Hacks

After a lengthy newspaper investigation on China's prime minister, The New York Times claims, the newspaper's computer systems were infiltrated and attacked by Chinese hackers.

The attacks began four months ago and culminated with hackers stealing the corporate password for every Times employee, according to the paper. The personal computers of 53 of these employees were also broken into and spied on.

The Times discovered the attacks after observing "unusual activity" in its computer system. Security investigators were then able to get into the system and track the hackers' movements, see what the infiltrators were after, … Read more

In response to the death of tech activist Aaron Swartz, hacktivist collective Anonymous hacked a U.S. government Web site related to the justice system and posted a screed saying it would begin leaking a cache of government documents if the justice system is not reformed.

The group hacked the Web site for the United States Sentencing Commission late Friday, posting a message about what it's calling "Operation Last Resort," along with a set of downloadable encrypted files it said contain sensitive information. The sentencing commission is the caretaker of the guidelines for sentencing in U.S. … Read more

Corporations are increasingly under fire from the rapidly rising threat of distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks, according to new research from security firm Radware.

The study notes that DDoS attacks on corporations rose 170 percent in 2012 over the previous year.

After analyzing data from a number of security breaches and responses from 179 participating firms, Radware said that many corporations can be compared to "someone who brings a knife to a gun fight." In other words, businesses are attempting to protect themselves from cyberattacks but often fail because they are unprepared.

A number of trends point toward a … Read more

WikiLeaks said late yesterday that recently deceased Internet activist Aaron Swartz assisted the organization, was in contact with Julian Assange, and may have been one of the organization's sources.

Reached in Iceland on Saturday evening, California time, WikiLeaks representative Kristinn Hrafnsson confirmed to CNET that the tweets were authentic but declined to elaborate.

In the tweets, the organization said it was revealing the information "due to the investigation into the Secret Service involvement" with Swartz.

Here are screenshots of the tweets:

The phrasing of the last tweet ("strong reasons to believe, but cannot prove") may … Read more

Anonymous has set its sights on Mexico's Department of Defense.

The group's Mexican legion has claimed responsibility for waging a distributed-denial-of-service attack on the government site, rendering it inoperable for several hours yesterday, according to the Associated Press.

During the attack, the group posted a statement on the media section of the government's Web site. The statement claimed that a "bad government" was running the country.

"Our struggle is for life, and our bad government offers death as the future," the statement read, according to Spanish language tech news site Web Adictos. "… Read more

Anonymous may have convinced the Westboro Baptist Church to cancel its planned protest of the funeral of Aaron Swartz.

A day after the news came out that the 26-year-old online activist had committed suicide, the members of WBC stated their intention to picket his funeral, which took place yesterday.

A press release on the group's Web site and Twitter feed revealed the location of the funeral and said: "Cyber criminals are the latest face of this nation's and this world's raging at God and His Servants at WBC. When you raging rebels give these cyber criminals … Read more

Windows RT was recently hacked to allow it to run unsigned desktop apps, and now it seems anyone can run that same hack via a simple batch file.

Someone dubbed Netham45 has packaged the hack into a batch file that users can trigger on their Windows RT tablets. That hack enables people to launch unsigned desktop applications compiled for ARM-based RT devices.

The tool takes advantage of a hack revealed earlier this week by someone identified only as clrokr. In a blog, clrokr explained how he was able to change a value in the Windows RT kernel … Read more

Several U.S. banks were hit with online attacks over the past few months, but it's been unclear who was responsible. Now, government officials and security researchers are saying Iran was waging these cyberattacks, according to a report by the New York Times.

"There is no doubt within the U.S. government that Iran is behind these attacks," James A. Lewis, a former official in the State and Commerce departments and a computer security expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, told the Times.

The attacks were aimed at several major banks, including … Read more

Windows RT can be hacked to run unsigned desktop apps, but Microsoft sees no reason to worry.

As described yesterday, the hack allows someone with a certain amount of savvy to change code in the Windows RT kernel so the tablet-based OS can run desktop apps. Officially, the only desktop programs that Windows RT supports are Microsoft's own Internet Explorer and Office suite. Otherwise, the OS can run only Windows Store apps.

But the hack isn't geared for the average Windows RT user.

Besides requiring the necessary programming chops, the hack can only change code in memory. So … Read more