Disinformation » Hacking

Anonymous Posts Recording Of FBI & Scotland Yard Call

James Curcio — Sat, 04 Feb 2012 15:53:21 +0000

The international hackers group known as Anonymous turned the tables on the F.B.I. by listening in on a conference call last month between the bureau, Scotland Yard and other foreign police agencies about their joint investigation of the group and its allies.

Anonymous posted a 16-minute recording of the call on the Web on Friday and crowed about the episode in via Twitter: “The FBI might be curious how we’re able to continuously read their internal comms for some time now.”

Hours later, the group took responsibility for hacking the Web site of a law firm that had represented Staff Sgt. Frank Wuterich, who was accused of leading a group of Marines responsible for killing 24 unarmed civilians in Haditha, Iraq, in 2005. The group said it would soon make public “mails, faxes, transcriptions” and other material related to the case, taken from the site of Puckett & Faraj, a Washington-area law firm. A voluminous 2.55 gigabyte file labeled as those files was later posted on a site often used by hackers, Pirate Bay…

[continues in the New York Times]

Hacked Emails Show Closer Ties Between Ron Paul And Neo-Nazis, Anonymous Claims

JacobSloan — Thu, 02 Feb 2012 15:29:23 +0000

The hackers group Anonymous has hacked and defaced the website of the American Third Position Party, a Neo-Nazi organization attempting to foment a “white revolution”. Anonymous says emails reveal that Ron Paul regularly holds conference calls with A3P’s board of directors, and that members hold key posts in Ron Paul’s campaign. Is this a smear job based on guilt by association, or outright lies? Or an ugly side of Ron Paul revealed? The International Business Times reports:

Members of the nationalist American Third Position Party (A3P), whose website was defaced by Anonymous, organised Republican presidential candidate Ron Paul’s meetings and campaigns, according emails hacked by the collective. Chairman of the British National Party (BNP) Nick Griffin also took part in meetings with Paul and other representatives of A3P.

“According to these messages, Ron Paul has regularly met with many A3P members, even engaging in conference calls with their board of directors,” read a statement from Anonymous.

Paul’s connections with racist supporters have been highlighted by the media in America. Bill White, a former member of the neo-Nazi group the National Socialist Movement, became disillusioned with Paul after a spokesman for the Republican candidate called white supremacy “a small ideology”.

Following the incident, he wrote on a popular white supremacist website: “Both Congressman Paul and his aides regularly meet with members of the Stormfront set, American Renaissance, the Institute for Historic Review, and others at the Tara Thai restaurant in Arlington, Virginia, usually on Wednesdays,” he said. “I have attended these dinners, seen Paul and his aides there, and been invited to his offices in Washington to discuss policy.”

“Paul is a white nationalist of the Stormfront type who has always kept his racial views and his views about world Judaism quiet because of his political position,” he added.

Israel Attacked From Saudi Arabia

majestic — Mon, 16 Jan 2012 21:14:16 +0000

Photo: Oren Rozen (CC)

A cyber attack that is, and it looks like a very successful first strike. From USA Today:

A hacker network that claims to be based in Saudi Arabia paralyzed the websites of Israel’s stock exchange and national airline on Monday, escalating an international cyber war that has jolted this security-obsessed country.

Neither website contains sensitive information and trading and flights were not affected. But the ongoing salvos by hackers who use anti-Israel language in their posts has revealed how vulnerable Israel is to cyber warfare, despite its sophisticated computer security units in the military and advanced high-tech sector.

The attacks began earlier this month when hackers identifying themselves as group-xp, a known Saudi hacking group, claimed on an Israeli sports website to have gained access to 400,000 Israeli credit card accounts. The group called it a “gift to the world for the New Year” designed to “hurt the Zionist pocket.”…

[continues at USA Today]

‘Anonymous’ Claims to Steal Security Think Tank Stratfor’s Client List

Good German — Thu, 29 Dec 2011 00:10:05 +0000

The Associated Press reports (via CommonDreams):

The loose-knit hacking movement Anonymous claims to have stolen thousands of credit card numbers and other personal information belonging to clients of US-based security thinktank 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 including Apple, the US air force and the Miami police department – and mining it for more than 4,000 credit card numbers, passwords and home addresses.

