Cyber Crime | Breaking Cybersecurity News | The Hacker News

Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) has been authorized by U.S Congress to hire 2,000 new employees this year, and many of those will be young hackers and Programmers in order to built-up its cyber crime division, but FBI's Director 'James B. Comey' is facing some difficulties. Apparently, FBI's Strict Anti-Drug Policy is making it very difficult for them to go after real criminals because most of the hackers have a fondness of smoking weeds, illicit drug. According to US agency policy, they won't hire anyone who used marijuana in the last three years, but it seems that now the law enforcement agency has to think about deviating from its own policy to get right talent to tackle cybercrimes over the Internet which has become a first priority for the agency. Recently, During an annual conference held at Manhattan's New York City Bar Association, One attendee asked James B. Comey that -- One of his friend who considered an FBI job but ultimately did not apply becaus

On Friday, we reported about the large-scale operation of International raids launched by the FBI and other law enforcement officials in countries around the world to arrest the targeted customers of a popular Remote Administration Tool (RAT) called ' Blackshades ,' which is designed to take over the remote control of the infected computers and steal information. The news broke when various announcements on underground forums by hacking group members claimed that FBI especially going after all of them who purchased the hacking tool using PayPal as payment option. Today, the UK's National Crime Agency announced that the raids took place in more than 100 of countries and they have arrested more than 100 people worldwide involved in the purchasing, selling or using the Blackshades malware. More than half million computers in more than dozens of countries were infected by this sophisticated malware that has been sold on underground forums since at least 2010 to seve

Identities now transcend human boundaries. Within each line of code and every API call lies a non-human identity. These entities act as programmatic access keys, enabling authentication and facilitating interactions among systems and services, which are essential for every API call, database query, or storage account access. As we depend on multi-factor authentication and passwords to safeguard human identities, a pressing question arises: How do we guarantee the security and integrity of these non-human counterparts? How do we authenticate, authorize, and regulate access for entities devoid of life but crucial for the functioning of critical systems? Let's break it down. The challenge Imagine a cloud-native application as a bustling metropolis of tiny neighborhoods known as microservices, all neatly packed into containers. These microservices function akin to diligent worker bees, each diligently performing its designated task, be it processing data, verifying credentials, or

A Russian Hacker who was arrested in year 2012 by the authorities of the Netherlands and accused for allegedly hacking into the computer networks of more than a dozen major American corporations and stole over 160 million Credit and Debit Card Numbers. Earlier we reported , 33-year-old Russian hacker Vladimir Drinkman is wanted in U.S and Russia for various cyber crime charges, and the Netherlands Court ruled simultaneous requests from the U.S. & Russia for the extradition were admissible. But now it's up to the Dutch Minister of Justice to decide, whether to which country he would be extradited. However, Hacker Vladimir Drinkman does not want to face charges in US and appealed to the Supreme Court of the Netherlands, Country's highest court, to avoid his extradition to the US, Bloomberg reported. In the U.S. District Court for the District of New Jersey , the U.S. prosecutor plead that he was involved in the theft of more than 160 million credit and debit-

The US Justice Department (DOJ) is seeking a transition in the criminal rules that would make the authorities to have more leeway to secretly hack into the suspected criminals' computer during criminal investigations at any times in bunches. The proposed [ PDF ] change in the rules would make FBI to easily obtain warrants to secretly access suspects' computers for the evidence when the physical location of the computer is not known to them. The problem FBI and government agents increasingly face as more and more crime carried out is online, and with the help of online tools, it is easy to conceal identity of the criminal. " This proposal ensures that courts can be asked to review warrant applications in situations where it is currently unclear what judge has that authority ," Justice Department spokesman Peter Carr told Bloomberg . " The proposal makes explicit that it does not change the traditional rules governing probable cause and notice. " This new U.S. proposal

In the mid of last year a Group of Russian Hackers were accused for allegedly infiltrating the computer networks of more than a dozen major American and international corporations and stole 160 million credit card and debit card numbers over the course of seven years, which were then resold to third parties buyers. WANTED IN U.S AND RUSSIA A Rotterdam court in Netherlands ruled that simultaneous requests from the U.S. and Russia for the extradition of the Russian hacker  Vladimir Drinkman  were admissible,  who is accused of being involved to lead the largest data theft case ever prosecuted in the U.S history, Bloomberg report . But it's not yet clear why Russia demands Drinkman 's extradition, "It's now up to the minister of justice to decide on the extradition, and to decide which country." court ruled. The investigators identified that the defendants have been infiltrating computer networks across the globe since at least 2007, including firms in New Jer

A teenager has been arrested by the Canadian police in relation to the infamous malicious breach on the country's taxpayer system using one of the most critical internet flaws, Heartbleed . Heartbleed bug , that made headlines over past two weeks and every websites around the world flooded with its articles. Every informational website, Media and Security researchers are talking about Heartbleed, probably the biggest Internet vulnerability in recent history. According to the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP), a 19-year-old ' Stephen Arthuro Solis-Reyes ' of London, Ontario, is charged with the unauthorized access of the computer and criminal mischief in relation to the data breach of taxpayer's private information from the Canada Revenue Agency (CRA) website. " The RCMP treated this breach of security as a high priority case and mobilized the necessary resources to resolve the matter as quickly as possible ," Assistant Commissioner Gilles Michaud said in

