Los Angeles: McDonald's Corp said on Monday hackers gained access to a database containing information such as the email addresses and birth dates of people who voluntarily signed up for its websites and promotions. The world's biggest hamburger chain said the security breach did not include any Social Security numbers, credit card accounts or sensitive financial information. The hacked data was on computer systems operated by an email database management...
11:03 AM, Dec 14, 2010
New York: Gawker Media Inc. is urging subscribers to change their passwords because someone has managed to hack into the company's user database. The company, which runs a series of irreverent blogs on media, technology and other issues, said in a posting on its website Sunday that the commenting passwords used on the sites were encrypted, but simple ones could be vulnerable to attacks by hackers' computers. The company also...
11:53 AM, Dec 13, 2010
Cyber attacks in retaliation for attempts to block the WikiLeaks website have already hit the websites of credit-card giants MasterCard and Visa. Using distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks, hundreds of cyber activists have joined forces and temporarily disabled computer servers by bombarding them with requests. On Thursday, supporters of WikiLeaks were plotting attacks on other perceived enemies of the publisher, which has angered US authorities by starting to release details of...
10:44 AM, Dec 10, 2010
London: The website attacks launched by supporters of WikiLeaks show 21st-century cyber warfare evolving into a more amateur and anarchic affair than many predicted. While most countries have plowed much more attention and resources into cyber security in recent years, most of the debate has focused on the threat from militant groups such as al Qaeda or mainstream state on state conflict. But attempts to silence WikiLeaks after the leaking...
04:29 PM, Dec 09, 2010
London: Hackers have crashed the website of credit card firm MasterCard in apparent retaliation for its blocking of donations to the Wikileaks website, the BBC and other media reported on Wednesday. MasterCard was not immediately available to comment. The website did not appear to be available online. Web activists calling themselves Anonymous threatened earlier this week to launch denial of service attacks against businesses such as online payment firm PayPal...
07:01 PM, Dec 08, 2010
Washington: It will take several more years for the government to fully install high-tech systems to block computer intrusions, a drawn-out timeline that enables criminals to become more adept at stealing sensitive data, experts say. As the US Department of Homeland Security moves methodically to pare down and secure the approximately 2,400 network connections used every day by millions of federal workers around the world, experts suggest that technology already...
06:33 PM, Dec 06, 2010
London: Britain is devoting more energy to understanding and developing "weaponry" for cyber warfare than any other military area, armed forces chief General David Richards said on Monday. "It's very genuinely a huge priority for us," Richards said. "Along with like-minded nations in NATO for example, we are more actively expanding our understanding and weaponry in this area than in any other area," he told an audience during questions that...
11:34 AM, Nov 23, 2010
Oslo: The Norwegian Nobel Institute's website was Tuesday subjected to a hacker attack, the online edition of the Aftenposten daily reported. Online visitors risked downloading a so-called trojan, a type of malware, to their computers, according to telecommunications group Telenor's security group. The attack was traced to an IP (Internet Protocol) address in Taiwan but it was possible it had been re-routed there, the Telenor Security Operation Centre said after...
12:24 PM, Oct 27, 2010
London: Countries are already using cyber warfare techniques to attack each other and need to be vigilant round the clock to protect computer systems, the head of Britain's communications spy agency says. Iain Lobban, the director of the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), said British government systems are targeted 1,000 times each month. "Cyberspace is contested every day, every hour, every minute, every second," he said late on Tuesday in a...
12:54 PM, Oct 14, 2010
Boston: Microsoft Corp issued its biggest-ever security fix on Tuesday, including repairs to its ubiquitous Windows operating system and Internet browser for flaws that could let hackers take control of a PC. The new patches aim to fix a number of vulnerabilities including the notorious Stuxnet virus that attacked an Iranian nuclear power plant and other industrial control systems around the world. Microsoft said four of the new patches -...
10:56 AM, Oct 13, 2010
London: An Israeli military unit that undertakes cyberwarfare is responsible for creating a virus that attacked Iran's computer systems and stopped work at a nuclear power station, an expert has said. A Biblical reference has been detected in the code of the computer virus that points to Israel as the origin of the cyber attack. Daily Telegraph Friday reported that the code contains the word "myrtus", which is a reference...
01:11 PM, Oct 01, 2010
New Delhi: In the second major XSS (cross-site scripting) attack on a major social networking service this week, Google owned Orkut was flooded with "Bom Sabado" scraps. The word "Bom Sabado" means "Good Saturday" in Portuguese, which is the also the official language of Brazil, one of the last remaining Orkut bastions in the world. The worm seems to be posting scraps with the text "Bom Sabado" and also adding...
03:46 PM, Sep 25, 2010
Tokyo: This week's Twitter attack that caused a widespread headache for the micro-blogging service appears to have been triggered by a Japanese computer hacker who says he was only trying to help. The attack, which emerged and was shut down within hours Tuesday morning, involved a "cross-site scripting" flaw that allowed users to run JavaScript programs on other computers. The originator is believed to be someone who uses the name...
07:28 PM, Sep 23, 2010
New York: Twitter has fixed a security flaw on its popular social media website after a cyber attack earlier on Tuesday sent some users to Japanese porn websites. Twitter, which allows users to broadcast short messages of 140 characters or fewer, was flooded with tweets by users who complained on the homepage under such topic headings as "Twitter got hacked." It said that no user information was compromised. A tweet...
11:48 AM, Sep 22, 2010
New Delhi: Another security flaw has hit the popular microblogging website Twitter. The bug on the Twitter website caused pop-up messages to appear or opened third-party websites when users just hovered the cursor over a link. The latest Twitter security exploit took advantage of the onMouseOver javascript code on the website, but it didn't appear to affect the third-party Twitter clients that many use to keep track of tweets. Even...
06:20 PM, Sep 21, 2010
Sydney: Online cheats are hacking into accounts of people who post their holiday plans on Facebook and are posing as their friends to cheat them of their money, Australia's national consumer regulator said Tuesday. The hackers are using vacationers' travel information to send bogus pleas for help, Australian Competition and Consumer Commission's (ACCC) deputy chairman Peter Kell said. "They say, 'Look, I've got an emergency here; I've lost my wallet',...
12:28 PM, Sep 21, 2010
San Francisco: Google is making it tougher for computer hackers and other imposters to break into e-mail accounts and other password-protected services. An additional security measure introduced Monday will require typing a six-digit code after an accountholder's Google password is entered. The codes will be sent to people's mobile phones. The two-step login means it will take more than a password to get into an account. The extra protection initially...
07:23 PM, Sep 20, 2010
Washington: An e-mail virus has attacked servers across the world, including those at NASA and Google, and possibly the US internal security department office. The virus, called "here you have" or "VBMania", is a simple Trojan Horse that arrives in your inbox with the odd-but-suggestive subject line "here you have", the Fox News said Saturday. The body reads "This is The Document I told you about, you can find it...
06:12 PM, Sep 11, 2010
San Francisco: If you're looking for Cameron Diaz, Julia Roberts or Jessica Biel online, look out! The movie stars top the latest list of the most dangerous celebrities to search for online, according to new research by computer-security software maker McAfee Inc. It's far from an Oscar, but landing atop McAfee's annual list carries a distinction all its own: It means that criminals believe those celebs are the perfect lures...
12:20 PM, Aug 19, 2010