…

“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.

You Can Remotely Hack Someone’s Insulin Pump To Kill Them

JacobSloan — Thu, 15 Dec 2011 19:00:51 +0000

A McAfee researcher has shown that it is possible to remotely hijack an insulin pump implanted in someone’s body. We may someday have internal devices that keep our organs functioning into super-old age, but will live in fear of computer viruses that explode hearts by sending pacemakers into hyperdrive, et cetera. The Register writes:

In a hack fitting of a James Bond movie, a security researcher has devised an attack that hijacks nearby insulin pumps, enabling him to surreptitiously deliver fatal doses to diabetic patients who rely on them.

The attack on wireless insulin pumps made by medical devices giant Medtronic was demonstrated Tuesday at the Hacker Halted conference in Miami. It was delivered by McAfee’s Barnaby Jack, the same researcher who last year showed how to take control of two widely used models of automatic teller machines so he could to cause them to spit out a steady stream of dollar bills.

“With this device I created and the software I created, I could actually instruct the pump to perform all manner of commands,” Jack told The Register. “I could make it dispense its entire reservoir of insulin, which is about 300 units. I just scan for any devices in the vicinity and they will respond with the serial number of the device.”

The hack he has devised would allow an attacker to manipulate the diabetic’s insulin injections and could possibly be used to kill the pump user. Radcliffe said that at first he thought it was cool for a tech standpoint and then since he uses an insulin pump he had an instance of “sheer terror” that there is no security on the devices.

An attacker according to Radcliffe could intercept wireless signals and broadcast a stronger signal to change the readout causing the person to adjust their dose. He also said that a person could do this from quite far away such as a few hundred feet away the attacker could do this from the same floor of a hospital or from the same airplane.

WikiLeaks Releases Spyware Firm Videos That Show How to Hack Email, Skype, WiFi

HAL9000 — Sun, 11 Dec 2011 20:54:45 +0000

Kim Zetter writes on WIRED’s Threat Level:

What better way to sell your wares than to produce a marketing video showing exactly how your product works? Even if that product is spyware, marketed to oppressive regimes.

WikiLeaks, as part of its Spy Files trove of documents, released on Thursday a series of videos from Gamma International, a UK-based firm that markets the Finfisher spyware.

The video shows how the company’s product can be used to sniff WiFi networks from a hotel lobby, hack computers and cell phones, or intercept Skype communications and siphon encryption passwords.

DARPA Waxes Poetic at Cyber Colloquium

aaroncynic — Tue, 08 Nov 2011 07:49:38 +0000

Aaron Cynic writes at Diatribe Media:

The Defense Department plans to ratchet up cyber security over the next five years, say chatter from a conference its research arm, DARPA, held on Monday. DARPA is seeking $208 million in funding to “prepare for hostile cyber acts that threaten our military capabilities,” an increase in $83 million reports Information Week. At the “cyber colloquium” in Virginia on Monday, talking heads for the DoD waxed poetic about the issues the Pentagon faces with cyber security.

“It is the makings of novels and poetry from Dickens to Gibran that the best and the worst occupy the same time, that wisdom and foolishness appear in the same age, light and darkness in the same season,” said DARPA’s director Regina Dugan, Wired reports. Former White House Security chief Richard Clarke was more blunt, saying current networks are as “porous as a colande.” Meanwhile, Wired reports DARPA also tacitly reached out to hackers at the colloquium, looking to enlist “the efforts of technical experts at unprecedented levels, including at the development of policy and legal frameworks.”

Read the full post at Diatribe Media

Do You Really Care If Anonymous Takes Down Facebook On Guy Fawkes Day?

majestic — Fri, 04 Nov 2011 14:32:09 +0000

The amount of chatter on the Interwebs about the threatened takedown tomorrow suggests that we should care, but why? From CNET:

There are some people who believe that being without Facebook means being without themselves. These people are, therefore, shaking at their sinews this week, fearing Saturday’s potential disaster.

Perhaps you are suffering too severely from NBA withdrawal to remember that back in August a member (or not) of hacker collective Anonymous threatened to take down Facebook on Guy Fawkes Day, which happens to be Saturday.

Back then, Anonymous may (or may not) have disavowed this plan of action.

