hijack

A former San Francisco network administrator was convicted Tuesday of hijacking the city's computer network and refusing to provide passwords to his superiors.

Terry Childs, who had worked at San Francisco's Department of Telecommunication Information Services for 10 years, was found guilty of a felony charge of denying computer access and faces a maximum state prison sentence of five years, according a San Francisco Chronicle report. Judge Teri Jackson is expected to factor in time already served for Childs, who has been in custody since July 2008.

Childs, 45, tampered with the city's Fiber Wide Area Network, … Read more

Updated at 5:50 p.m. PDT September 14 with explanation from The New York Times.

The New York Times' Web site is grappling with problems created by an "unauthorized advertisement," but it is unknown how the ads managed to appear on the site and whether the site had been compromised.

The rogue ad warns readers that their computer may be infected with a virus and redirects them to a site that purports to offer antivirus software, according to a note posted to the newspaper's Media & Advertising section:

LAS VEGAS--Showing off technology that James Bond would love, two researchers at Defcon on Friday demonstrated tools that allow people to eavesdrop on video conference calls and intercept surveillance camera video.

An attacker needs to be in the same building as the victims to carry out the man-in-the-middle attacks over the network.

The free UCSniff tool, available in Linux and Windows versions, offers a slick graphical user interface for sniffing video, said Jason Ostrom, director of the Viper Lab at Sipera Systems. The tool basically tricks the voice-over-IP network carrying the video into sending the data packets to the attacker'… Read more

Editors' note: This article was first published on February 27, 2008, and was titled, "Clean your PC with Trend Micro HijackThis." It was updated on May 21, 2009.

Malware has gotten more sophisticated at hiding its tracks compared with a few years ago. Adware, it seems, with its pop-ups and unwanted browser toolbars, has taken a backseat to the sly, ever-dangerous, and much more lucrative realm of the botnet, also known as that class of malware that conscripts your computer into an army of spam-spewing zombies, or worse.

If you suspect your Windows computer may be compromised, you should always try running standard adware-removal programs first. Ad-Aware and Avira AntiVir Personal Free are two good starts. If they can't seem to keep the nasties at bay, Trend Micro HijackThis digs deep. For most, HijackThis will be diagnostic software for Windows XP (with high compatibility for Vista) that creates a log of your Windows Registry and file settings. It is not a spyware removal tool. However, its capability to identify commonly abused methods of altering your computer can help you (and the Internet community) determine your next course of action.

Step 1: Install it

Version 2.0.2 of HijackThis contains an installer, unlike the previous version that launched from a ZIP file or EXE. If you're using that legacy version, be sure to update. You'll find that this build also downloads a desktop icon for quick-launching.

Step 2: Scan your system

Trend Micro HijackThis opens with a simple interface that offers limited instruction. Running the program and interpreting its results can be confusing. Click either of the two "system scan" buttons to bring up a list of registry and file entries. Expect to see a mess of entries--even a Firefox plug-in on a completely healthy computer can produce multiple listings. If you choose to scan the system only, you can still save a record after the scan by selecting the "Save log" button on the bottom left. This will save the log as a plain text document that you'll be able to open in Notepad.

Step 3: Identify problems

Here's the rub--now that you've got a long list of your computer's contents, how do you determine which results are critical, and which benign?

There are a few determining factors. Some entries may be obviously tied to a legitimate program you installed. A browser helper object like Adobe PDF Reader Link Helper is clearly harmless and installs with the Adobe Reader application. Listings like these you can ignore or can add to the Ignore List to bypass in future scans. To excuse any entry from showing up in the results list in the future, click the adjacent box to add a check mark and choose the button reading "Add checked to ignorelist." See it in action in this video (Note: The video accurately demonstrates using the ignore list on a previous version of HijackThis.)… Read more

A computer security enthusiast in India has released a tool designed to allow people to take complete control of strangers' Facebook accounts if they can get hold of the targets' session cookies. It also could be used to manage large quantities of hijacked accounts.

FBController analyzes the communications that Facebook has with computers when they interact with the site and uses that information, along with the cookie data, to allow for accounts to be hijacked, said 26-year-old Azim Poonawala, who wrote the tool and provides details on his blog.

Cookies, meanwhile, can be obtained using network sniffing, cross-site scripting exploits, … Read more

LiveJournal warned its users on Monday that lapsed Hotmail accounts are to blame for bloggers having their LiveJournal accounts hijacked.

"Recently some journals and communities have been broken into, their contents deleted, and their owners locked out," LiveJournal said in an e-mail to its users. "The problem appears to stem from Hotmail's policy of recycling inactive e-mail addresses."

Anyone can claim a Hotmail address if it has not been used in more than a year, the e-mail says. Hijackers are grabbing lapsed e-mail addresses that have been publicly displayed on LiveJournal profile pages and are … Read more

Our final mini-sode and the very last 404 before 2009! It's been a big year for The 404 even though it's been a really crappy year for everything else in the world. We talk about the origins of the show, the infamous BOL hijack, the addition of Justin Yu and of course, Dan the Mantern. We reminisce about all our fantastic guests and dry our eyes as we count down to the new year. Thanks to all our loyal fans! We couldn't do this without you! See you in 09...

A network administrator will stand trial for allegedly hijacking the network he designed and maintained for the city of San Francisco.

A superior court judge ruled Wednesday that there was enough evidence to hold Terry Childs for trial on four felony charges of tampering with a computer network, denying other authorized users access to the network, and causing more than $200,000 in losses, according to a report in the San Francisco Chronicle. Childs, who has been in custody since July 13, had worked at San Francisco's Department of Telecommunication Information Services for five years. Childs, 44, is being … Read more

Only days after the city of San Francisco regained control of its computer network after an alleged hijacking, a new vulnerability has come to light--this time brought on by the city itself.

The San Francisco district attorney's office has apparently made public nearly 150 usernames and passwords used by city officials to gain access to the city's network. The list was submitted to the court as Exhibit A in a case against Terry Childs, a 43-year-old network administrator for the city who was arrested July 13 on four felony charges of tampering with the city's computer network.… Read more