hackers
'Anarcho-Transexual' Hacker Returns with New Scam Site
Owen Thomas · 03/10/09 12:23PMPalin Email Hacker Faces Three New Charges
Pareene · 03/09/09 02:35PMJason Calacanis's Felony-Friendly Hiring Practices
Owen Thomas · 03/05/09 03:41PMWas an 'Anarcho-Transexual Afro-Chicano' Behind the IM Worm?
Owen Thomas · 02/25/09 01:33PMGovernment Job Database Hacked
Pareene · 01/30/09 03:18PMThe Twitterati Are Not as Awesome as They Think They Are
Owen Thomas · 01/22/09 06:01PMParisHilton.com Infected, Cue the STD Jokes
Owen Thomas · 01/14/09 02:25PMLiberal Blogosphere Proves Trivially Easy to Destroy
Owen Thomas · 01/08/09 07:51PMHackers Post Faked Report of Steve Jobs's Death
Owen Thomas · 01/06/09 01:15PMTwitter Hacking Epidemic Claims Britney Spears, Barack Obama
Owen Thomas · 01/05/09 12:31PMFox News Twitter Hacked By Bill O'Reilly
Hamilton Nolan · 01/05/09 12:14PMWhy the Koobface virus spread so fast
Owen Thomas · 12/07/08 05:40PMYouTube users in virus panic
Owen Thomas · 12/03/08 01:00PMProletarian Revolutionaries Hack Web Page
Hamilton Nolan · 12/03/08 10:32AMBankrupt 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 02:40PMIt'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 04:00PMWho 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 03:20PMIt'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.
Vista is so secure, no one uses it
Paul Boutin · 11/03/08 01:00PMMicrosoft saves my job for the weekend
Tim the IT Guy · 10/24/08 07:00PMHooray — 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.