Time Magazine hacked?
April 27, 2009 by NetCrunch
Filed under Internet Security
According to TechCrunch, A hacker successfully hacked Time Magazine’s online poll, and they didn’t do anything about it. Apparently Christopher Poole, aka Moot, the founder of the 4Chan online forum, whose members used some coding to get his name to the top of the list. Not only did they help moot win the poll, but they also arranged the next 20 names to spell out “Marblecake, also the game.” Marblecake is a lewd sexual reference, but is also supposedly the name of the chat room where one of 4Chan’s online collective actions, Project Chanology, originated. here’s a screenshot from techCrunch.
Computer Worm to attack on April Fool’s Day
March 27, 2009 by NetCrunch
Filed under Internet Security, Top Stories
Rumors has it, the dreaded fast-moving computer that infected at least 3 million computers, is set to attack again on April 1, 2009.
The army of Conficker-infected machines, known as a “botnet,” could be one of the greatest cybercrime tools ever assembled. Conficker’s authors just need to figure out a way to reliably communicate with it.
Infected Machines need commands to come alive. So far, Conficker-infected PC’s have been trying to connect each day to 250 Internet domains. The hackers needs to get just one of those sites under their control to send their commands to the botnet. (The name Conficker comes from rearranging letters in the name of one of the original sites the worm was connecting to.)
Mahalo vouches for criminal hacker in its midst
March 7, 2009 by NetCrunch
Filed under Cyber Crimes, Internet Security, Top Stories
The founder of young Internet search engine Mahalo explained on Thursday how a convicted hacker wound up a cherished member of their team.
Mahalo hired John Schiefer without being aware of his cyber crimes, and regretted seeing him sentenced on Wednesday to four years in prison, founder Jason Calacanis said in a message posted online.
Schiefer used “botnets,” armies of computers hijacked by using malicious software, to steal people’s identities and snoop on electronic communications, according to Los Angeles US attorney’s office spokesman Thom Mrozek.
eBay Auction Tool Web Site Infected With Malware
February 23, 2009 by NetCrunch
Filed under Internet Security, Top Stories
A Trojan horse lurking on servers belonging to Auctiva.com, a Web site offering eBay auction tools, infected people’s PCs last week.
The problem became very public when Google’s malware warning system kicked in as people tried to browse the site, saying Auctiva was infected with malware. Google will display an interstitial page warning people of certain Web sites known to contain malware.
“It appears the reason these virus alert warnings started showing up on our site is because some of our machines were injected with malware originating in China,” according to a post on Auctiva’s community forum. “The malware we believe to be at fault has also hit a number of other high-profile Websites over the past six months.”
Pentagon bans Google map-makers
February 19, 2009 by NetCrunch
Filed under Internet Security
The US defence department has banned the giant internet search engine Google from filming inside and making detailed studies of US military bases.
Close-up, ground-level imagery of US military sites posed a “potential threat” to security, it said.
The move follows the discovery of images of the Fort Sam Houston army base in Texas on Google Maps.
A Google spokesman said that where the US military had expressed concerns, images had been removed.
Hackers Target Patched Microsoft Internet Explorer 7 Vulnerability
February 17, 2009 by NetCrunch
Filed under Internet Security, Top Stories
According to security firm Trend Micro, cyber-criminals are targeting a patched flaw in IE 7 to steal data. A fix for the flaw was included in the recent round of Patch Tuesday security bulletins.
Hackers have begun actively targeting a vulnerability in Internet Explorer 7 that was patched earlier this month by Microsoft.
The bug cyber-criminals are looking to exploit is a remote code execution vulnerability that lies in the way Internet Explorer 7 handles errors when attempting to access deleted objects. According to Trend Micro, attackers are spamming a malicious .DOC file detected as X M L_DLOADR.A in a bid to infect unprotected users.