Showing posts sorted by date for query Sony. Sort by relevance Show all posts
Showing posts sorted by date for query Sony. Sort by relevance Show all posts

Personal Details of Sun Newspaper Readers Hacked

Posted by Avik Sarkar On 8/03/2011 05:24:00 pm

 
Personal details of Sun newspaper readers - including Miss Scotland applicants - have been stolen by hackers in the latest online security breach.
Britain's biggest selling daily has sent out e-mails warning that information, including addresses, dates of birth and phone numbers, have been accessed. But it added: "No financial or password information was compromised."
News Group Newspapers, which also published the News of the World until it closed last month, said the breach took place on 18 to 19 July, at about the time hackers created a link from the Sun's website to a spoof page that said company owner Rupert Murdoch had been found dead in his garden.
Hacking group LulzSec claimed to be behind that breach but has been silent since alleged spokesman Jake Davis, 18, from Shetland, was arrested on 28 July. Davis faces a string of charges relating to the hacking of organizations such as Sony, the CIA and the UK's Serious Organised Crime Agency, allegedly carried out by LulzSec and another group, Anonymous.
However, a Twitter user, Batteye, has claimed responsibility for taking the Sun readers' details, denied being part of either LulzSec or Anonymous and said the theft took place before 18 July.
Some of the information, including a Scottish students' poll and biographies of Miss Scotland applicants, then appeared on the website Pastebin.
One Miss Scotland entrant said: "I'm not happy at all. I'm kind of worried - because that's everything about me.

"(This data] should have been locked up. This was last year's, so they didn't need to keep my details."
The Batteye post said it was an attempt to expose those who could not be trusted with personal information.

The statement on Pastebin said: "We will begin today by presenting to you various files obtained from the Sun, a company within the News Corp group.
"We will continue, then, by exposing the world for what it is; a less than perfect place where we cannot trust those who we ask to protect our information."
 
On Twitter, Batteye posted a message saying: "OK - Anon and @lulzsec may have carried out their own attack, with defacements, emails, and whatnot. This is different."

The hacking of the Sun's website follows hacking by sister newspaper the News of the World of celebrities, politicians, war widows and victims of crime, including murdered schoolgirl Milly Dowler.
The so-called "hacktivist" code deployed by the likes of LulzSec, combines mischief-making or irony with the aggressive targeting of corporations or large organizations they believe are guilty of wrongdoing.

-News Source (Scotsman)

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Lulzsec Spokesman Jake Davis Get Bail

Posted by Avik Sarkar On 8/01/2011 11:36:00 pm


An 18-year-old British man Jake Davis arrested on suspicion of being a spokesman for hacking groups LulzSec and Anonymous was granted bail when he appeared in a London court on Monday. Jake Davis is charged with hacking into websites, including that of Britain's Serious Organized Crime Agency (SOCA), which was out of service for several hours on June 20 after apparently being targeted.
Davis was arrested on Wednesday at his home on the Shetland Islands, north of the Scottish mainland. He faces five charges, including conspiring to carry out a distributed denial of service attack on SOCA, the British equivalent of the FBI. Such attacks flood websites with traffic to make them crash.
Davis wore a grey-blue shirt and a black T-shirt and clutched a book as he appeared in the dock at the City of Westminster Magistrates Court in London.

He appeared relaxed and spoke only to confirm his name and date of birth. District Judge Howard Riddle told the teenager he will have to appear in Southwark Crown Court in London on August 30 and granted him bail with stringent conditions and a curfew attached.

He is barred from using the Internet or having access to any computer or mobile phone and must remain indoors from 10:00 pm to 7:00 am at his mother's home in Lincolnshire, eastern England. The alleged hacker is said to use the online nickname "Topiary" and present himself as a spokesman for LulzSec and Anonymous.
LulzSec has claimed responsibility for a 50-day rampage earlier this year against international businesses and government agencies, including the Central Intelligence Agency and Senate in the United States and electronics giant Sony. Another alleged British member of the group was released by a court on bail in June after being diagnosed with autism. 
Ryan Cleary, 19, has been charged with offences including hacking into the SOCA website.


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Facebook Launches Security Bug Bounty

Posted by Avik Sarkar On 7/30/2011 05:01:00 pm


Facebook is set to announce today a bug bounty program in which researchers will be paid for reporting security holes on the popular social-networking Web site.
Compensation, which starts at $500 and has no maximum set, will be paid only to researchers who follow Facebook's Responsible Disclosure Policy and agree not to go public with the vulnerability information until Facebook has fixed the problem.
Facebook Chief Security Officer Joe Sullivan told that "Typically, it's no longer than a day" to fix a bug,

Facebook's Whitehat page for security researchers says: 

"If you give us a reasonable time to respond to your report before making any information public and make a good faith effort to avoid privacy violations, destruction of data, and interruption or degradation of our service during your research, we will not bring any lawsuit against you or ask law enforcement to investigate you."

