anonymizing

A hacker claiming to have broken into networks of dozens of banks and stolen customer data, has released as proof a file that contains names, addresses, e-mail addresses, and phone numbers in plain text, but no credit card numbers.

"I penetrated over 79 large banks, I've been targetting these banks since 3 months," read a tweet from the Twitter account of Reckz0r. "Actually, I didn't hacked VISA & Mastercard, I hacked the banks, #Chase..etc."

A Pastebin post from today has a link to a downloadable file on the AnonFiles.com site that appears … Read more

The British man that allegedly hacked into the Fox reality TV show "The X-Factor" and the "PBS News Hour," along with music companies and government security agencies, was indicted by a U.S. federal grand jury on conspiracy and hacking charges today, according to the Associated Press.

Ryan Cleary, 20, reportedly had ties to the well-known branch of Anonymous called LulzSec before he was arrested in London last June (although the hacktivist group denies his involvement with it). U.S. federal prosecutors said today that he worked to take down, deface, and steal personal information from … Read more

It's been three months since the arrest of a handful of people accused of conducting denial-of-service and other attacks on police and corporate networks as part of the notorious LulzSec hacking crew.

Yet rather than laying low following the arrests, hacker activists are still going strong and, in fact, regrouping, taking up the baton from the Lulz crew or citing dissatisfaction with the schizophrenic nature of all the various Anonymous operations. Suddenly, there is "LulzSec Reborn," "MalSec," and "SpexSec," fresh names for groups of malicious hackers using old techniques.

It's unknown if … Read more

Online activists with Anonymous said they took out a site associated with the Euro 2012 games in Ukraine to protest the country's rounding up and slaughter of stray dogs in advance of the soccer championship that started there today.

The account for YourAnonNews tweeted: "#OpUkraine?: Revenge for your Animal Holocaust: http://www.kieveuro2012.org ==>> TANGO DOWN!! | ?#Euro2012? via @AnonOpsLegion| ?#Anonymous? ?#Ukraine?"

However, the site appeared to be back up as of midday Pacific Time. Distributed denial-of-service attacks that shut down Web sites are Anonymous' tool of choice in its ops, or operations. The activists have … Read more

Now that the oohs and ahhs of Airtime's launch this week have settled, it's time to look at the nitty gritty of this new browser-based video chat service. One of the company's policies involve user privacy.

The way Airtime works is by using Facebook as its log-in platform. At its basic level, Airtime allows simple video chat with users' Facebook friends, but take it up a notch and it lets people chat with strangers that have common interests.

So, as a way to keep its users safe, the service takes random secret photos of video conversations between … Read more

I know that some of you will still have your hearts near your tonsils after Thursday's devastation of a Facebook outage.

I know that you will have spent most of your waking hours wondering what might have happened and whether you could ever bear a recurrence of such pain.

Managing pain, though, is all about getting to the roots of the cause. Some immediately made the assumption that members of Anonymous might have been behind Facebook's sudden disappearance.

This was clearly fueled by Facebook's curious reluctance to declare why the site had malfunctioned. As my colleague Dan Farber pointed out, … Read more

Google announced today that it's aiming to help users control their settings to more easily avoid answering those pesky anonymous callers on Google Voice. Be it an unknown, restricted, or blocked number, the Web giant says users can now fit those callers into one specified group.

"Many users have asked us for controls aimed at people who are NOT in their address book," Google software engineer Tom Ford wrote in a blog post. "So today, we're adding two groups of callers for Google Voice users."

Besides grouping anonymous callers into one group so users … 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

Hacktivists from the online group Anonymous claim to have taken down the Chicago Police Department's Web site in the wake of violent clashes between the police and protesters.

Members of AntiS3curityOPS, which claims to be affiliated with Anonymous, posted a video on YouTube taking credit for a hacking that allegedly brought down the page and accusing Chicago police of brutality during clashes Saturday night with protesters, who were demonstrating against the NATO summit discussing the ongoing war in Afghanistan.

"We are actively engaged in actions against the Chicago Police Department, and encourage anyone to take up the cause … Read more