hack

New Jersey is a complex place.

So complex that it even has a town called West New York. The mayor of that little town, Felix Roque, may well be a complex man himself.

For authorities are accusing him of becoming so upset by a movement to recall him that, together with his son, he allegedly took down the recall Web site.

No, he didn't turn up at the site owner's house with machetes and men with deep set eyes and obvious intentions. Instead, the FBI says Roque and his son Joseph sneaked their way illegally into RecallRoque.com.… Read more

The war on terror has gone cyber.

The U.S. State Department has been hacking into al-Qaeda websites in Yemen to change al-Qaeda propaganda that bragged about killing Americans, according to an Associated Press report.

Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton made mention of the covert cyber operations on Wednesday, saying a team of State Department hackers plastered al-Qaeda sites with with altered versions of the ads. These new ads portrayed how al-Qaeda attacks have affected the Yemeni people. The missions were carried out in a 48 hour-period.

"Extremists are publicly venting their frustration and asking supporters not to … Read more

In a hack it dubbed "Monday Mail Mayhem," Anonymous claims to have collected and released 1.7GB of data from the U.S. Department of Justice yesterday.

"Within the booty you may find lots of shiny things such as internal emails, and the entire database dump," the hacker group wrote on the AnonNews Web site. "We Lulzed as they took the website down after being owned, clearly showing they were scared of what inevitably happened."

The group did not specifically say why it initiated the attack. Instead, it cryptically announced that, "We are … Read more

The former head of News Corp.'s U.K. newspaper business Rebekah Brooks has been formally charged in the phone-hacking scandal that took the popular News of the World down.

The U.K.'s Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) today announced that it has charged Brooks with three counts of "conspiracy to pervert the course of justice." CPS claims that last July, Brooks "conspired" with her husband, chauffeur, and others to "conceal documents, computers, and other electronic equipment from officers of the Metropolitan Police Service." CPS also charged Brooks and her assistant with "permanently&… Read more

The Atlantic Ocean was experiencing rough waters this morning.

This, many suggest, was due to the sheer power of the guffaws that were being emitted from Britain's shores after it was revealed that the nation's prime minister, David Cameron, seemed unclear what it means when you write "LOL" in a text.

The Guardian reports that former News of the World editor Rebekah Brooks, in giving evidence to the Leveson inquiry into News Corp.'s phone hacking, revealed that Cameron send her texts regularly.

She also revealed that he kept signing them "LOL", in the … Read more

Twitter is investigating the release of what appear to be thousands of user account passwords and e-mail addresses.

"We are currently looking into the situation. In the meantime, we have pushed out password resets to accounts that may have been affected," Twitter spokesman Robert Weeks told CNET in an e-mail. "For those who are concerned that their account may have been compromised, we suggest resetting your passwords and more in our Help Center."

The user data, so vast that it took five Pastebin pages to post, was released yesterday and blogged about on Airdemon.net, putting … Read more

It's been a tough year for the U.K.'s Serious Organized Crime Agency (SOCA).

The organization confirmed to TechWeekEurope today that its site has once again become the target of a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack, and has been forced to take its site offline to "limit the impact" of the threat.

"Clearly the things we'd like to stress are that the SOCA website contains only publicly available information, it does not provide access to operational material," a SOCA spokesperson told TechWeekEurope. "DDoS attacks cause a temporary inconvenience to website visitors, … Read more

Hackers overrode the tallest building in Cambridge, Mass., last week, turning the 21-story Green Building at MIT into a giant Tetris puzzle game controllable from a nearby joystick attached to a podium.

The successful attempt comes after a glitch-filled try to run Tetris on the same building in September of last year. Hackers used 153 wirelessly controlled color-changing LED lights for the giant game on a building that hosts MIT's Department of Earth, Atmospheric, and Planetary Science facilities.

The MIT-hosted Hack Gallery notes, "MIT hackers have long considered 'Tetris on the Green Building' to be the Holy Grail of hacks, as the side of the building is a wonderful grid for the game." … Read more

In an effort to cut down on hacking, bugs, and vulnerabilities, Google offers dollar rewards for people to hack into its Web services.

The Internet giant began swapping security research for cash over the past couple of years, but today it announced that it was upping the ante.

"In just over a year, the program paid out around $460,000 to roughly 200 individuals," Google security team members Adam Mein and Michal Zalewski wrote in a blog post. "We're confident beyond any doubt the program has made Google users safer."

As of today, hackers can … Read more