hacker

South Korean police reported Thursday that over 30 North Korean hackers were recruited to work in China by a South Korean criminal ring. The hackers stole personal data of South Korean gamers and transferred $5 million to North Korea.

Seoul blamed North Korea for distributing malicious software to paralyze web sites of government agencies and businesses as well as orchestrating a cyber attack on a South Korean bank this year that brought down its network.

In the course of a mass iFrame injection attack, nearly 100,000 web pages for e-commerce sites on the open source OS Commerce platform were compromised with malware, reports security firm Armorize.

As estimated the attacks appear to come from Ukraine and they aim to infect the websites with malware to further attack visitors to these e-commerce websites, says Wayne Huang, chief technology officer at Armorize.

Being "under constant attack" supposedly from hackers Nasdaq plans to increase its expenses on cyber security.

"As we sit here, there are people trying to slam into our system every day," Robert Greifeld, chief executive officer of Nasdaq OMX Group, said in an interview on Wednesday. "So we have to be ever-vigilant against an ever-changing foe."

Hackers could damage US power generation plants, water treatment facilities, and other critical infrastructure with clones of the Stuxnet computer worm, warn officials at the US Department of Homeland Security.

When the Stuxnet hurt Iran's nuclear-enrichment operations, it was widely believed that it was Israel and US behind the attack.

New updates have been released by Adobe to patch Reader PDF and Flash animation applications. The patches fix the flaws widely used by hackers to penetrate and take control of end user machines.

In the latest patch Adobe fixes a serious bug in Flash that allows attackers to remotely execute malicious code on machines that run the software, and there are reports it's being actively exploited, Adobe said.

The website of the US Senate was hacked last week, after which all the Senate website were checked for hijacking, reports the information agency Reuters.

The intrusion into the computer network of the Senate is the latest in a series of the so called “embarrassing” attacks that have happened over a recent period of time.

Another attack hit the website of the Spanish police having successfully blocked the access to it for over an hour, as reported by the newspaper El Mundo. The attack is believed to be organized by the hackers’ group Anonymous.

The group warned the police earlier that it planned to disable the website at some time Saturday. The website was down for at least an hour from 2130 GMT.

Three suspected members of the group were arrested by the Spanish police on charges of cyber attacks against targets including the websites of Sony Corp, governments, businesses and banks.

Eric Corley, who publishes the hacker quarterly, 2600, said that about 25% of American hackers are informers for the US Federal Bureau of Investigation.

"Owing to the harsh penalties involved and the relative inexperience with the law that many hackers have, they are rather susceptible to intimidation," Corley told the Guardian.

Internet Explorer was found to have a flaw that allows hackers to steal cookies to access their accounts on some websites. The bug was found by a security researcher Rosario Valotta who said it could let hackers steal credentials to access FaceBook, Twitter and other websites.

"Any website. Any cookie. Limit is just your imagination," said Valotta, an independent Internet security researcher based in Italy.

Apple provided its response to the new attack started by hackers on Mac computers, the most pernicious types of computer virus infecting Cupertino machines.

Apple has issued a security advisory to customers warning them about a recent scam that infects Macs with malicious software that wrongly tells them their computer is infected with a virus. Hackers are targeting Mac machines to obtain credit card numbers and other valuable personal information.

DrWeb anti-virus software provider compiled a report of the most interesting malware for April. Android OS related viruses turned to be the most popular platform for malicious applications among hackers.

Osama bin Laden’s death is widely used today by hackers to lure unwitting people into installing malware. The tricks work because people want to see the photos of a dead Al Qaeda leader, but the alleged pictures of bin Laden’s corps are in fact malicious, warned the FBI.

"It's not really surprising," said Mikko Hypponen, the chief research officer of Helsinki-based F-Secure. "We were expecting to see related malware."

iPhones and iPads track users locations and store these details in an unencrypted file on the devices as well on the users’ PCs, according to a finding by researchers. Collection of such data started with Apple iOS4. It is stored as a SQLite file on iPhones and iPads with 3G feature, says Pete Warden, the founder of Data Science Toolkit and a former Apple employee, and Alasdair Allan, a senior research fellow at the University of Exeter.

Sony has been granted permission by a federal judge to subpoena PayPal records of George Hotz, the hacker behind jailbreaking the company’s PlayStation 3 game console.

Yevgeny Anikin, a hacker who was convicted of the $9 million hack of RBS WorldPay has avoided jail and has been given only a suspended sentence.

Anikin, a 27 Russian, was given a suspended sentence of five years on Monday, according to Russian state news agency RIA Novosti, after pleading guilty to what the U.S. has called “perhaps the most sophisticated and organized computer fraud attack ever conducted.”

According to the report Anikin expressed regret for his role in the crime and said: “I want to say that I repent and fully admit my guilt.”