However, I might add to your deep-seated jitters when I tell you that the Twitter account of the anti-Facebook operation, @Op_Facebook, is very much active.

I wouldn’t even dream of deciphering whether covert messages might be passed within its tweets. There is certainly no obvious mention of a November 5 takedown. But perhaps the author is just LOLing the world into a false sense of security.

There continues, though, to be a link to a statement that might, for some, clarify intentions…

[continues at CNET]

German Government Spyware Transforms Citizen’s Computers Into ‘Big Brother’-Type Surveillance Devices

HAL9000 — Mon, 31 Oct 2011 21:50:06 +0000

Discovered by the Chaos Computer Club, reports GlobalPost:

The use of so-called “Trojan horse” software by authorities in a number of German states came to light after the Computer Chaos Club, a hacker group, published details of their examination of spyware planted on a laptop in Bavaria.

It found that the software — developed by a private company called DigiTask for the Bavarian police — was capable of much more than just monitoring internet phone calls. It could take screenshots, remotely add files and control a computer’s microphone or webcam to monitor the person’s home. However, the authorities insist that they did not deploy these functions. Investigations are ongoing.

Graham Cluley, a senior technology consultant with British computer security firm Sophos, which also analyzed the software, said that the spyware could “automatically update itself over the internet, so new functionality can be added. It can be used to install new software onto the computer, so people could actually alter the contents of a suspect’s hard drive.”

The scandal has led politicians and security experts to look at whether the country’s already stringent privacy laws need firming up.

Chinese Military Suspected in Hacker Attacks on U.S. Satellites

HAL9000 — Fri, 28 Oct 2011 08:30:44 +0000

Tony Capaccio and Jeff Bliss report in Bloomberg:

Computer hackers, possibly from the Chinese military, interfered with two U.S. government satellites four times in 2007 and 2008 through a ground station in Norway, according to a congressional commission.

The intrusions on the satellites, used for earth climate and terrain observation, underscore the potential danger posed by hackers, according to excerpts from the final draft of the annual report by the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission. The report is scheduled to be released next month.

“Such interference poses numerous potential threats, particularly if achieved against satellites with more sensitive functions,” according to the draft. “Access to a satellite‘s controls could allow an attacker to damage or destroy the satellite. An attacker could also deny or degrade as well as forge or otherwise manipulate the satellite’s transmission.”

Anonymous Busts Child Porn Ring

HAL9000 — Wed, 26 Oct 2011 01:53:41 +0000

Funny, how the mainstream media isn’t all over this one, given Anonymous has been a great punching bag for them. Think they are still upset about the Stock Exchange? … Sara Yin reports in PC Magazine:

Hacker group Anonymous briefly crashed a large collection of child pornography Web sites, and published the names of its patrons.

Last week, the cyber vigilantes, better known for targeting large corporations and oppressive government regimes, used a brute force attack to infiltrate a server called Freedom Hosting, which housed about 40 child porn sites. The biggest site was Lolita City, which contained more than 100GB of content.

According to a timeline of events posted on Pastebin, Anonymous said before taking down the sites, it issued a warning to Freedom Hosting to remove the illegal content. When it failed to do so, Anonymous attacked. The sites were down for about five minutes before an admin restored them, upon which Anonymous again launched a successful attack. Later, the group posted on Pastebin the names of 1,589 individuals who visited Lolita City.

“If the FBI, Interpol, or other law enforcement agency should happen to come across this list, please use it to investigate and bring justice to the people listed here,” Anonymous wrote in a statement.

More: PC Magazine

Sesame Street Letter X Hack Puts Porn On YouTube Page

majestic — Mon, 17 Oct 2011 13:48:02 +0000

So far as subversive pranks go, this one doesn’t seem especially anti-establishment. How about hacking some banks’ YouTube pages instead? CNN reports on the juvenile shocker:

Hackers appeared to have commandeered the YouTube page of the venerable “Sesame Street” children’s show Sunday, reprogramming the page with content brought to you by the letter “X.”

The show page was taken offline Sunday afternoon, and visitors were greeted with a message from the video website informing them it had been shut down “due to repeated or severe violations of our community guidelines.” Users who called up the account earlier had found explicit sex videos instead of Muppets.

