hackers

Just hours after the Massachusetts Institute of Technology pledged an investigation into its role in events leading up to the suicide of Aaron Swartz, online hacktivist group Anonymous defaced the school's Web site.

Swartz, who championed open access to documents on the Internet, committed suicide on Friday. The 26-year-old was arrested in July 2011 and accused of stealing 4 million documents from MIT and Jstor, an archive of scientific journals and academic papers. He faced $4 million in fines and more than 50 years in prison if convicted.

After MIT President L. Rafael Reif issued a statement this afternoon … Read more

It's hard to imagine a group that adheres to anarchic ideology would want its actions legalized under U.S. law. But that is exactly what Anonymous is doing.

The loose-knit group of hackers submitted a petition to President Obama this week asking that distributed denial-of-service attacks be recognized as a legal form of protest.

The petition, which is posted on the White House's "We the People" Web site, claims that DDoS attacks are not illegal hacking but rather a way for people to carry out protests online. Similar to the Occupy movement when protesters pitched tents … Read more

Microsoft's Windows RT can apparently run unsigned desktops app with a little bit of hacking.

In a blog posted yesterday, a hacker dubbed clrokr described how he was able to change a value in the Windows RT kernel to bypass certain restrictions set up by Microsoft. The blog details how clrokr tracked down the right value to open up the types of apps that RT can run. And it includes his code for other enterprising hackers.

The specific value can't be permanently altered on devices enabled with Secure Boot, but it can be changed in memory. As a … Read more

The hacking collective Anonymous has clarified that it has no plans to fade away in the New Year. It issued a statement over the weekend that warned the world to "Expect us 2013."

Along with the statement, the group created a video that boasts of its campaigns and exploits carried out in 2012. The video details the group's temporary shutdown of the U.S. Department of Justice, the FBI, Universal Music, and the Motion Picture Association of America's Web sites in protest of the U.S. government's indictment of the operators of popular file-hosting site … Read more

Indie hardware hacker and engineer Limor "Ladyada" Fried was named today as Entrepreneur Magazine's Entrepreneur of the Year.

The founder of Adafruit Industries was chosen among thousands of nominations the magazine received. She was the only female finalist when the nominations were whittled down to five for the main category in the early fall.

Fried's company has humble beginnings and has grown into a sprawling educational resource and one-stop shop for electronics hobbyists, do-it-yourselfers, and experienced hackers alike. Remarkably, in a highly competitive marketplace where businesses closely guard code, schematics, and most everything they can, Adafruit … Read more

A group attached to the online hacktivist group Anonymous claims to have hacked the Web site of the Westboro Baptist Church in response to plans by the controversial church to picket the funerals of those massacred Friday at a school in Newtown, Conn.

As part of a campaign dubbed #OpWestBoro, KY Anonymous said yesterday it posted the personal information belonging to members of the extremist organization, which is best known for conducting protests designed to disrupt the funerals of members of the military killed in action. The data dump included the names, phone numbers, e-mail addresses, and physical addresses of … Read more

NASA hacker Gary McKinnon will face no legal action in the U.K.

The Crown Prosecution Service has decided the appropriate jurisdiction for the McKinnon case is the U.S., after discussing the case with the U.S. Department of Justice and the police.

U.S. authorities started their bid to extradite McKinnon in 2005, accusing him of causing hundreds of thousands of dollars of damage by hacking into NASA and military systems. McKinnon admitted to the intrusion in 2002 but claimed he was looking for evidence of UFO activity.

But U.S. requests for his extradition were formally turned down … Read more

When Windows hangs or crashes, it's usually due to a single process or program that isn't running properly. Sometimes you have to open the System Configuration or Services tool to terminate a running process. Or you can open Process Hacker and view it all at once. This free, open-source process viewer displays all your running processes and services, including network and disk processes, in color-coded tree views. Process Hacker's powerful process termination capabilities bypass most security software and rootkits, ending the entire affected process. Skilled users can take advantage of Process Hacker's string scanning capabilities and … Read more

Hackers broke into insurance company Nationwide's network in early October, stealing the personal information of more than a million customers across the country, the insurance company recently revealed.

The company said the compromised information included people's names and a combination of Social Security numbers, driver's license numbers, their date of birth, and possibly marital status, gender, and occupation, as well as the names and addresses of employers. Nationwide said it had no evidence that any medical information or credit card account data was stolen.

"We discovered the attack that day, and took immediate steps to contain … Read more