Displaying items by tag: Hackers

Global auction service eBay was hacked. The company began sending alerts to its users to change their passwords. The attack compromised the personal data of eBay users - names, (encrypted) passwords, email addresses, and phone numbers. However, the company assures that the financial information of users are safe, and there is no indication that the PayPal was hacked too.

Malware is a nasty thing that touches every corner of the consumer electronics market. No matter what type of device you have someone, somewhere will find a way to write malware to compromise it. Over the last two weeks there has been a resurgence of a very nasty bit of Malware called CryptoLocker. This malware sneaks in through poisoned websites or emails (typically in a .zip file) using multiple flaws in Java. Once in it reaches out and encrypts every Microsoft office file it can see including on shared drives. There is no real cure for this one and you end up losing data and time as you reload your computer.

Karsten Nohl, a computer security expert for the German company Security Research Labs, discovered a security flaw in the SIM cards that use older data encryption standard (DES). Karsten was able with taking advantage of this omission to acquire the 56-digit sequence that represents a digital key to a SIM card, which allows modification of the chip.

As we see an even bigger push to cloud services there is also an interesting increase in online attacks. According to numbers from security firms the number of DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) attack have skyrocketed in Q1 of 2013. This increase in number of attack has also been accompanied by an increase in power and sophistication. In particular a recent attack on Spamhaus topped 130Gbps which is an almost unheard of number when talking about this type of attack.