The compensation program is a good way to provide an incentive and show appreciation to the research community for helping keep Facebook safe for users, according to the company's security team. Up until now, researchers received recognition on the Facebook Whitehat page, maybe some "swag," and--if they were lucky--a job.
"Some of our best engineers have come to work here after pointing out security bugs on our site," like Ryan McGeehan, manager of Facebook's security response team, said Alex Rice, product security lead at Facebook. (Facebook also recently hired famed iPhone jailbreaker and Sony PlayStation 3 hacker George Hotz, who works on security issues.)
Meanwhile, Facebook is allowing security researchers a way to create test accounts on Facebook to ensure they don't violate terms of use or impact other Facebook users, Rice and McGeehan said.
Facebook is following in the steps of Mozilla, which launched its bug bounty program in 2004, and Google, which offers a bug bounty program with payments ranging from $500 to more than $3,000 for finding Web security holes, as well as a program specifically for Chrome bugs.
Microsoft has offered bounties of $250,000 for information leading to the arrest of virus writers, but does not pay researchers who find bugs in its software. However, other companies do, like TippingPoint's Zero Day Initiative.
Researchers typically are paid more for finding bugs in desktop software, which can take much longer to fix and to update software on computers than bugs in Web-based software, which can be fixed much more quickly.

According To FACEBOOK:- 

Eligibility
To qualify for a bounty, you must:
  • Adhere to our Responsible Disclosure Policy:
    ... give us a reasonable time to respond to your report before making any information public and make a good faith effort to avoid privacy violations, destruction of data and interruption or degradation of our service during your research ...
  • Be the first person to responsibly disclose the bug
  • Report a bug that could compromise the integrity or privacy of Facebook user data, such as:
    • Cross-Site Scripting (XSS)
    • Cross-Site Request Forgery (CSRF/XSRF)
    • Remote Code Injection
  • Reside in a country not under any current U.S. Sanctions (e.g., North Korea, Libya, Cuba, etc.)
Our security team will assess each bug to determine if qualifies.

Rewards
  • A typical bounty is $500 USD
  • We may increase the reward for specific bugs
  • Only 1 bounty per security bug will be awarded
Exclusions
The following bugs aren't eligible for a bounty (and we don't recommend testing for these):
  • Security bugs in third-party applications (e.g., http://apps.facebook.com/[app_name])
  • Security bugs in third-party websites that integrate with Facebook
  • Security bugs in Facebook's corporate infrastructure
  • Denial of Service Vulnerabilities
  • Spam or Social Engineering techniques


                                                                                                                                                                     -News Sourec (FACEBOOK & Cnet)


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LulzSec Spokesman Busted By Scotland Yard

Posted by Avik Sarkar On 7/29/2011 12:02:00 pm


Scotland Yard's cybercrime unit has arrested a teenager it suspects of working as the spokesman for the Lulz Security hacking collective, officials said Wednesday.
The Metropolitan Police's Central e-Crime Unit arrested a 18-year-old at an address in Scotland's remote Shetland Islands, the force said in a statement. His name wasn't released, but police said he was believed to be "Topiary," one of LulzSec's most prominent members.
Police originally gave his age as 19 but later issued a correction. 
LulzSec shot to prominence in May with attacks on the US Public Broadcasting Service - whose website it defaced by posting a bogus story claiming that the late rapper Tupac Shakur had been discovered alive in New Zealand.
The group is a spin-off of Anonymous, an amorphous collection of Internet enthusiasts, pranksters and activists whose targets have included the Church of Scientology, the music industry, and financial companies including Visa and MasterCard.
Topiary was linked to both groups, serving as the on-again, off-again media liaison for the publicity-hungry hackers.
In his only known television interview, on the "David Pakman Show" earlier this year, Topiary phoned in via Skype to feud with Shirley Phelps-Roper of the Westboro Baptist Church, a Kansas-based group notorious for picketing the funerals of slain American soldiers.
Anonymous vandalised the church's website live over the course of the interview.
In conversations with The Associated Press, Topiary said he controlled LulzSec's Twitter feed, which garnered some 300,000 followers over the course of its six-week-long Internet rampage.
LulzSec has claimed responsibility for breaches at pornography websites, gaming companies, and law enforcement organisations. It's also claimed credit for harassing seemingly random targets including an obscure New Jersey-based magnet manufacturer.
One its most spectacular hacks was against Sony Pictures Entertainment. The group posted the usernames, passwords, email addresses and phone numbers of tens of thousands of people, many of whom had given Sony their information for sweepstakes draws. Another stinging series of breaches last month targeted Arizona's police force in protest against its contentious immigration law. Officers had to scramble to change their numbers because their phones were being jammed with calls.
Shortly thereafter the group abruptly announced it was disbanding, although Topiary said at the time that the group wasn't bowing to police pressure.
"We're not quitting because we're afraid of law enforcement," he said in a Skype call. "The press are getting bored of us, and we're getting bored of us."
Attempts to reach Topiary since then have been unsuccessful, although his group recently re-emerged from retirement, defacing The Sun newspaper's website with a fake story claiming that media tycoon Rupert Murdoch had died. In one of its last messages, LulzSec said it was working with unnamed media outlets on a WikiLeaks-style release of emails it claimed to have stolen from the tabloid.
Topiary's once-plentiful Twitter feed was practically wiped clean Wednesday. The only remaining post, from nearly a week ago, read: "You cannot arrest an idea."
The latest arrest is one of an increasing number claimed by law enforcement in Britain and the United States in connection to their investigations into Anonymous and its offshoots. Last week, the FBI, British and Dutch officials carried out 21 arrests, many of them related to the group's attacks on Internet payment provider PayPal Inc., which has been targeted over its refusal to process donations to WikiLeaks.
Last month another 19-year-old, Ryan Cleary, was charged with attacks on Britain's Serious Organized Crime Agency and various UK-based music sites. Although at least one of the attacks he was charged with seemed linked to LulzSec, Topiary claimed at the time that Cleary was at most only tangentially involved with the group.
Scotland Yard said Wednesday it was also searching a residential address in Lincolnshire, in central England, and interviewing an unnamed 17-year-old in connection with the investigation. The second teen has not been arrested.