“YouTube’s Community Guidelines prohibit graphic content,” a YouTube representative told CNN. “As always, we remove inappropriate material as soon as we are made aware of it.”

Sesame Workshop, the non-profit organization behind Sesame Street, issued an apology Sunday…

[continues at CNN]

Enter the FBI’s ‘Stingray’ Phone Tracker, Able to Locate Cell Phones Even When Not In Use

Join Or DIE — Fri, 23 Sep 2011 23:53:32 +0000

Jennifer Valentino-Devries reports in the Wall Street Journal:

For more than a year, federal authorities pursued a man they called simply “the Hacker.” Only after using a little known cellphone-tracking device — a stingray — were they able to zero in on a California home and make the arrest.

Stingrays are designed to locate a mobile phone even when it’s not being used to make a call. The Federal Bureau of Investigation considers the devices to be so critical that it has a policy of deleting the data gathered in their use, mainly to keep suspects in the dark about their capabilities, an FBI official told the Wall Street Journal in response to inquiries.

A stingray’s role in nabbing the alleged “Hacker” — Daniel David Rigmaiden — is shaping up as a possible test of the legal standards for using these devices in investigations. The FBI says it obtains appropriate court approval to use the device.

Stingrays are one of several new technologies used by law enforcement to track people’s locations, often without a search warrant. These techniques are driving a constitutional debate about whether the Fourth Amendment, which prohibits unreasonable searches and seizures, but which was written before the digital age, is keeping pace with the times.

Media Fail: Is Anonymous Helping Time Warner’s Bottom Line?

HAL9000 — Fri, 02 Sep 2011 04:36:47 +0000

Photo: Vincent Diamante (CC)

Way more positive social action than feeding their machine, but an interesting shot at activism from Nick Bilton in the NY Times:

Anonymous, the hacker group, has jostled with the Iranian government and the Church of Scientology and has briefly shut down the Web sites of Visa, MasterCard and other global corporations.

When members appear in public to protest censorship and what they view as corruption, they don a plastic mask of Guy Fawkes, the 17th-century Englishman who tried to blow up the Houses of Parliament.

Stark white, with blushed pink cheeks, a wide grin and a thin black mustache and goatee, the mask resonates with the hackers because it was worn by a rogue anarchist challenging an authoritarian government in “V for Vendetta,” the movie produced in 2006 by Warner Brothers.

What few people seem to know, though, is that Time Warner, one of the largest media companies in the world and parent of Warner Brothers, owns the rights to the image and is paid a licensing fee with the sale of each mask.

The 404 Attacks – Meme or Scheme?

James Curcio — Mon, 29 Aug 2011 15:26:43 +0000

Photo: Mr.Bigg23 (CC)

[UPDATE: the Wikipedia page has been deleted.]

A Wikipedia article that’s been the subject of some internal argument there (based on the fact that much associated with this meme is by its nature unverifiable) was brought to my attention by one of the readers of my books. I can’t say I’m entirely enthusiastic about the possible uses that this thing might be put to in the hands of a group like Anon — though it seems to already be “their” M.O. anyway, and the dis-organization is structured along the same lines as the fictitious (?) “Mother Hive Brain” in a way that’s always amused me more than a little. In a world teetering on the brink, and in the midst of issues such as “NymWars,” this topic at the least seems finally ripe for discussion as well as action. From Wikipedia:

In practice, the 404 Attacks are a technique for disseminating disinformation through various networks. The campaign thus far seems to be organized through mIRC, various message boards, and relatively small circles of culture jammers. The project in general, much like Operation Mindfuck, leads an outsider to an immediate double bind scenario: The only safe assumption is that everything that is read or disseminated globally through various media networks, especially but not limited to the internet, is false or a part of the 404 Attacks- However, this is not really a safe assumption at all, as it lends itself to widespread paranoia and skepticism at the very least.

Motives behind each individual’s level of participation vary across the board. Typically these motives include, but are not limited to: Increasing awareness, pulling the curtain back on the art of persuasion/”mind control”, increasing chaos in systems that tend towards homeostasis, and Doing It For The Lulz.

