Home · Security

Hackers Select a New Target: Other Hackers

The hackers, calling themselves the A-Team, assembled a trove of private information and put it online for all to see: names, aliases, addresses, phone numbers, even details about family members and girlfriends.

But their targets were not corporate executives, government officials or clueless bank customers. They were other hackers.

And in trying to unmask the identities of the members of a group known as Lulz Security, the A-Team was aiming to take them down a peg — and, indirectly, to help law enforcement officials lock them up.

The core members of Lulz Security “lack the skill to do anything more than go after the low-hanging fruit,” the A-Team sneered in its posting last month. More...

07-06-2011 00:30

Hackers Fight Rivals, FBI to Control Hijacked-Computer Networks

Just after 3 a.m. on May 26, Karim Hijazi, the chief executive of Unveillance, a cyber-security firm, received an e-mail from hackers calling themselves LulzSec. They demanded he help them take over some networks of hijacked computers that other criminals were operating.

Unveillance had information on the so-called botnets because it was tracking them for potential corporate targets, Hijazi said in an interview. LulzSec had leverage to make Hijazi comply because it had hacked his Wilmington, Delaware-based company’s e-mail system and threatened to post captured confidential documents online if he didn’t help the group.

“If they did get a hold of these, they could potentially do way more damage than what’s already being done to these corporate targets,” said Hijazi, who rejected the demands. “The harm could be monumental.”

Botnets, which secretly control almost one-fifth of all home computers, have become a hotly contested terrain in the cyber-underground, according to Alex Cox, a security researcher at Reston, Virginia-based NetWitness Corp. Criminals who run them or rivals who want to are facing off against each other and against law enforcement and intelligence agencies that seek to render the rogue networks harmless or use them for their own devices, according to cyber-security experts. More...

06-12-2011 15:30

Citi Says Credit Card Customers’ Data Was Hacked

Citigroup acknowledged on Thursday that unidentified hackers had breached its security and gained access to the data of hundreds of thousands of its credit card customers in North America.

“During routine monitoring, we recently discovered unauthorized access to Citi’s account online,” the bank said in an e-mailed statement. “We are contacting customers whose information was impacted.”

The bank said about 1 percent of its North American credit card holders had been affected, putting the total count of customers exposed in the hundreds of thousands, based on its annual report for 2010, which said it had about 21 million credit card customers in North America. More...

06-09-2011 17:50

<< First < Previous [5 / 20] Next > Last >>