-News Source (IBN)

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AVG Premium Security

Posted by Avik Sarkar On 7/28/2011 04:14:00 pm

 
AVG Technologies today announced AVG Premium Security, the all-new and only Internet security solution that actively surveys the Web for incidents of stolen identity. Available now for US$69.99, the product includes AVG Identity Alert, AVG Internet Security and AVG Quick Tune.
Placing identity protection at the center of the new offering, AVG Identity Alert scours criminal web pages, chat rooms and bulletin boards to determine whether a customer's personal information has been used, traded or sold online. By monitoring a user's e-mail address and debit and credit card numbers—the three primary elements of an online identity—the system notifies the user if personal details appear somewhere they shouldn't.

AVG Identity Alert also provides an Identity Theft Risk Score, which evaluates online theft risk based on behavioral characteristics, and an Identity Theft Restoration Kit, which provides documentation, sample letters and other tools for restoring an identity should it be compromised.
AVG Premium Security is also comprised of the award-winning AVG Internet Security, which offers signature anti-virus, anti-spyware, AVG Protective Cloud Technology and the AVG Community Protection Network. Finally, AVG Quick Tune contains four of the 16 features available in the company's popular PC Tuneup, including the disk defragmenter, junk file removal, registry cleaner and broken shortcut removal.

“When you combine the shocking security lapses we have seen out of very high profile and respected brands such as Sony, Epsilon and Citigroup in the past few months with the liability shift toward consumers, it is clear that identity theft protection tools are no longer a nice to have,” said J.R Smith, CEO, AVG Technologies. “Banks and corporations are at an important tipping point, showing strong indications that they will no longer simply cover losses, and expecting the online users to share equal responsibility in taking appropriate security measures that ultimately protect each other from malicious attacks.”

In 2010 alone, IC3, the FBI/National White Collar Crime Center partnership, reported more than 300,000 individual complaints of Internet crime. Identity theft was one of the top three complaints, next to non-delivery of payment or merchandise and scams using the FBI's name.
“The key to combating internet crime is real-time intelligence and protection,” Smith added. “Our identity-theft tools offer consumers access to the kind of timely intelligence they need to more effectively monitor and protect their personal information. Credit report-driven tools are much slower and therefore give thieves a massive head start, making clean-up and recovery of identity theft under those circumstances very difficult for the average consumer.”

“To protect our 110 million active customers around the globe, AVG will now extend beyond local Internet security and anti-virus protection to provide customers with a digital bodyguard dedicated to protecting their names and identities online,” said Tony Anscombe, AVG's Ambassador of Free Products. “Even if an identity is compromised outside a user's home network, AVG Premium Security can still discover it. Bottom line: we offer vital peace of mind, virtually eliminating the perils often associated with surfing the Web.”
 
For more information Click Here

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14 Guys Arrested By FBI in Operation Targeting Anonymous

Posted by Avik Sarkar On 7/20/2011 03:51:00 am


The FBI has conducted more than a dozen raids and made more than a dozen arrests across the United States in connection with the Anonymous computer hacking investigation.
The officials described the sweep as a "major" law enforcement operation and say there have been 14 arrests nationwide.
FBI agents conducted raids at four New York residences as well as locations in California, New Jersey and Florida Tuesday in connection with the investigation.
Agents seized computers and computer accessories under search warrants at four homes of suspected hackers in Baldwin and Merrick both on Long island, in Brooklyn and the Bronx. The allegations are that the network of hackers allegedly carried out distributed denial of service attacks on numerous victims including corporations and their websites.
The amorphous, loosely organized group of hackers sympathetic to WikiLeaks has claimed responsibility for numerous attacks against corporate and government websites around the world. The news comes as Anonymous claimed a cyberattack that shut down the website of Rupert Murdoch's Times newspaper.

