Displaying items by tag: Hacking

Yesterday (Thursday August 9, 2012) Blizzard announced that someone had breached their network and accessed account information illegally. The news comes after months of blaming users for compromised accounts, hacks, stolen items and more. As of right now Blizzard is stating that no credit card information or real names were accessed, the attackers did get enough to get into people’s accounts with a little work which raises some questions about their original security and what they can realistically do to secure their network.

Google would like you to use two-factor authentication for their Gmail service to help prevent unauthorized access. Using this extra layer of security can protect you and your data, which makes it sound like a good idea. The advice comes after the recent publication of Mat Honan’s tragic and life changing, account hack thee have been many changes to the way that the companies involved do business. While we sympathize with Mat completely we are actually kind of glad that it was someone of note that had this happen. If this had been a regular consumer it is unlikely that Google, Apple, or Amazon would have done anything to fix these issues. In fact most of the issues that allowed this hack to happen have been in place for a very long time.

Identity theft is nothing new and unfortunately it is also still very common. By Some estimates 1 out of 3 people will have experienced identity theft of some sort. After a close relative had their identity stolen I did a little bit of research into the methods that some use to steal others identities and was surprised at how easy it is to do. Now that we have social sites like Facebook, Twitter and more it is actually becoming easier to steal people’s personal information and do massive amounts of damage to them financially and personally.

Russian leaker WZOR confirmed yesterday that he is in possesion of both x86 and x 64 Windows 8 Enterprise RTM. He stated that they will leak these to the web anytime and that the "Pro" versions (both x64 and x86) can also be expected in near future. This version differs from the earlier "N" editions by not having Windows Media Player stripped out. Windows Server 2012 was also leaked yesterday via the same source, and will probably be available together with Windows 8 RTM leaked versions on popular torrent sites, and similar sources.

Although to many the Anonymous collective is anything but a protector or a hero there are many times when the faceless group has come to the aid of others and punished members (or people pretending to be members) of the group. Although we have heard of more than a few of these internal disciplinary actions, there are a few that stand out. One recent incident was when someone who claimed to be part of Anonymous hacked Sesame Street’s YouTube account and replaced a few Videos with Porn. Another was when a group released names and addresses of police informants and also home addresses for police officers to the public. In both of these cases the guilty parties found themselves on the wrong end of a collective that knows how to not only find you, but make you feel very helpless indeed.

Jim Croce one sang that there are some things that you just do not do; one of them should be not to try and steal the unofficial logo for the group Anonymous.  Foolishly this is what a French company has done and has now drawn the wrath of a group that claims ties to the hacker/activist collective. The company in question is named Early flicker and they have registered the headless man and tag line that Anonymous uses in all of their communication “We are Anonymous, We do not forgive, We do not forget. Expect us”.

Ubisoft has responded to the claims that its UPlay DRM software is a rootkit that enabled them (and anyone else) to install arbitrary code on systems that it was installed on. The original claim was from developer Travis Ormandy who posted the issue on pastebin and also showed the vulnerability working with a website specially crafted to take advantage of the exploit he found. Ormandy likened the issue to Sony’s famous screw up with their BMG DRM that was in actuality a rootkit and caused the recall of quite a bit of Sony games.

Straight from the Black Hat Conference in Las Vegas we have some bad news for the Apple fans. It seems that the myth surrounding the security of the iPhone is starting to crack around the edges. This is something that we predicted would happen when the trend to use Smartphones for common net tasks first started appearing. It only make sense that malicious coders would start hitting out smart phones after all. I mean how many people use their phones for banking, personal and work email, store passwords to online accounts in their phones with password lockers and more. To be honest, considering the number of smart phones in use, we are surprised that it has taken this long.

The Black Hat conference is happening right now in Sin City and already there is news coming out of the gather that should send chills down the spine of many smartphone owners. Apparently it is dead simple to exploit the NFC (Near Field Communications) found on Nokia and Samsung Products (this also extends to the NFC that will be in Apple’s devices when they are launched later this year). If you trot around with your NFC feature enabled someone can gain control of your phone by simply brushing a properly prepared tag against it.

About two weeks ago we saw a random tweet that seemed to indicate that Microsoft had added in technology that would allow for easier spying on Skype conversations. Right after this a tweet on the YourAnonNews feed seemed to indicate that the “bug” that was accidentally sending some conversations to random members of your contact list was related to the new “feature”. There was a much more ominous tweet about an hour later that claimed Skype had been hacked and the source code downloaded. Although we never were able to confirm the relationship to the bug and the reworking of supernodes to switch to Microsoft run servers, we did find out that the released code was not the official source code, but a posting of a decompiled version of the Skype application; still useful if you wanted to look for an exploit, but not the original source code to be sure.