A report from The Guardian claims that detectives working for Rupert Murdoch’s News International may have siphoned off classified intelligence documents from MI5, Britain’s domestic intelligence agency.
The e-mail addresses and account passwords for more than one thousand United Nations staff and other users of a UN development Web site were leaked online by the hacking group TeamP0ison, which has been linked to past attacks on governments in the U.S. and India.
When CrowdOptic, a Silicon Valley, venture funded startup, developed a cool application that could stream real-time, context-aware information streams to mobile devices, the applications seemed straight-forward (and lucrative) enough: a blend of advertising and broadcasting that sports franchises and concert promoters might use to create an enhanced and “immersive experience” for fans attending live events. Along the way, however, the company discovered another, even more powerful use for their technology: crowd control.
An Analysis published earlier this month by Kahu Security raises the possibility that the hack of systems used by the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation host committee was the result of a spear phishing attack with links back to the Chinese mainland.
Siemens said on Tuesday that it is working with the U.S. Department of Homeland Security to investigate a cyber intrusion into a water treatment plant in South Houston, Texas, but couldn’t confirm that a default, three digit password hard coded into an application used to control the company’s SCADA software played a role.
The news last month was of the bust up of the biggest cyber crime ring in history, with 4 million victims and $14 million in losses. Now the FBI is hoping a few of those victims step forward to help with the prosecution.
Dozens of members of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit’s host committee who submitted to background checks ahead of a meeting with President Obama may have been the victims of a data breach, according to an Associated Press report.
In an e-mail interview with Threatpost, the hacker who compromised software used to manage water infrastructure for South Houston, Texas, said the district had HMI (human machine interface) software used to manage water and sewage infrastructure accessible to the Internet and used a password that was just three characters long to protect the system, making it easy picking for a remote attack.
When most people think of the Great Firewall of China, they think of government censors black holing the comments of political dissidents or conversations related to the long list of topics the governing Communist Party finds disruptive to political harmony. But in testimony before Congress, the head of a U.S.-based technology industry group said that the censorship is also taking an economic toll on Western Internet firms, as China steers Chinese consumers away from Western Web based services including Facebook, Google, Twitter, Yahoo and Foursquare and toward domestic competitors.
An electronic attack believed to emanate from computers in Russia reportedly destroyed a water pump belonging to an unnamed, Springfield, Illinois water utility earlier this month after hackers gained unauthorized access to that company’s industrial control system, according to published reports.
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