In addition, Anonymous has been linked to cyber attacks at the CIA, Sony, Fox News, the Arizona Department of Corrections and a well-known consulting firm, Booz Allen Hamilton, among others.

The group is implicated in denial-of-service attacks, in which large amounts of traffic are directed to a website, overloading it and, in effect, shutting it down.
The FBI in New York refused to confirm Tuesday's actions involved Anonymous. "These search warrants are being executed in connection with an ongoing FBI investigation," said FBI spokesman Peter Donald.


-News Source (CBS, CNN)

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The Sun Newspaper Defaced By LulzSec & Declared Fake Death Notice of Murdoch

Posted by Avik Sarkar On 7/19/2011 02:33:00 pm

They’re back, are they?? The dangerous hacker group LulzSec, after declaring retirement last month, cracked the Rupert Murdoch–owned New Times on Monday and used it to host a fake news story declaring that the embattled media mogul had been found dead at his home.
The web defacement took the form of a mock article from Murdock’s The Sun, with the headline “Media moguls body discovered” [sic]. The text goes on to claim falsely that Murdoch “ingested a large quantity of palladium before stumbling into his famous topiary garden late last night.”
“We have owned Sun/News of the World – that story is simply phase 1 – expect the lulz to flow in coming days,” the group announced on its Twitter feed.

At the same time, some visitors were redirected from The Sun’s home page to the fake story, which appeared to have been blocked within an hour.
Murdoch’s news empire has been badly shaken in the last month by a massive voice-mail hacking scandal involving reporters at the UK-based News of the World, which Murdoch recently shuttered.

In May, LulzSec made news for the the first time with a similar attack against the website of PBS Newshour, in which it posted a false news story announcing that deceased rapper Tupac Shakur had been found “alive and well” in New Zealand. By then the gang had already hacked Sony’s Japanese website, and before that Fox.com, where the group stole and posted 363 employee passwords, the names, phone numbers and e-mail addresses of 73,000 people who had signed up for audition information for the Fox talent show The X-Factor.
Subsequent hack targets included the Arizona Department of Public Safety. By late June, though, web vigilantes and rival hackers had exposed what they said were the real identities of LulzSec’s members, and on June 25 LulzSec announced its retirement. Group leader “Sabu” joined an outfit called AnonymousIRC, which continued targeting corporations and users, including the defense contractor 


To see the twitter Status of Lulzsec Click Here

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Motorola’s Latest Phone will no loger be Friendly With Hackers

Posted by Avik Sarkar On 7/09/2011 08:41:00 pm


For phone modification junkies, the Android software platform comes with a host of mod-friendly features. It’s too bad, then, that Motorola’s latest Android phone lacks all of them.
Motorola’s Droid 3 features a locked boot loader, which is a program that loads the operating system software on every smart phone when it’s turned on. The company said it planned to change the policy this year.

The news first came from a Motorola support forums representative.

“As we’ve communicated, we plan to enable the unlock-able/re-lockable bootloader in future software releases, starting in late 2011, where channel and operator partners will allow it,” said a Motorola spokesperson in a statement provided to Wired.com. “DROID 3 is not built on a software version that includes this feature.”

Locking down the bootloader is a big pain for those who want to modify their Android phone operating systems. Essentially, it drastically limits the extent of modification and customization you can accomplish on your phone. If you wanted to install a particularly popular piece of modding software like, say, CyanogenMod — a very popular custom Android build that optimizes a phone’s hardware performance and adds a number of nifty flourishes — with a locked bootloader, you’re out of luck.

In today’s smart-phone landscape, handset manufacturers face pressure from wireless carriers like Verizon and AT&T to lock down phone boot-loaders. This is done especially to prohibit the potential installation of software used to do things that carriers don’t want you doing, like, say, capture licensed streaming content. There’s also software available that lets you tether your phone to your computer (providing it with an internet connection) for free, a feature for which wireless companies normally charge users. Bypassing that charge means cutting into a carrier’s bottom line.

Motorola doesn’t want to deal with the tech support nightmare that widespread phone hacks entail. “If you brick your phone messing with it” — which basically means rendering the device useless (like an electronic “brick,” as it were) — “we don’t want to have to fix it under warranty,” a Motorola representative wrote in a message board post.

Because of all this, hacker-unfriendly phones aren’t uncommon. Motorola’s Atrix debuted with a locked boot-loader, as have many of the company’s phones since the release of the Droid 2. Motorola’s upcoming Photon 4G smart-phone will also be locked down.

