

India has had some serious issues dealing with technology over the past decade, the country has gone from a potential tech behemoth to an open joke. An Indian hacking group, calling itself the Lords of Dharmaraja, has threatened to publicly disclose the source code on the internet. So far, there have been two claims related to Symantec’s source code. A document claiming to be confidential information related to Norton AntiVirus’s source code was posted on Pastebin. Symantec says it has investigated the claim, and  rather than source code, most of the hackers booty  seems to have been documentation dated April 1999, the documentation is related to an API – application programming interface – used by the product.

In a later posting to Pastebin, the hacking group shared what it said was source code. However, it seems the code is related to what appears to have been the 2006 version of Symantec’s Norton AntiVirus.  Almost as quickly as the Hackers post documents, accounts are closed, documents removed and the smoke and mirror game goes no-place. The hacking group claim that they are working on creating mirror sites for their content, though nothing of any real substance has come through.  The group are claiming that they have been “pressured and censored by US and Indian government agencies.” It’s important to underline that there is presently no reason to believe that Symantec’s own servers have been compromised in any way.

It appears that the data leak has occurred on Indian government servers, which are notoriously unsecured, the implication is that Symantec, and perhaps other software companies, may have been required to supply their source code to the Indian authorities. The source code the hackers have released is NOT relevant to ANY of Symantec’s current anti-virus products, the source code is 6 years old.  This is very likely a case of over-excited Indian Hackers.

The serious question now is: Has Symantec misled the Indaina government by feeding it old, redundant code, or are Indian Hackers truly going the way of Indian call center operators? Read the full article »»»»

Anonymous: Operation Darknet Takes Down Pedophile Site

Our least favorite rabble rousers, Anonymous, have finally done something with real meaning. The Hactivist group has taken - excuse the bad taste – back door into a Pedophile site, rumaged around and caused a little chaos. Yeehaa, you guys now rock our world! Lolita City, a child pornography site run on a hidden “darknet,” has been taken down by Anonymous members, and account details of 1,600 users from the site’s database were posted as evidence.

The takedown is part of Anonymous’ Operation Darknet, an anti-child-pornography effort aimed at thwarting child pornographers operating on on the Tor network. Anonymous’ attack was focused on a hosting service called Freedom Hosting, which the group claims was the largest host of child pornography on Tor’s anonymized network. Read the full article »»»»