Posts tagged hacking

Daily Mail made 1,728 potentially illegal requests to private detective

Just when the Daily Mail gets some longread love from the New Yorker, the Guardian reports that Daily Mail journalists paid private investigators about $227,000 to “unearth phone numbers and addresses of public figures over a three-year period, including personal details of the Duchess of Cambridge and her sister Pippa Middleton.”

Via the Guardian:

The tabloid demanded the private information between 2000 and 2003 from Steve Whittamore – whose targets for a range of newspapers included the union leader Bob Crow, the family of the murder victim Holly Wells, members of the England football team and the singer Charlotte Church. The Daily Mail made the most requests, with its sister title the Mail on Sunday spending an estimated £62,000 on 578 requests for information. The Sunday title’s figure was also roughly double the number of requests counted by the information commissioner in a report in 2006…

…Obtaining such personal information is a breach of section 55 of the Data Protection Act, although there is a public interest defence. If anybody working in the public sector was paid money to supply information illegally, it could amount to an offence under the more serious 1906 Prevention of Corruption Act, for which there is no public interest defence. Whittamore himself pleaded guilty to breaches of the Data Protection Act in 2005 and received a two-year conditional discharge.

News Scandals are Theatrical

Via Journalism.co.uk:

The “current crisis” engulfing UK newspaper journalism has inspired a new fast-turnaround theatre production that will launch in Glasgow at the end of April.

The National Theatre of Scotland and the London Review of Books have teamed up to produce Enquirer, which will be performed in an empty floor of an office block in Glasgow’s digital media quarter at Pacific Quay, before moving to London later in the year.

It is based on more than 50 interviews with people working in the newspaper industry - from reporters to printers and newsagents - conducted by journalists Paul Flynn, Deborah Orr and Ruth Wishart.

The transcripts from the interviews will be edited into a script, and the project will be updated throughout the rehearsal and performance period to reflect the current state of events in the phone hacking story and the Leveson inquiry.

Cause and Effect: Interpol arrests 25 alleged members of Anonymous. Hours later its site goes down under DDoS attack.

Facebook Hacking Happens Really Fast

Background: Facebook’s hundreds of millions of users log in and out of the the site a billion plus times each day.

The Good News: Facebook reports that logins are only compromised .06% if the time.

The Bad News: .06 of a really large number (Facebook members) is a really large number.

Via Consumer Reports:

Graham Cluley, a senior technology consultant with security software maker Sophos, took a closer look at the numbers reported by Facebook in a blog post touting its new online features such as Trusted Friends.

By Cluley’s calculations, 0.06 percent of a billion log-ins results in 600,000 compromised Facebook sign-ons per day. Or, more telling: One hacked Facebook account is being logged in to the social media website every 140 milliseconds.

That’s literally faster than the blink of an eye, which takes only 150 milliseconds.

Takeaway: Change your password from 12345 to something a little more clever.

Syria's Digital Counter-Revolutionaries

Via The Atlantic:

As President Bashar al-Assad dispatches tanks against peaceful protesters across Syria, pro-regime forces are launching a parallel effort against the uprising on a very different front: the Internet. A collective of pro-Assad hackers and online activists, calling themselves the Syrian Electronic Army, appears to be targeting dissidents within Syria as well as sympathizers without…

…Over the past few months, their primary means of attack has been to overload the social networking profiles of government institutions and Western media outlets, flooding the Facebook pages of ABC News, the Telegraph, Oprah Winfrey, and the U.S. Department of Treasury with pro-Assad messages. Their primary method is distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks: by jamming an online portal with messages, the group keeps regular visitors out and forces institutions to remove content unfavorable to the Syrian regime. This screenshot shows a “virtual demonstration” on President Barack Obama’s Facebook page

Apart from regular Facebook spamming, the Syrian Electronic Army has engaged in several highly organized denial of service attacks on the main websites of major media organizations.

In Open Letter, Anonymous Taunts FBI

In an open letter to the FBI, the hacker groups Anonymous and Lulz Security write:

Hello thar FBI and international law authorities,

We recently stumbled across the following article with amazement and a certain amount of amusement:

http://www.npr.org/2011/07/20/138555799/fbi-arrests-alleged-anonymous-hackers

The statements made by deputy assistant FBI director Steve Chabinsky in this article clearly seem to be directed at Anonymous and Lulz Security, and we are happy to provide you with a response.

You state:

“We want to send a message that chaos on the Internet is unacceptable, [even if] hackers can be believed to have social causes, it’s entirely unacceptable to break into websites and commit unlawful acts.”

Now let us be clear here, Mr. Chabinsky, while we understand that you and your colleagues may find breaking into websites unacceptable, let us tell you what WE find unacceptable:

• Governments lying to their citizens and inducing fear and terror to keep them in control by dismantling their freedom piece by piece.
• Corporations aiding and conspiring with said governments while taking advantage at the same time by collecting billions of funds for federal contracts we all know they can’t fulfil.
• Lobby conglomerates who only follow their agenda to push the profits higher, while at the same time being deeply involved in governments around the world with the only goal to infiltrate and corrupt them enough so the status quo will never change.

These governments and corporations are our enemy. And we will continue to fight them, with all methods we have at our disposal, and that certainly includes breaking into their websites and exposing their lies.

We are not scared any more. Your threats to arrest us are meaningless to us as you cannot arrest an idea. Any attempt to do so will make your citizens more angry until they will roar in one gigantic choir. It is our mission to help these people and there is nothing - absolutely nothing - you can possibly to do make us stop.

“The Internet has become so important to so many people that we have to ensure that the World Wide Web does not become the Wild Wild West.”

Let me ask you, good sir, when was the Internet not the Wild Wild West? Do you really believe you were in control of it at any point? You were not.

That does not mean that everyone behaves like an outlaw. You see, most people do not behave like bandits if they have no reason to. We become bandits on the Internet because you have forced our hand. The Anonymous bitchslap rings through your ears like hacktivism movements of the 90s. We’re back - and we’re not going anywhere. Expect us.

As Michele Bachman might say, these folk have “choots-pah”.