Hackers

A U.S. federal judge has agreed to freeze the assets of a company being accused of manipulating the stocks of 38 companies listed on the Nasdaq and New York Stock Exchange via compromised trading accounts, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission said Tuesday.

The SEC alleges in a complaint filed in federal district court in New York on Monday that BroCo Investments and its president, Valery Maltsev, gained access to investor accounts using stolen usernames and passwords, and placed unauthorized trades through the accounts.

Maltsev's company bought stocks at above-market prices through the accounts and then sold … Read more

With Wilson nursing a flu, Natali Del Conte comes in to save the day and somehow manages to work up the nerve to challenge me to a habanero chili pepper eating competition. Clearly she doesn't know I was president of Edison High School's Fire Eater's Club and eat Scoville units for breakfast. Then again, her last name is Del Conte, which automatically gives her an advantage. May the best Justin Yu win.

Due to the depressing rain New York suffered over the weekend, the three of us spent the last two days indoors--and how each of us passed our time reveals a bit about our personalities. Natali checked out the 3D showing of "Alice in Wonderland" to see if the movie lives up to the hype; Jeff gives himself a pat on the back for finishing three video games in two days; and I discovered the marketing magic that is The Dragulator, a promotional campaign for RuPaul's show "Drag Race" that lets you see how you'd look as a drag queen, and I'm not gonna lie--I make this look gooooood.

It's been a long time coming, but Fandango launched a new "mobile ticket program" today that enables moviegoers to download a scannable bar code to use in lieu of a physical movie ticket.

The service will definitely save time and paper, but it also opens up a whole new world to hackers, who could easily forge a ticket using a fabricated bar code. The program is currently being tested in more than 100 theaters, including a few in NYC, so we'll try it out and bring you a special report soon.

Appreciate androids with a taste for technology tipples? BarBot 2010 may be just the event for you.

A dozen drink-making droids served up their mixology skills this week, pouring cocktails for booze-hungry hackers at the DNA Lounge in San Francisco. BarBot 2010, the third event of its kind to celebrate robots and cocktail culture, is the place to get perfectly mixed drinks from well-oiled machines. Watch as these robots use automated algorithms to serve up White Russians, cosmopolitans, and shots of whiskey with a bit of futuristic flare.

The event was put on by the same folks behind the RoboGames, … Read more

After a long battle with hackers who have been successful at jailbreaking the iPhone from one version of the OS to another, Apple is now taking a more personal approach to locking down the device. It's been reported that known iPhone jailbreaking/unlocking hackers have had their Apple IDs banned from Apple's App Store.

One of those hackers is Sherif Hashim, who recently found an exploit in the latest iPhone OS version 3.1.3 that could unlock the baseband version 05.12.01. Sherif now gets a message saying that his Apple ID is banned for "… Read more

Peiter Zatko--a respected hacker known as "Mudge"--has been tapped to be a program manager at DARPA, where he will be in charge of funding research designed to help give the U.S. government tools needed to protect against cyberattacks, CNET has learned.

Zatko will become a program manager in mid-March within the Strategic Technologies Office at DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency), which is the research and development office for the Department of Defense. His focus will be cybersecurity, he said in an interview with CNET on Tuesday.

One of his main goals will be to fund … Read more

Chinese authorities have broken a hacking-tool dissemination ring, according to state media.

Police in the central Hubei province arrested three people suspected of running the Black Hawk Safety Net, state news agency Xinhua reported Monday.

The Black Hawk Safety Net disseminated hacking tools and Trojans to its members, said Xinhua. The group had collected 7 million yuan ($1 million) in membership fees from 12,000 subscribers by the time it was shut down. The group had an additional 170,000 members who had joined for free, said Xinhua.

Read more of "China breaks up Black Hawk hacking ring" … Read more

Utility companies around the world will spend $21 billion by 2015 to improve cybersecurity for the world's electrical smart grid, according to a report released Thursday by Pike Research.

As the industry has increasingly built up smart grids to better control and regulate electrical power, the threat of cyberattacks has become a greater concern. Dangers ranging from terrorist attacks to hackers to accidents to natural disasters could cause substantial damage.

To better safeguard the grid, utilities will spend a total of $21 billion over the next five years. The business segment that services this market will likely see revenue … Read more

Many organizations are focused on stopping random hackers and blocking pornography when they should be concerned with bigger threats from professional cybercriminals, according to a new cybersecurity report.

In a survey conducted last year of 523 IT and security managers, top-level executives, and law enforcement personnel, hackers were rated the biggest threat, followed by insiders and foreign entities--probably because hackers are the "noisiest and easiest to detect," the 2010 CyberSecurity Watch Survey concluded.

However, attackers from nation-states and organized crime syndicates use more sophisticated techniques that can do more economic damage and go undiscovered, said the report, sponsored … Read more

Microsoft is so concerned about the future of cloud computing that it's urging the government to step in.

In a speech Wednesday, Microsoft general counsel and senior vice president Brad Smith called on government and business to shore up confidence in cloud computing by tackling issues of privacy and security--two major concerns that have been voiced about the cloud.

During his keynote speech to the Brookings Institution's "Cloud Computing for Business and Society" form, Smith also appealed to Washington to pass new laws and update existing ones to address problems such as computer fraud and cyberattacks … Read more