attacks

Just in time for the announcement that the National Security Agency (NSA) will be pervasively monitoring private networks comes news that cyber attacks attributed to North Korea paralyzed major South Korean and U.S. government web sites. Eleven ... South Korean organizations, including the presidential Blue House, the Defense Ministry, the National Assembly, Shinhan Bank, Korea Exchange Bank and top Internet portal Naver, and coincidentally, eleven U.S. sites including the U.S. Treasury Department, Secret Service, Federal Trade Commission and Transportation Department, went down or experienced ... (view more)

Microsoft has confirmed that thousands of legitimate web sites have been compromised by hackers and are now targeting innocent users through a critical unpatched vulnerability in Windows' DirectShow, part of DirectX . This is the second time in just ... six weeks that hackers have been exploiting the unpatched bug. This time, however, it appears as though Internet Explorer (IE) has been chosen as the weapon of choice when trapping innocent users. Browse and Get Owned Attacks: Drive-By Hackings The new wave of attacks is being referred to as "browse and get owned attacks" or "drive-by hackings". ... (view more)

Since it was first introduced several months ago, the dreaded Conficker worm has been synonymous with wreaking havoc on computers worldwide. Almost no one would ever consider its creation a "good" thing, but that may be changing, if only in one ... isolated incident. Ironically the virus, warned to be harmful to millions of people around the globe, has actually made a few hundred fans in England. The warm reception came following a planned attack on Manchester City Council (MCC). According to the Manchester Evening News, a total of 1,609 traffic tickets could not be issued within the 28 ... (view more)

Anyone who has ever owned a computer has likely been the victim of spam . But while most of us would be quick to hit the delete button at the first sign of an unfamiliar (and potentially harmful) email, others are analyzing its components in the ... hopes of finding common traits amongst viruses in order to predict the frequency and sophistication of future attacks. Spam-haters around the world recently celebrated when San Jose-based McColo was shut down in November 2008, after it was discovered that the web hosting service provider was trafficking high levels of malware from their servers. The ... (view more)

Malware was on the rise last year, and 2009 doesn't look much better. Reports from two different security companies, AVG and F-secure, are painting an increasingly dangerous picture of our online world. F-secure, makers of real-time virus protection ... software, reports that detections of malware have tripled since 2007. Topping their list were botnets -- a network of infected computers, sometimes called zombies -- which can be remotely controlled by hackers without the knowledge of the computer's owner. There is no hard data on how many zombified computers are out there, but by F-secure's ... (view more)

Security researchers have revealed that the current military hostilities between Russia and Georgia may have actually begun online a couple of weeks ago. There's no official word as to who was behind cyber attacks which brought down Georgian ... government websites, including that of the country's president Mikheil Saakashvili. The Russian government has denied any involvement in the attacks, which were routed through servers based in the US. Whoever was responsible used denial of service (DOS) attacks, a brutally simple technique which involves sending repeated requests to a website's server. It ... (view more)

A group of hackers has been carrying out threats against the Church of Scientology. The attacks are in response to the religion's efforts to remove a video originally posted on YouTube and Gawker, which featured Tom Cruise praising the attributes of ... Scientology. (Source: canada.com ) Working under the name Anonymous, the group has posted several videos on YouTube in which it threatens to drive the Church off the Internet and out of existence. In the first video, released last week, ominous storm clouds churn over a building (presumably a Scientology office) while a computerized voice delivers ... (view more)

Scary: A recent survey sponsored by Deloitte ... (view more)

International hackers have reportedly been targeting American federal agency computers, stealing as much data as possible, and assuming control of PC files. While this appears to be a very difficult and sophisticated endeavor to accomplish, ... international spies are simply using the same method that domestic hackers implement on a smaller scale: corrupt Microsoft Office files. The actual virus is sent via email attachment and when government officials unwittingly open these Word, Excel or PowerPoint files, they relinquish control of their entire PC. The attacker then uses the PC as a base from ... (view more)

Infopackets.com isn't the only web server under attack from hackers as of late . " Several major web sites, including Yahoo, Microsoft and Google, were inaccessible at times early [Tuesday (06/15/2004), due to an online attack]. The problem began ... about 9 a.m. Eastern and lasted less than two hours, said Jeff Young, a spokesperson for Akamai Technologies Inc., whose network of servers mirror some of the Web's top destinations to improve their performance. " (1) Akamai Technologies later confirmed that its network and servers came under 'a sophisticated, large-scale attack' as a ... (view more)