Hacks

Attackers were able to compromise a database at DreamHost, a large hosting provider, late last week and the company is forcing all of its customers to change their passwords for their FTP and shell accounts as a precautionary measure.

Anonymous’ army of hacktivists have changed tactics in what some are calling an attempt to trick people into participating in distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks. 

Less than three weeks after releasing a new jailbreak for iPhones running iOS 5.01, a team of researchers has now published a similar tool for jailbreaking the iPhone 4S and iPad2. The Absinthe jailbreak tool will allow users to run unsigned code on their devices and load apps from places other than the iTunes App Store.

Miami, Florida – A no-holds barred presentation at the S4 Conference laid bare the woeful state of security for many industrial control systems that power the world’s critical infrastructure. Organizers have also cooperated with security scanning firms Rapid7 and Tenable to release modules for the Metasploit and Nessus products that can test for the discovered security holes.

It appears that hackers in China – not India as previously suspected – were behind the apparent leak of e-mails last week from the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission.

The crew behind the Koobface worm, who have been quite open about their exploits and financial gains from their work in the past, now seem to be ducking underground as pressure is building on them in the wake of exposures of their operation and real identities. The command-and-control server used to run the Koobface botnet, known as the Mothership, is now offline and new infections seem to have dropped off, experts say.

The Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) is the latest high profile government agency in that country found to be infected with a computer virus.