hackers

Hackers Post Faked Report of Steve Jobs's Death

Owen Thomas · 01/06/09 01:15PM

MacRumors, one of the many sites which cover Apple's annual Macworld product launches, has had its live coverage infiltrated, with someone adding the false news of Steve Jobs's death to the blow-by-blow reports.

Why the Koobface virus spread so fast

Owen Thomas · 12/07/08 05:40PM

A long-dormant virus aimed directly at Facebook struck Thursday, spreading quickly via the social network. What's surprising isn't that Koobface hit Facebook so hard. It's that it took so long to do it.

YouTube users in virus panic

Owen Thomas · 12/03/08 01:00PM

Hasn't YouTube always seemed too good to be true — all those video clips, for free? We must be getting away with something. That's why rumors about a new YouTube virus have spread so far, so fast.

Proletarian Revolutionaries Hack Web Page

Hamilton Nolan · 12/03/08 10:32AM

Bankrupt electronics retailer Tweeter closed all its stores yesterday and fired its employees without warning. But it appears some naughty ex-employees have had their revenge on Tweeter's executives—by hacking the company's web page and placing a humorously profane photo and message upon it for all the public to see! Oh ho! It seems the tables have turned, eh? Click through for a screengrab of the shocking political metaphor that has prompted Tweeter to pay all its employees what they're owed a few people to chuckle, then hit the bong again:

Credit-Card Hackers in New Attack

Owen Thomas · 12/02/08 02:40PM

It's the last thing cash-strapped banks need right now: Holders of credit and debit cards are reporting an epidemic of unauthorized charges on their bills. It could be the sign of a massive card-fraud operation in the making. A company called Adele Services, based in Melville, N.Y., has been charging cards small amounts — 21 to 29 cents. Such charges are usually attempts by card fraudsters to test whether a particular card number is valid.

Traffic engineers pull a "Die Hard 4" on Los Angeles

Tim the IT Guy · 11/06/08 04:00PM

Who pays attention to unions anymore? A bunch of carpenters picket your office because of a grievance with a contractor who works for the facilities department of the company on the floor below you. They might as well stencil WE ARE POWERLESS on their placards. But a couple of Los Angeles traffic engineers who work for that city's Automated Traffic Surveillance Center found a way to make "strike" an active verb again: They disabled four traffic lights at major intersections a couple of hours before a job action. The red-light gridlock lasted four days until the PHBs figured out how to reprogram things. Gabriel Murillo, 39, and Kartik Patel, 36 admitted to felony hacking as part of a plea bargain. I'm sure it sucked for commuters, but at least they didn't turn all the lights green. (Photo by AP/Nam Y. Huh)

PDFs now as rock-solid secure as ActiveX

Tim the IT Guy · 11/05/08 03:20PM

It's a verified bug: PDF files can be used to take over your PC. Adobe's mistake was adding support for ever-sloppy JavaScript inside the once-benign PDF format. Core Security, the company that outed the vulnerability, says, "An attacker could put malicious code in JavaScript embedded in a PDF and [...] could manipulate the program's memory allocation pattern and trigger the vulnerability to execute arbitrary code with the privileges of the user." Great. I can hardly wait to reinstall Paul's PC after he pretends to read another of those ethics-in-journalism PDFs.

Microsoft saves my job for the weekend

Tim the IT Guy · 10/24/08 07:00PM

Hooray — another zero-day patch! The financial sky is falling! The only good news is I'm used to hedge fund managers throwing themselves out the windows. If you're as familiar with zero-day patches as collateralized debt obligations, let me explain the difference to an IT guy. A CDO means I'm fired. A zero-day patch means I'm working. All weekend.A zero-day patch is a security alert that's been issued for some major, Internet-threatening bug, one that's so serious that they give people zero days of warning. It means the bad guys know about it. It's so bad that it needs to be fixed right away, I get that. But do you think IT departments are staffed for one zero-day patch over another? Of course not. Your infrastructure doesn't scale, but who cares? And why pay for all that automation? We have people here. Or in Bangalore, or somewhere. But when an operation takes 10 minutes per machine, multiplied by hundreds of servers and thousands of workstations for millions of customers ... well, I'll get complaints about the overtime charges, but my managers already told me they didn't want to pay to configure the automated solution. See? I can't win, even if Arista replaces every Cisco box on the network. The bright side: This morning, I worried I'd be out of a job by noon. Thanks to Microsoft, I now have another life-or-death upgrade to install. I'll do it this weekend. I may not have a family life, but I have a job.