Techniques include, but are not limited to, strategic application of art crime (graffiti campaigns, reality tunnel manipulation, guerilla theater, etc.), meme dissemination, social engineering and production of media designed to disrupt traditional thought patterns in subhuman primates.

The first cited use of the 404 attacks was in the novel Fallen Nation, an excerpt of which, explaining the 404 concept, can be found here. Briefly quoting the excerpt:

How did this snowball? You’ll have to inspect my recent entries. In the time left in this incarnation, I can say this much…The net crackled here and there with chatter, frankly predicting the complete destruction of corporate and governmental information architecture by agents unknown. No one knew how or why this would happen, or even questioned the meme’s credibility; they just passed it on, working it into their conversations without gravity.

Looking back, it was the quietly asserted inevitability of the ‘404 attacks’ in these messages that in turn made the events inevitable. Whoever spread those initial communications is a genius of memetic engineering. Anyone with the motivation and skills to bring chaos to the infrastructure, receiving the meme, would immediately conclude that they were not alone, others had the same plans, and all they had to do was help it along. Soon artists, bands, hackers, and pretty much all those disenfranchised by the present regime passed this anarchistic mantra amongst themselves. What a joke. I doubt that the original authors had anything in the oven, save prodding everyone else into action.

In the novel, it is utilized by the fictional ontological terrorist organization ”The Mother Hive Brain Syndicate.” It has since been picked up by the hacker collective Anonymous.

(Full disclosure: Following Wikipedia’s guidelines I neither created nor edited this article because I’m associated with some of the original sources. I would otherwise change several inaccuracies.)

Anonymous Releases Defense Contractor’s Drone Data

Good German — Sun, 28 Aug 2011 22:15:36 +0000

Alastair Stevenson reports in the International Business Times:

The hacker collective Anonymous has released a fresh batch of data taken from Vanguard Defense Industries, a Pentagon and FBI contractor.

The data release was revealed via a post on tor2web.org and later publicised on the group’s AnonymousIRC Twitter account. In it the group claimed to have released “1GB of private emails and documents belonging to Vanguard Defense Industries (VDI).”

Anonymous later said the e-mails belong to the contractor’s senior vice president, Richard T. Garcia, and contained information regarding “internal meeting notes and contracts, schematics, non-disclosure agreements, personal information about other VDI employees, and several dozen ‘counter-terrorism’ documents classified as ‘law enforcement sensitive’ and ‘for official use only.’”

A key bit of information highlighted in its release pertained to Vanguard Defense Industries’ ShadowHawk drones, which are used by military, law enforcement and private companies across the world and are loaded with grenade launchers and shotguns. Despite highlighting the ShadowHawk unmanned aerial vehicle, the group offered no clear reason for the attack on Vanguard Defense Industries besides its association with military and law enforcement agencies.

Hacker Stock Photo Art

JacobSloan — Thu, 04 Aug 2011 15:13:13 +0000

Boing Boing has a brilliant collection/dissection of the stock photography used when news websites attempt to report on “hacking” and cybercrime. Strained visual metaphors abound, and the usual suspects include disembodied hands that try to strangle you through the internet, cyber-ninja hackers, and bad teens who keep their sweatshirt hood up even though they are indoors sitting at a computer:

The color of the glow of monitor light is semiotically significant. White light, resulting in natural tones, is for victims and security experts. Blue-bathed hackers are thieves. Green-tinted hackers are exploring The Matrix. Red glows are for evil hackers, especially cyber-bullies.

________

Meet An Open Source Weapon in Stuxnet: The Anatomy of a Computer Virus (Video)

HAL9000 — Mon, 25 Jul 2011 00:43:52 +0000

An infographic dissecting the nature and ramifications of Stuxnet, the first weapon made entirely out of code. This was produced for Australian TV program HungryBeast on Australia’s ABC1:

Anonymous Claims to Breach NATO Security

BananaFamine — Fri, 22 Jul 2011 06:10:41 +0000

Via Fox News:

NATO is looking into claims that hackers have breached its security and accessed scads of material so confidential the hacker group itself deemed it “irresponsible” to publish them all, despite a series of international raids Tuesday designed to corral the hacking activity.

“NATO is aware that hacker group released what it claims to be NATO classified documents on the internet,” a NATO spokseman said in a statement. “NATO security experts are investigating these claims. We strongly condemn any leak of classified documents which could potentially endanger the security of NATO allies, armed forces and citizens.”

