hijack

A severe cyberattack hit the servers of the International Monetary Fund. The fund has admitted to being a victim of hackers’ hijacking. After the report the World Bank decided to temporally cut all computer connections between the two institutions.

It was not revealed what the nature of the attack was. The IMF staff was told of the hack last week in an email. However, it is widely believed that the attack had occurred some time before Dominique Strauss-Kahn was accused of the sexual assault.

Many US officials suspect that the latest cyber attacks on Lockheed Martin were orchestrated by some individual or an organization in China.

"It's unclear at this point precisely who conducted the attacks, but given past history with these sorts of things, there's a strong tendency to look east. The Far East, in fact, and a country that not so long ago hosted the Olympics," said one U.S. official who asked for anonymity, but was reluctant to point the finger at China by name.

A group of hackers reported a new successful hijacking of another Sony Corp’s computer networks to show that the electronic company lacks proper security in all its systems. LulzSec hackers broke into U.S. PBS television and Fox.com and accessed the information of more than 1 million customers. It published the names, birth dates, addresses, emails, phone numbers and passwords of thousands of people who had entered contests promoted by Sony.

A new way to hijack Windows machines was found by researchers in the course of some experiments. Experts at InfoSec Institute, an information security services company, tried the MITM, or man-in-the-middle, attacks that exploit features that present in recent versions of Windows to make it easy for computers to connect to networks using the next generation IPv6 protocol.

According to Jack Koziol, a program manager at InfoSec Institute, the attack may also exploit features of Apple's OS X for Macs, however the proof-of-concept has not been tested on that platform.

This week independent researchers Nick DePetrillo and Don Bailey of iSec Partners at the Source Conference in Boston demonstrated the ways to hijack mobile network databases to find the number of most US-based cellphone users and to track virtually any GSM-enabled handset all over the world.

Users of smartphones are being tricked into downloading a malicious application that makes expensive international phone calls unseen for the user. Crooks have developed a pirated version of a Windows mobile game that contains a Trojan virus.

Earlier this week the social networking company Facebook started a lawsuit against the alleged high profile hijackers and spammers. Among the defendants there are Jeremi Fisher, Philip Porembski, and Ryan Shimeall along with Choko Systems, Harm, Inc., and iMedia Online Services, LLC, three firms associated with the alleged spammers.

The company filed the lawsuit which charges the criminals of "phishing Facebook users and sending spam from their accounts".