hacking

The Cumbria Constabulary and Tufin Technologies conducted a survey amid 1,000 children in London and 150 from the northern English county of Cumbria reflected over a quarter of children had tried hacking at least once, despite the majority of kids agree that computer hacking is wrong and bad.

Thus the survey found 26% of kids surveyed said they had tried hacking, breaking into someone else's account, at some point. Of those who had hacked, 27% had targeted accounts on the popular social networking site Facebook, and 18% went after their friends' e-mail accounts.

The mostly costly scam in 2010 according to McAfee report will be fake antivirus applications that prompt Internet subscribers to download malicious software under guise of anti-virus protection and pay their own money for such bogus products.

The report reveals that cyber crooks earn more than $300 million from luring unwitting users into downloading scareware. Over the past two years scareware grew by 660% while during the past 12 months it increased by 400%.

For the fourth time hackers will participate in an annual contest where they will focus on vulnerabilities in smartphones and browsers with as much as $100,000 in awards next month.

The Pwn2Own competition will award $60,000 for exploits that successfully penetrate Apple's iPhone 3GS, Research in Motion's Blackberry Bold 9700, a Nokia device running the most recent version of Symbian and a Motorola phone running Google's Android. Each mobile attack that results in code execution "with little to no user-interaction" will fetch $15,000.

A notorious hacker Max Butler, known also as Max Ray Vision as well as under the nickname Iceman, was sentenced to 13 years in federal prison by US District Court in Pittsburgh. He was found guilty of hacking financial firms and stealing nearly two million credit card numbers from banks, businesses and other hackers.

This weekend Chinese local paper the Wuhan Evening News reported that the authorities closed allegedly the largest hacker training website in the country and arrested three of its members.

According to the newspaper the "Black Hawk Safety Net" website taught hacking techniques and provided malicious software downloads for its 12,000 members in exchange for a fee.

Chinese largest search engine Baidu.com filed a lawsuit against its US domain registrar over a hack that took down the Web site, alleging negligence by the US company.

Last week, users had failed accessing Baidu.com for several hours after the company's domain name server in the US was tampered with. The same group, the Iranian Cyber Army, that took down Twitter last month, also was found to be behind the attack on Baidu.

A Twitter-style service offered by a government-linked news site in China was hacked and has since gone offline, according to screenshots posted on the Web.

A microblog service launched Tuesday by the Web site of the People's Daily, the mouthpiece of China's ruling Communist Party, added to the growing number of Twitter-style services offered in China but became inaccessible by Wednesday. Screenshots posted in Chinese online forums showed the service before it went offline bombarding visitors with a set of pop-up messages apparently added by a hacker.

RockYou, social app creator, notified 32 million of its users that their usernames and passwords may have been compromised by hackers who broke into the company’s older widgets.

RockYou chief technology officer Jia Shen said in an interview the company was notified of the SQL injection attack against RockYou.com last week by security company Imperva. As Shen reported, RockYou closed the site for its legacy applications, like slide show widgets, and secured them.

Tuesday Google visitors got malicious instead of search results clicking Google's front-page Doodle sketch, dedicated to 150th anniversary of the birth of Esperanto's creator L. L. Zamenhof.

Searchers were taken to to dodgy advertisements or pages that tried to trick visitors into thinking their computers were infected and paying for fake antivirus software.

This case reflected the latest example of just how good scammers have become at manipulating Google search results.

The U.S. government has identified flaws in equipment from four companies, including Cisco Systems Inc that hackers can exploit to break into corporate computer networks.

The Department of Homeland Security's U.S. Computer Emergency Readiness Team, US-CERT, said on its website on Wednesday that the warning applies to certain networking products from Cisco, Juniper Networks Inc, SonicWall Inc and SafeNet Inc.

Notorious spammer Alan Ralsky has been jailed for more than four years over his role in a masterminding a stock fraud spam campaign that made him an estimated $2.7m.

Ralsky, 64, from West Bloomfield, near Detroit, Michigan, was sentenced to 51 months while his son-in-law, Scott Bradley, 48, was imprisoned for 40 months over the same pump and dump stock fraud conspiracy involving thinly-traded stocks.

F-Secure Malaysia, security solutions company, found malware shifted considerably from e-mail to instant communication channels provided by social networking sites, that led to rising vulnerability of the latter.

 The sale of a Chinese domain has attracted attention of some observers and one businessman. The wpad.cn domain is for sale, according to a note posted on the Web site. Duane Wessels the president of Measurement Factory, owns five wpad domains -- wpad.com, wpad.net, wpad.org, wpad.biz and wpad.us.

 About one million users of Xbox 360 were banned by Microsoft for hacking their consoles in order to play pirated games from the company's Xbox Live service. As a result a great number of cheap Xbox 360 consoles is now being sold on sites such as Craigslist. The average price for such a console is now around $90, much under the normal market price of around $200.

 Dearborn, Mich.-based Aegis Data Security has introduced its dedicated hardware and software package called Aegis Data Shield SystemTM designed to protect information on computers, networks and over the Internet against theft and hacking.

According to the company statement Aegis Data Shield SystemTM does not interrupts the daily work flow. The system seamlessly operates with all widely used platforms and operating systems.