With an 87% global market share, it’s no wonder that Android devices are attracting malware authors like circling vultures – much to Apple’s delight. There’s a kind of hackers’ arms race going on as they compete to plant nastier and nastier bugs on Android phones. The latest arrival is ransomware, which infects and encrypts your files then (sometimes) releases your… Read more »
In the popular American Football movie ‘Any Given Sunday’, a near burnt-out coach played by Al Pacino somehow digs out an inspirational half-time speech in a crucial game that turns his team’s fortunes and his own life around. His theme is that, in sport and in life, the gap between success and failure is measured in inches and you have… Read more »
It’s commonplace for the prosecution in hacking cases to overstate the capabilities of the accused and exaggerate the damage they’ve caused. One is reminded of the assertion that Kevin Mitnick could launch nuclear missiles just by having access to a phone. Sometimes this inflation of the dangers is detestable. At other times it is merely risible. But it never reflects… Read more »
Our legal attitudes to hacking and cyber-attack are in a mess, frankly. Often (and yes, America, I’m looking at you) they are wildly disproportionate to the damage done. And even when they’re not, the judiciary and the mainstream press seem unable to come to any settled opinion about what should be done about the hacker ‘menace’. There is a clear,… Read more »
The GhostShell hacktivist group has been at it again. It has dumped 1.6 million records – mainly database tables – which it claims it took from NASA, ESA, the FBI, Interpol, various defence and aerospace industry firms, the Credit Union National Association (CUNA) and others. You can read more details at The Register and Information Week. The data dump is accompanied… Read more »
With law enforcement officials claiming that LulzSec has been decapitated, what does this mean for Anonymous? The web is awash with hydra metaphors, but the truth is that no-one can say exactly what the effects are likely to be. Not for a while, anyway. It’s always been clear that the number of Anonymous members with real hacking skills is a… Read more »
So, it turns out that the infamous ‘Sabu’, the somewhat cocky leader of LulzSec and one of the few members of Anonymous accredited with real hacking skills, has been an FBI informer for months. This is not news to someone who goes by the name ‘HuntJaeger’ on Twitter. Just over five months ago I witnessed a Twitter exchange between anonymouSabu… Read more »