Category: Hacking
T-Mobile Sidekick Hacker Pleads Guilty
Those of you who recall Aunty telling you about the T-Mobile Sidekick hacker will be interested to know that not only has he been apprehended, but he has pleaded guilty. Twenty-one year old Nicholas Lee Jacobsen, an engineer now living in Oregon, formerly of Orange County, California, pleaded guilty to…
ChoicePoint Hacking Puts Californians at Risk for Identity Theft
As many as 35,000 Californians may have had their credit card numbers, social security numbers, and other personal information compromised when hackers accessed identification and credential verification service provider ChoicePoint’s data servers. Hacks into ChoicePoint’s system have already lead to six documented cases of identity theft in California alone. Authorities…
Teen Steals Exam Answers with Key Logger
And here Aunty thought that public school education in our country had gone down hill. Apparently our public schools are in fact turning out students well-suited to the demands of the next generation of technologists – or a life of crime. A sixteen-year-old high school student in Fort Bend, Texas,…
T-Mobile’s Trusty Sidekick Caught in Compromising Position
I’m a big fan of the T-Mobile Sidekick, nee “Danger Hiptop”. I carry mine with me wherever I go (well, almost). Once thought of as the poor man’s Blackberry, the Sidekick has really come into its own, offering all if not more of the functionality of the Blackberry, for half…
Panix in a Panic as Entire ISP Domain Gets Hijacked
Internet service provider Panix.com found that their entire domain was hijacked over the weekend. The ISP, which serves the greater New York City area, found that the domain had been moved from their own registrar to one in Australia, that their DNS pointed to a site in the United Kingdom,…
Hacker Compromises 32,000 User Accounts
A hacker has compromised the personal information and identification of as many as 32,000 users whose details were stored on computers at George Mason University, in Fairfax, Virginia. The computer system which was compromised was that holding all of the information associated with university identification cards, including names, photos, and…
Two More Windows Patches from Microsoft
In addition to the critical fix for the Help flaw which implicated Active X, and which Aunty posted about here, Microsoft today announced two additional security patches for Windows users. The first one involves both a cursor and icon handling vulnerability, along with a Windows kernal vulnerability, and affects a…
Microsoft Announces Patch for “Help Flaw” Security Hole
Not a moment too soon, Microsoft has announced a fix for that pesky “help flaw” involving ActiveX which Aunty first reported on here and again here just yesterday. Making this flaw even more devestating than some others is the fact that it affects so many flavours of Windows, including version…
Internet Explorer 6 Security Flaw Given “Extremely Critical” Status
Security company Secunia, Inc. has raised the security threat warning for recently revealed Internet Explorer 6 security flaws to “extremely critical”, their highest threat level. This is the result of yet another “security” site publishing yet another set of instructions for how to exploit the security hole (what’s up with…
Hardware Hacker Does Hard Time
Some of you may remember when infamous hacker Kevin Mitnick was all over the news. Mitnick spend a bit over 5 1/2 years in prison for his hacking exploits. Well, a Michigan man has just received the longest prison sentence ever handed down in a hacking case, nearly twice that…
Is Your Computer Complicit in Online Extortion?
We all know about spam, spyware, viruses and phishing. But these pale by comparison with (and indeed are the supporting cast for) the mother of all Internet incursions: extortion of online businesses.