The group, which goes by the name “Anonymous,” claimed to be sitting on about 1 gigabyte of data. The hackers broadcast a link to a PDF file Thursday via Twitter, showing what appeared to be a document headed “NATO Restricted.”

The group’s actions have become intolerable, Steven Chabinsky, deputy assistant FBI director, said in an interview with NPR. “We want to send a message that chaos on the Internet is unacceptable,” Chabinsky said. “[Even if] hackers can be believed to have social causes, it’s entirely unacceptable to break into websites and commit unlawful acts.”

For more information, see original article.

Anonymous Launches Social Networking Site: AnonPlus

Pelliciari — Tue, 19 Jul 2011 17:51:37 +0000

AnonPlus is to be a new social networking site without censorship, but how different is it from other social networks? The Raw Story reports:

Infamous hacker group Anonymous launched Monday its own social network after being rejected by Google’s freshly-launched online community.

“Today we welcome you to begin anew,” the hacker alliance said at the website anonplus.com, which it described as a platform to distribute information.

“Welcome to the Revolution – a new social network where there is no fear…of censorship…of blackout…nor of holding back.”

The drive to build a social network came after the Anonymous account was suspended at the Google+ online community, which was launched last month by the Internet giant as a challenge to Facebook.

A message on the anonplus.com website promised that the Anonymous social network would be for everyone and listed online monikers of developers taking part in the project.

[Continues at Raw Story]

Rupert Murdoch’s Tabloid Hacked To Report His Death

JacobSloan — Tue, 19 Jul 2011 15:27:25 +0000

The woes keep piling on for Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp, as the homepage of its popular Sun paper was altered to feature an amusing fake report on the mogul’s committing suicide “in his topiary garden”. The Guardian notes:

News International websites for the Times and the Sun were taken down last night after hackers targeted the Sun’s web pages and redirected traffic to another page falsely reporting that Rupert Murdoch had been found dead. The breach was apparently the first hack of a major UK newspaper’s website.

The LulzSec hacking collective hacked the tabloid’s site, and also claimed to be “sitting on their [the Sun's] emails” and that they would release the emails on Tuesday.

‘News of the World’ Phone-Hacking Whistleblower Found Dead

ralph — Mon, 18 Jul 2011 18:56:08 +0000

Not thought to be suspicious but is unexplained. Hell of a dark omen with Rupert Murdoch due to appear before Parliament tomorrow. Amelia Hill, James Robinson, Caroline Davies report in the Guardian:

Sean Hoare, the former News of the World showbiz reporter who was the first named journalist to allege Andy Coulson was aware of phone hacking by his staff, has been found dead, the Guardian has learned.

Hoare, who worked on the Sun and the News of the World with Coulson before being dismissed for drink and drugs problems, is said to have been found dead at his Watford home.

Hertfordshire police would not confirm his identity, but the force said in a statement: “At 10.40am today [Monday 18 July] police were called to Langley Road, Watford, following the concerns for the welfare of a man who lives at an address on the street. Upon police and ambulance arrival at a property, the body of a man was found. The man was pronounced dead at the scene shortly after.

“The death is currently being treated as unexplained, but not thought to be suspicious. Police investigations into this incident are ongoing.”

Fox News Twitter Account Gets Hacked Announcing President Obama’s Assassination

Pelliciari — Tue, 05 Jul 2011 15:02:46 +0000

With instant access to knowledge via technology, it’s easy to get the wrong news. While some hackers may expose a private tweet or e-mail, others create fake news, like the assassination of the American president. Los Angeles Times reports:

Former Rep. Anthony Weiner falsely said his Twitter account was hacked just before Memorial Day weekend. But over the holiday weekend, it looks like real hackers attacked the @foxnewspolitics verified account, one of several Twitter accounts run by FoxNews.com.

A group calling itself “ScriptKiddies” claimed responsibility for the hack and also declared it has ties to the international hacker collective Anonymous.

The Tweets began appearing just after 2 a.m. ET on Monday, July 4, an hour and date likely calculated to maximize the time the Tweets were up before the account owner noticed or could do anything about it. The fake messages announced the assassination of President Obama during a visit to Iowa, but there were no links to news reports on the incident.