Android modification junkies aren’t happy about Motorola’s decisions. In March, one Motorola smartphone owner started an online petition, asking others who don’t agree with the company’s locked bootloader decisions to sign and bring up the issue on Moto’s Facebook page. As of this post’s publishing time, the petition has over 10,000 signatures.

Given the hardware specs on the Droid 3, it’s especially disappointing for hackers to see the phone debut as mod-unfriendly. The Droid 3 has a beefy dual-core 1GHz processor under the hood, which when used in conjunction with modding software, can be overclocked to faster speeds.

The future isn’t entirely grim for phone hackers. Motorola continually promises a change in locked bootloader policy come late-2011, and other companies like Sony Ericsson have even begun to court the modding community, providing a detailed list of instructions on how to unlock the company’s phones.

It seems as if the predominant feeling is: We’ll believe it when we see it.

“There’s not a single reason to believe that Motorola has truly changed their views,” wrote an angry Motorola message board user in a post. “We’re not saying you have to unlock all our devices now, but a little sign of good faith would be much appreciated.”

-News Source (Gadget Lab)

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Microsoft Said, Our Security is Stronger than Sony & RSA, also We are not Vulnerable to DDoS

Posted by Avik Sarkar On 7/08/2011 03:24:00 pm


Microsoft's John Howie claims Microsoft security is stronger than Sony and RSA which were hacked due to "rookie mistakes." The software giant also released Volume 10 of its Security Intelligence Report.

Uh-oh. There's nothing quite like throwing down the gauntlet and virtually taunting hackers to prove a proud boast is false. In what some attackers might consider a dare,  John Howie, Microsoft's senior director in the Online Services Security & Compliance (OSSC) team, basically claimed that Microsoft sites are unhackable and can't be DDoSed.
According to Microsoft, "rookie mistakes" by Sony and security firm RSA caused the corporations to be brought down by hackers. Howie told Computing News that Sony was coded badly and failed to patch its servers. "These are rookie mistakes," Howie said.  In regards to the breach at RSA, Howie stated, "RSA got hacked because someone got socially engineered and opened a dodgy email attachment. A rookie mistake."
Howie added, "At Microsoft we have robust mechanisms to ensure we don't have unpatched servers. We have training for staff so they know how to be secure and be wise to social engineering. We have massively overbuilt our internet capacity, this protects us against DoS attacks. We won't notice until the data column gets to 2GB/s, and even then we won't sweat until it reaches 5GB/s. Even then we have edge protection to shun addresses that we suspect of being malicious."
In other Microsoft security news, after analyzing 600 million computers worldwide, Microsoft released Volume 10 of its Security Intelligence Report. It  focuses on malware, software vulnerability disclosures, vulnerability exploits, and related trends. The majority of all vulnerabilities in 2010 were vulnerabilities in applications versus operating systems or web browsers. Exploiting Java vulnerabilities topped the list of exploitation categories over generic HTML/scripting exploits, operating system exploits, and document exploits. Adobe Acrobat and Reader accounted for the highest number of document format exploits. Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 had the lowest operating system infection rate for both client and server platforms. 64-bit versions of Windows 7 which "appeal to a more technically savvy audience than their 32-bit counterparts" have the lowest infection rates.
In regard to malicious websites, phishers targeted gaming sites in the first half of 2010 but then targeted social networks. Yet the "number of active sites targeting gaming sites remained relatively high during the second half of the year, which suggests that more campaigns may be coming."
According to the SIR [PDF] Global Threat Assessment graph below, in the 4th quarter of 2010, the most common threat in the USA  was miscellaneous Trojans which affected 38.6% of all cleaned computers. This was down from 43.8% in the 3rd quarter. The second most common threat was Adware which affected 28.3% of all cleaned computers and was up from 23% in the third quarter. "Miscellaneous Potentially Unwanted Software" was the third most common threat in the U.S. and affected 24.6% of cleaned computers. The MSRT detected malware on 11.6 of every 1,000 computers scanned in U.S. in 4Q10 giving the States "a CCM score of 11.6, compared to the 4Q10 average worldwide CCM of 8.7."

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Small Data Breach on Apple Site #Antisec Continues

Posted by Avik Sarkar On 7/04/2011 11:56:00 am


We’ve heard a few reports in the past that Lulzsec hackers had broken into Apple. Now, however, the WSJ is reporting that the AntiSec hackers that have been joyriding around the internet using SQL injectors to steal username and password have hit Apple’s servers and taken user names and passwords.
The hackers said in a statement posted to Twitter that they had accessed Apple’s systems due to a security flaw used in software used by the Cupertino, Calif.-based gadget maker and other companies. “But don’t worry,” the hackers said, “we are busy elsewhere.” A spokesman for Apple didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment. The posted information comes as part of a two-month campaign of digital heists targeting corporations including Sony Corp. and AT&T Inc., as well as government agencies such as the U.S. Senate, the Central Intelligence Agency and the Arizona Department of Public Safety.
Specifically, they say  they’ve got the user name and passwords from this server:
While this looks to be a pretty harmless server with only local user names, previous postings have claimed a much bigger bounty. 
Click HERE to See the Statement on Pastebin 

