hacking

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.

 The federal prosecutors have charged eight men from Russia, Moldova and Estonia with hacking into Atlanta-based bank card processor RBS WorldPay and stealing more than $9m in 12 hours. The defendants are accused of hacking the RBS computer network and retrieving payment card data as they were being processed.

 SSL, or the Secure Sockets Layer system that is widely used to protect Web traffic against data theft was found vulnerable to hacking attacks. The system that is mainly used for online banking, shopping, and any other https connection appears to have a flaw that allows an attacker to break into any theoretically secured connection and add malicious commands.

 A class-action settlement over contact information stolen from online brokerage TD Ameritrade was rejected by a federal judge. U.S. District Judge Vaughn Walker in San Francisco claimed that the settlement is more to the advantage of Ameritrade and the plaintiffs' lawyers rather than benefiting affected customers.

 More than one in ten social networkers thinks their account has been hacked, says Moneysupermarket.com. 

Research by the comparison website revealed that 8 percent of web users admitted they have thought about or been successful at hacking into a friend Facebook, Twitter or email account. 

Of those potential hackers, most said they accessed the account because they suspected their partner was having affair.