More Tweets detailed the president’s condition and promised the shooter would be found.

The language of the messages did not match normal news style, sounding more like the amateur fiction it turned out to be.

[Continues at Los Angeles Times]

LulzSec Hack Revealed Cops’ Least Favorite iPhone Apps

BananaFamine — Mon, 04 Jul 2011 21:10:43 +0000

[Site editor's note: Even though, they seemingly have called it quits, an intriguing swan song ... ] Andy Greenberg writes in Forbes:

… I noted a new suite of police-policing apps including OpenWatch and Cop Recorder, which turn your phone into a “reverse surveillance camera” for secretly recording run-ins with authority figures. Now it appears that police are well aware of those programs and others that complicate law enforcement, and at least some cops are none too happy about them.

That’s one of the revelations … by the hacker group LulzSec, which dumped a cache of files that it stole from the Arizona Police Department, calling Arizona a “racial profiling anti-immigrant police state.” A pair of documents among the hundreds leaked show concerns about how smartphones are being used for everything from recording interactions with police to evading speed traps.

One document labelled “Law Enforcement Sensitive” lists the following apps, and warns officers to “take the time to look at an arrestee’s cell phone to see what applications they have.”

For more information, see original article.

LulzSec: Absolute, Grade A Imbeciles?

majestic — Sat, 25 Jun 2011 23:47:23 +0000

Paul Carr

How long before Paul Carr (author of The Upgrade, coming soon from disinformation) finds his online identity is no longer his own? He takes on Lulzsec in this article for the Guardian, which has been modified after complaints about his original choice of words:

If one is to believe the media coverage – particularly here in the US‚ no one is safe from the ingenious hackers and their devilishly complex attacks. The truth is, there’s almost nothing ingenious about what LulzSec is doing: CIA and Soca were not “hacked” in any meaningful sense, rather their public websites were brought down by an avalanche of traffic – a so-called “distributed denial-of-service” (DDoS) attack. Given enough internet-enabled typewriters, a monkey could launch a DDoS attack – except that mentally subnormal monkeys have better things to do with their time.

Even the genuine hacks are barely worthy of the word. Many large organisations use databases with known security holes that can easily be exploited by anyone who has recently completed the first year of a computer science degree: it’s no coincidence that so many of these hacker collectives appear towards the end of the academic year.

Still, what LulzSec might lack in technical prowess, it certainly makes up for in its ability to grab attention. Hackers have always boasted of their work – leaving messages on their victims’ servers, posting proof of their exploits on bulletin boards‚ so in a world where every criminal and his dog has a YouTube channel and a Facebook fan-page it’s hardly surprising that LulzSec is obsessed with online publicity. The group has been particularly smart in their use of Twitter: in less than two months it has amassed over 240,000 followers which, amusingly, means it can launch a DDoS attack simply by tweeting the web address of its next target and waiting for the tsunami of clicks to have the desired effect.

Given the group’s modus operandi – boasting on social networks, sticking it to the man – it was entirely unshocking when, on Tuesday morning, the police arrested their first suspect: a teenager who, according to his mum, suffers from agoraphobia and “lives his life online”. Ryan Cleary may, of course, be found completely innocent but when the group’s leaders are rounded up it’s a fairly safe bet that none of them will turn out to be attractive, outgoing 30-year-old women…

[continues in the Guardian]

LulzSec Leaks Arizona Law Enforcement Papers

BananaFamine — Sat, 25 Jun 2011 06:06:56 +0000

Rob Beschizza writes on BoingBoing:

LulzSec announced Thursday evening the publication at Pirate Bay of a trove of leaked material from Arizona law enforcement agencies. Arizona’s Department of Public Safety confirmed shortly thereafter that it was hacked.

In the press release included with the dump, a LulzSec affiliate outlines a more activist agenda than is usually associated with the group:

We are releasing hundreds of private intelligence bulletins, training manuals, personal email correspondence, names, phone numbers, addresses and passwords belonging to Arizona law enforcement. We are targeting AZDPS specifically because we are against SB1070 and the racial profiling anti-immigrant police state that is Arizona.

