hacking

London police have arrested six individuals in last year's News of the World phone-hacking scandal, and one report claims former News Corp. exec Rebekah Brooks is among them.

Citing sources, Britain's Sky News is reporting today that London police have arrested Brooks. Scotland Yard confirmed that one 43-year-old woman had been arrested, but did not provide her name. Brooks, who is 43, was a close ally to News Corp. chief Rupert Murdoch, whose media conglomerate owned News of the World.

Last year's scandal, in which the newspaper was accused of hacking cell phones in order to dig … Read more

The Vatican has confirmed a second attack against its Web site by the Anonymous hacking group, and an infiltration of its radio database.

"There was a second attack we are aware of directed against the [Vatican IP] address," said a Vatican spokesman today. "[Concerning] Vatican Radio, a database on an old server was accessed. Thirty percent of the information on the server was so outdated it was of no use."

Anonymous claimed to have hacked Vatican Radio in protest against the Vatican Radio allegedly using "repeaters with power transmission largely outside the bounds of the … Read more

When the Antisec branch of Anonymous hacked into security think tank Strategic Forecasting, or Stratfor, at the end of December, one of its claims was the theft 200GB worth of data, including e-mails and clients' credit card information.

Days after the hack, the group published 860,000 e-mail addresses and 75,000 unencrypted credit card numbers on the Web.

Now, the FBI's Milan Patel says that between December 6, 2011, and February 2012, "at least $700,000 worth of unauthorized charges were made to credit card accounts that were among those stolen during the Stratfor Hack," according … Read more

Some government witnesses do only what they must to help. Others do everything they can. Hector Xavier Monsegur, who was known as "Sabu" in hacking circles, was the latter.

According to unsealed court documents released yesterday and obtained by the Wall Street Journal, Monsegur was "proactively" cooperating with theFBI, helping the government agency build its cases against alleged hackers. Monsegur's work with the government became an around-the-clock job, as he stayed up all night at times coaxing alleged hackers into conversations that were recorded and eventually used against them by the FBI.

Sabu's true … Read more

An online hacker group associated with Anonymous responded to the arrest of six suspected hackers by hacking and defacing a security firm's Web site.

Members of AntiSec hacked the Web site of antivirus company Panda Security after it was revealed today that five men in the U.K., Ireland, New York, and Chicago had been charged with hacking-related offenses, as well as news that LulzSec leader Hector Xavier Monsegur, known as Sabu, had assisted federal officials in their probe of the group.

"Yeah yeah, we know, Sabu snitched on us. As usually happens FBI menaced him to take … Read more

Government agencies have arrested several members of hacker group LulzSec, which has claimed responsibility for attacks on Sony Pictures and Fox's "X-Factor" reality series, charging them with crimes allegedly affecting more than 1 million victims.

Five of the arrested individuals are described as "core" members of the hacker groups Anonymous and LulzSec, while a sixth individual, who operated under a separate group called Antisec, was also arrested, the U.S. Attorney's office said today in a statement.

The arrests have likely put hackers on alert, even as tensions rise over future attacks. While law … Read more

Sony's sad security song isn't finished yet.

Hackers have reportedly broken into the music label's servers and downloaded Michael Jackson's entire 50,000-track catalog, including many songs that have never been released, according to a report in Britain's Sunday Times (behind paywall). Sony purchased the catalog in 2010 from Jackson's estate for $250 million--billed as the biggest recording deal in history.

"Everything Sony purchased from the Michael Jackson estate was compromised," a source told the newspaper. "It caused them to check their systems and they found the breach. There was a … Read more

As political parties, bank managers, and drug dealers have often found to their cost, infiltrators can be very hard to detect.

This is something that, perhaps, the members of Anonymous recently discovered for themselves, at least according to Symantec, the online security people.

For the company believes that members of the hacking collective were deceived into downloading a Zeus Trojan that gave up their banking details and other personal information.

On its blog, Symantec described how, on January 20--the day of the rather charming Kim Dotcom's sequestration by the FBI--members of Anonymous used their own personal computers to participate … Read more

By now, you're probably a little bored of playing Angry Birds, but here's a new way to make it fun and challenging again.

Simon Ford over at Mbed has an awesome hack that lets you hurl your favorite fighting birds using a real slingshot. Inspired by a demo on how easy it is to build your own USB devices, the idea behind this DIY project is to turn the slingshot into a mouse.

The slingshot was actually handmade by Chris Jarratt using a branch he found in Epping Forest, London. Ford then hollowed out parts of the branch, … Read more