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Skype 2.0 for Android Released and Also Hacked

Posted by Avik Sarkar On 7/02/2011 05:58:00 pm


It was only yesterday when Skype 2.0 for Android was released, but the latest version of the popular instant messenger has already been hacked to allow video calls to be made over Wi-Fi or 3G/4G using non-supported devices as well. Thanks to that, it is not only Google Nexus S, HTC Desire S, Sony Ericsson Xperia neo and Xperia pro owners who can enjoy Skype's newly-added and long-anticipated feature.
The hacked Skype 2.0 version has been intended to run on the Samsung Galaxy S II, and our test showed that it works without a hitch. However, the program has been successfully tried out on a number of other smartphones and tablets. So far, the list of devices that reportedly run the unofficial Skype

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Arizona Police are Still in the Target of Hackers

Posted by Avik Sarkar On 6/30/2011 06:02:00 am



A computer-hacking group posted Wednesday personal details of officers allegedly taken from an Arizona police department, stepping up its campaign of attacks against government agencies and officials.
"AntiSec," a hacking campaign that includes elements of the Anonymous vigilante group and the Lulz Security hacking collective, posted emails, photos and other personal information it said was from at least 14 officers at the Arizona Department of Public Safety.
Hackers had targeted the same police department earlier and released training manuals, emails and intelligence documents last week as part of a political protest against a controversial state immigration law.
A spokesman for the Arizona Department of Public Safety declined to comment. Wednesday's release appears to step up the attack, focusing on officers rather than the department more broadly.
"We're not stopping until every prisoner is free," the hackers said in a statement. Earlier, some of the hackers said they had targeted Arizona's police department to protest Arizona's SB1070, a controversial state law that critics say is anti-immigration. A key provision of the law has been frozen because of legal challenges.
The hack comes amid a two-month long rampage of digital break-ins targeting governments and corporations including Sony Corp. (SNE, 6758.TO), the U.S. Senate, AT&T Inc. (T) and other high-profile targets. The attacks had been headed by Lulz Security, which said it had disbanded four days ago. The group's six main members joined a larger Internet campaign called AntiSec, or "Anti-Security," along with members of the online vigilante group Anonymous.
Together, the groups have released passwords and user data stolen from a Universal Music affiliated website, as well as details of Viacom Inc.'s (VIA) computer networks. 

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After Ruling the WWW for 50 Long Days, LulzSec said now it's Interval

Posted by Avik Sarkar On 6/26/2011 03:09:00 pm


After Ruling the WWW for 50 Long Days, LulzSec said now it's Interval time. Hacker group LulzSec has announced that after 50 days of hacking companies and organizations, it is finally done. Check out the message from LulzSec below, which was posted on Pastebin. LulzSec most recently released a torrent of data from Arizona law enforcement which included hundreds of classified documents including personal emails, names and phone numbers.
The group was also behind attacks on Sony, attacks on PBS, the US Senate, the CIA, and a slew of gaming sites popular with 4Chan users including EVE Online, Minecraft and League of Legends. LulzSec was thought to have been the source of hacks against Scotland Yards and the UK Census, but the group denied involvement. As the post, says the group of six hackers has been “disrupting and exposing corporations, governments, often the general population itself, and quite possibly everything in between, just because we could.”

Click HERE to See the LulzSec Official Statement
This Is the video


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PBS Hacked Again

Posted by Avik Sarkar On 6/25/2011 06:10:00 pm



The affected website was for the program "Becoming American." Bentley says a "very small number" of administrative user names and encrypted passwords were stolen.PBS spokeswoman Anne Bentley says one section of a website in the PBS collection of sites was defaced Friday. PBS says its website has been hacked for at least the second time in a month - the latest in a string of intrusions into such sites as Sony, Lockheed Martin, Nintendo and others.  At the end of May, hackers broke into the PBS website and posted a phony story claiming the late rapper Tupac Shakur was alive. A group that claimed responsibility complained about a recent "Frontline" investigation on Wikileaks.Arlington, Va.-based PBS says it has seen an increasing number of intrusion attempts recently. 