The documents classified as “law enforcement sensitive”, “not for public distribution”, and “for official use only” are primarily related to border patrol and counter-terrorism operations and describe the use of informants to infiltrate various gangs, cartels, motorcycle clubs, Nazi groups, and protest movements.

LulzSec ‘Takes Down’ CIA Website

Pelliciari — Thu, 16 Jun 2011 21:34:55 +0000

Via BBC News:

The hacker group Lulz Security has claimed it has brought down the public-facing website of the US Central Intelligence Agency.

The alleged attack on CIA.gov occurred on the same day the group opened a telephone request line so its fans could suggest potential targets.

On its Twitter feed, the group wrote: “Tango down – cia.gov – for the lulz”.

The CIA website was inaccessible at times on Wednesday but appeared to be back up on Thursday.

It was unclear if the outage was due to the group’s efforts or to the large number of internet users trying to check the site.

The CIA would not confirm if it had been the victim of an attack. In a statement, a spokesperson told BBC News: “The CIA’s public web site experienced technical issues that caused it to respond slowly for a short time yesterday evening. Those issues are now resolved.”

[Continues at BBC News]

IMF Hacked Suffering ‘Very Major Breach’

HAL9000 — Tue, 14 Jun 2011 01:41:19 +0000

David E. Sanger and John Markoff write in the NY Times:

WASHINGTON — The International Monetary Fund, still struggling to find a new leader after the arrest of its managing director last month in New York, was hit recently by what computer experts describe as a large and sophisticated cyberattack whose dimensions are still unknown.

The fund, which manages financial crises around the world and is the repository of highly confidential information about the fiscal condition of many nations, told its staff and its board of directors about the attack on Wednesday. But it did not make a public announcement.

Several senior officials with knowledge of the attack said it was both sophisticated and serious. “This was a very major breach,” said one official, who said that it had occurred over the last several months, even before Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the French politician who ran the fund, was arrested on charges of sexually assaulting a chamber maid in a New York hotel.

Asked about the reports of the computer attack late Friday, a spokesman for the fund, David Hawley, declined to provide details or talk about the scope or nature of the intrusion. “We are investigating an incident, and the fund is fully functional,” he said.

Anonymous Claims Control Of Iranian Government Servers

BananaFamine — Mon, 06 Jun 2011 06:29:22 +0000

Stephen C. Webster writes on The Raw Story:

Hackers claiming to be part of protest group “Anonymous” published on Friday over 10,000 internal emails from the Iranian government’s ministry of foreign affairs, as part of an ongoing campaign against the authoritarian regime.

The emails were published to torrent file sharing website The Pirate Bay, along with usernames and passwords. Members also claimed they had taken control of the government’s servers.

In a chat with Raw Story, members of Anonymous on the #OpIran server said they were leading the charge because they want Iranians to know they’re not alone in their struggle against the regime of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

They also pointed to a declaration of intent to attack the Iranian government, which they published to YouTube in February.

For more information, see original article.

MI6 Hacks Online Al-Qaeda Magazine Swapping Bomb Recipes For Cupcake Recipes

Pelliciari — Fri, 03 Jun 2011 20:11:45 +0000

Photo: Joy (CC)

This is quite a sweet hack. The Telegraph reports:

The cyber-warfare operation was launched by MI6 and GCHQ in an attempt to disrupt efforts by al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsular to recruit “lone-wolf” terrorists with a new English-language magazine, the Daily Telegraph understands.

When followers tried to download the 67-page colour magazine, instead of instructions about how to “Make a bomb in the Kitchen of your Mom” by “The AQ Chef” they were greeted with garbled computer code.

The code, which had been inserted into the original magazine by the British intelligence hackers, was actually a web page of recipes for “The Best Cupcakes in America” published by the Ellen DeGeneres chat show.

Written by Dulcy Israel and produced by Main Street Cupcakes in Hudson, Ohio, it said “the little cupcake is big again” adding: “Self-contained and satisfying, it summons memories of childhood even as it’s updated for today’s sweet-toothed hipsters.”

It included a recipe for the Mojito Cupcake – “made of white rum cake and draped in vanilla buttercream”- and the Rocky Road Cupcake – “warning: sugar rush ahead!”

[Continues at The Telegraph]