Apparently retaliating for a recent Frontline program about WikiLeaks, the group, which calls itself @LulzSec or The Lulz Boat, also disclosed passwords and e-mail addresses held by PBS on the public bulletin board Pastebin.com.Shakur died in a shooting in Las Vegas in 1996. Smalls, whose real name was Christopher George Latore Wallace, was gunned down the following year in a Los Angeles drive-by shooting.By Monday morning, the fake story, which had appeared on The RunDown under the byline PBS WebTech, was gone. But a cached version remains available:"Prominent rapper Tupac has been found alive and well in a small resort in New Zealand, locals report. The small town - unnamed due to security risks - allegedly housed Tupac and Biggie Smalls (another rapper) for several years. One local, David File, recently passed away, leaving evidence and reports of Tupac's visit in a diary, which he requested be shipped to his family in the United States."A hacker group posted a bogus report on the PBS website on Saturday evening that claim slain rappers Tupac Shakur and Biggie Smalls were actually alive and residing in New Zealand.  
According to the Australian publication Secure Business Intelligence, LulzSec had earlier targeted Fox News and the X-Factor television show.
In explaining its motivation, "LulzSec" put out a statement:
"Greetings, Internets. We just finished watching WikiSecrets and were less than impressed. We decided to sail our Lulz Boat over to the PBS servers for further... perusing. As you should know by now, not even that fancy-ass fortress from the third shitty Pirates of the Caribbean movie (first one was better!) can withhold our barrage of chaos and lulz. Anyway, unnecessary sequels aside... wait, actually: second and third Matrix movies sucked too! Anyway, say hello to the insides of the PBS servers, folks. They best watch where they're sailing next time."

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Obama Proposes Anti-Hacking Laws

Posted by Avik Sarkar On 6/22/2011 12:32:00 pm



Hackers will face tougher penalties in the U.S. if the Obama administration's proposed cyber-security measures become law, in an attempt to deter attacks on critical online infrastructure.Under the new law, hackers would face 20 years in prison for endangering national security, 10 years for stealing data and three years for accessing a government computer.
The proposal doubles the penalties from current laws in nearly every category, responding with force to the spate of hacks that have made headlines this last month.The Obama administration first suggested the law last month, before the hacking group LulzSec broke into FBI, CIA and U.S. Senate websites. If prosecuted under the new law, its members could face hefty prison terms for flaunting national security.Compared to the anonymous hacks against Lockheed Martin and the International Monetary Fund, however, LulzSec's distributed denials-of-service, or DDoS, attacks against government websites were merely an annoyance.
Groups like LulzSec, who hack for the fun of it, may face the same sentences as serious data thieves under the cyber-security plan.
Either way, the trouble lies in catching computer hackers who use botnets and server mis-location to cover their tracks. Months after Sony's disastrous data breach left 100 million users' information exposed, Sony and the FBI still haven't found those responsible for the attack.
Tracking down "smoking keyboards" is not impossible, however, as Spain and Turkey proved by arresting members of the Anonymous hacking group. Spain's authorities captured three men accused of intending to publish "sensitive data" about Spanish politicians and policemen. Turkey nabbed 32 Anonymous hackers that had coordinated DDoS attacks against the Turkish government after the country announced plans to restrict Internet services starting this August.
Arresting hackers may deter some from attempting further exploits, but in Anonymous' case the group's loose-knit organization means hundreds of new hackers can rise to fill one member's shoes.
Furthermore, some hackers may have government backing, as IMF officials believe was the case in their hack and as Google alleges happened to them in China.If governments are indeed involved in some of the major recent hacks, things could get sticky, as the Pentagon is set to publish a policy to use physical force against online crime. As one official warned, "If you shut down our power grid, maybe we will put a missile down one of your smokestacks."
The difficulties of catching and prosecuting hackers seem nearly insurmountable. But the new law in the U.S. could encourage a reduction in cybercrimes if it makes an example of even a few.

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19 Years Old Guy get Busted by London Police in Sony Hacking Case

Posted by Avik Sarkar On 6/21/2011 06:30:00 pm


A teenager has been arrested near London in connection with the hacking of Sony, London's Metropolitan Police said Tuesday. The 19-year-old is suspected of hacking into systems and mounting denial of service attacks against "a number of international businesses and intelligence agencies," police said. Naming suspects who have been arrested in Britain is illegal. Sony's PlayStation Network went down on April 20 after what Sony said was a massive data breach. It had more than 70 million subscribers at the time. It began coming back on line in mid-May. The PlayStation Store did not reopen until June 2.

The company estimated the cost of that attack will total $171 million. Hackers later broke into Sony Pictures website, compromising the accounts of over 1 million users, and the gaming company SEGA, stealing nearly 1.3 million users' details via a British subsidiary of the Japanese company. SEGA makes games for PlayStation and other gaming systems. The suspect's computer "will now be examined for ties to any potential group, including LulzSec," a police spokesman told CNN, declining to be named in line with custom. "This link has not been established yet as it is still early days," the spokesman said. The hacker group LulzSec claimed recently to have attacked the CIA website, and took credit for hacking into the website of the American public broadcaster PBS and posting a fake story saying the rapper Tupac Shakur was still alive. He was killed nearly 15 years ago. It's unclear whether LulzSec members played a role in the Sony PlayStation Network breach. But they have posted on their website what they claim is proprietary information from Sony Pictures and other Sony properties' websites. On Friday, on the occasion of their 1,000th tweet, the group posted a manifesto of sorts in which they said people, including their targets and advocates of Internet freedom, should be thankful. "The main anti-LulzSec argument suggests that ... our actions are causing clowns with pens to write new rules for you," the group wrote. "But what if we just hadn't released anything? What if we were silent? That would mean we would be secretly inside FBI affiliates right now, inside PBS, inside Sony... watching... abusing... ."
They seemed to suggest that by making their attacks public, they'll push websites to increase security. They said they're sitting on account information for 200,000 players of the online game Brink, but moments later said that releasing people's information is worth doing sometimes because it's fun. 
"Yes, yes, there's always the argument that releasing everything in full is just as evil, what with accounts being stolen and abused, but welcome to 2011," they wrote. "This is the lulz lizard era, where we do things just because we find it entertaining."
Analysts said the group appears to be some sort of spin-off of "Anonymous," the loose coalition of hackers that grew to prominence through their support of the whistle-blower site WikiLeaks.
But while Anonymous has its own set of moral codes and is largely politically motivated, LulzSec seems to be random.
For every hack like the one on PBS, which the group said came out of anger over a documentary about WikiLeaks, there's the cracking of porn site pron.com -- and a subsequent public list of members' e-mail addresses and passwords.
LulzSec has not yet posted a comment on the arrest of the teen in Essex, outside London, which police said was "intelligence-led."
The suspect was arrested Monday night and police are now examining a "significant amount of material," they said.


The Suspect Details:- 
Name: Mr Ryan Cleary
Alias: viraL
Age: 18-19
Address: 10 South Beech Avenue Wickford SS11 8AH
Phone Number: +447510557265
-NEWS SOURCE (CNN)

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LulzSec said: "Hack Attacks Will Continue Until Group Caught"

Posted by Avik Sarkar On 6/19/2011 01:49:00 pm



In a catch-me-if-you-can explanation of why it has targeted the likes of Sony, the U.S. Senate, an FBI affiliate, and online porn sites, the LulzSec hacking group says it plans to keep having fun until it gets caught. A statement the group has posted says going public with user personal details after a hack attack is better than keeping exploits private. It gives users a chance to change their passwords, the group says. Such public releases are also arguably good for websites too. After the group published 26,000 emails and passwords stolen from porn sites last week, Facebook automatically locked every account linked to the email addresses, stopping the kind of unauthorized access LulzSec discusses. LulzSec says its hack attacks will continue until "we're brought to justice, which we might well be." The group's statement amounts to a manifesto and is surprisingly more erudite than might be expected. "We're attracted to fast-changing scenarios, we can't stand repetitiveness," the group says. "Nobody is truly causing the Internet to slip one way or the other, it's an inevitable outcome for us humans." And not everything the group has done has appeared malicious. Although ithacked into the British health system computers, it declined to cause damage or publish details, instead warning admins that the system was insecure.
The group denies it's locked in a hacker war with similar group Anonymous. This had been suggested after LulzSec targeted the 4Chan website with a denial of service attack following attempts by 4Chan users to expose members of LulzSec.
LulzSec members were considered righteous vigilantes by some sectors of the Internet after their repeated attacks against Sony, which were carried out in response to Sony's hounding of PS3 hardware hacker George Hotz. However, support has been waning after the group targeted non-Sony game servers this week. Perhaps surprisingly, in the statement the group attempts to distance itself from these attacks, pointing out they were done "by the request of callers [to its telephone request line], not by our own choice".  

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Microsoft gave comment about LulzSec

Posted by Avik Sarkar On 6/18/2011 09:37:00 pm



Microsoft has commented on LulzSec's posting of emails and addresses, some of which may be associated with Xbox Live accounts. Microsoft has sent us this comment on the data, which is an info dump and not a hack.
"This group appears to have posted a list of thousands of potential email addresses and passwords, and encouraged users to try them across various online sites like Xbox LIVE in the event one of the users happens to use the same password and email address combination.  At this time we do not have any evidence Xbox LIVE has been compromised. However we take the security of our service seriously and work on an ongoing basis to improve it against evolving threats."
The group dumped a list of 62,000 emails and passwords on a file sharing site (the list has been taken down multiple times) for accounts of sites and services like Xbox Live, PayPal, WOW, and much more (confirmed on LulzSec's Twitter, even). We've also had one poor reader tell us the credit card attached to his Xbox Live account has already been hit for $100 and the account's password changed.Just to clarify: LulzSec hasn't hacked Xbox Live, they've simply released people's emails and passwords that may pertain to an Xbox Live or PayPal or WOW, etc. account.  Hacker group LulzSec has released emails and passwords for some people's Xbox Live account info, among other sites and services. LulzSec has also been involved in attacks on Nintendo, Minecraft, EVE Online, and (of course) Sony, among others. And for those of you keeping score out there, hactivists Anonymous deal more in denial of service attacks, while exposing user info is one of LulzSec's deals. Whatever the method or rationale, though, it's annoying. 

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