U.S. Prosecutors decided not to pursue crucial criminal charges against journalist and activist Barrett Brown , and dismiss a majority of charges related to sharing a link to a dump of credit card numbers connected to the breach of intelligence firm Stratfor. Supporters say Brown just copied the hyperlink from an the Internet chat room and then reposted the link on his own internet chat room, Project PM , that linked to stolen documents from the US government contractor, Stratfor Global Intelligence , included 860,000 e-mail addresses for Stratfor subscribers and 60,000 credit card details. Just hours after Brown's lawyers filed their comprehensive argument, the DOJ has filed a motion to dismiss all 11 charges, on Thursday.  Apart from computer fraud charges, Brown is also facing prosecution for allegedly threatening an FBI agent and for alleged obstruction of justice. The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) , a non-profit organization defending civil libertie

" Guccifer " arrested in Romania, the infamous hacker who was responsible for breaching the social media and email accounts of numerous high profile US and Romanian Politicians. Romanian authorities collaborated with US services to catch him and the officers of the Directorate for Investigating Organized Crime and Terrorism (DIOCT) raided His House last Wednesday. His well known leaks included the emails of former secretary of state ' Colin Powell ', suggested that he was having an affair, which was later denied by Colin. He was also responsible for breaking into the Bush family e-mails . The Hacker also infiltrated the email from George Maior , chief of the Romanian Intelligence Service (SRI). Guccifer is a 40-year-old Marcel Lazar Lehel , a resident of Arad , who was convicted of several other computer crimes in 2012, according to Romanian media report . But those charges stemmed from Lazăr Lehel's attacks on dozens of Romanian officials between O

In last October, the Feds told they would probably just  liquidate the bitcoins  seized from the online black market Silk Road, once they were legally free to do so. Finally the United States District Judge  J. Paul Oetken   signed off  on the forfeiture order for the Bitcoins, clearing the government to sell the assets. Last September, the FBI had seized  29,655 Bitcoins from the online black market Silk Road after its alleged 29-year-old mastermind, Ross William Ulbricht , aka ' Dread Pirate Roberts ' was arrested and charged with possessing controlled substances and committing or conspiring to commit computer hacking offenses, among other charges. This new ruling represents the largest-ever forfeiture of Bitcoins . The assets include the Silk Road hidden website and 29,655 Bitcoins , worth more than $28 Million according to current exchange rates. Manhattan U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara said: "With today's forfeiture of $28 million worth of Bitcoins fr

Today I desire to propose an interview with Andrey Komarov , CEO of IntelCrawler and Dan Clements , President of IntelCrawler. IntelCrawler  is a multi-tier intelligence aggregator, which gathers information and cyber prints from a starting big data pool of over 3, 000, 000, 000 IPv4 and over 200, 000, 000 domain names, which are scanned for analytics and dissemination to drill down to a desired result. I have prepared for them a series of answers and questions to analyze significant evolutions in the cyber-threat landscape: Q. Which are the most concerning cyber threats for private businesses and government organizations? A. Avoiding talking about usual and standard things, of course, the most dangerous and annoying is the emergence of fundamentally new vulnerabilities in critical applications and systems. " Zero day " vulnerabilities market is developing every day and taking the shape of a part of the future cyber warfare market , as it is still in the process of formati

Eric Rosol , A  38-year-old hacker who joined an Anonymous hacker attack for just one minute has been sentenced to two years of federal probation and ordered to pay $183,000 fine. Yes you read right! $183,000 fine  for just 1 Minute of DDoS attack. In 2011, Eric participated in a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack organized by hacker collective Anonymous against the servers of Koch Industries. The DDoS attack was organized in opposition to Koch Industries' reported weakening of trade unions. He used a software called a Low Orbit Ion Cannon Code , LOIC is a popular DDoS tool used by anonymous hackers and other hackers to perform the DDoS attack. Rosol pleaded guilty and was agreed to direct pay for the losses as a result of the attack on the company website i.e. around $5,000 only, but Koch Industries had argued that it hired a consulting group to protect its web sites at a cost of approximately $183,000. Unfortunately, the company website was knocked offline for just 15

Microsoft today announced that its Digital Crimes Unit ( a center of excellence for advancing the global fight against cybercrime ) has successfully disrupted the ZeroAccess botnet, one of the world's largest and most rampant botnet .The Botnet is " disrupted ," not "fully destroyed" , Microsoft itself admits that " do not expect to fully eliminate the ZeroAccess botnet due to the complexity of the threat. " This is the Microsoft's 8th botnet takedown operation in the past three years. With the help of U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation  ( FBI ) and Europol's European Cybercrime Centre (EC3), Microsoft led to the seizure of servers that had been distributing malware which has infected nearly 2 million computers all over the world, and with that, ZeroAccess botnet's masters are earning more than $2.7 million every month. ZeroAccess was first identified in 2011 by Symanetc, being used for click fraud, the malware can also be used to illicitly mine the v

The breaking news is that, another Bitcoin exchange  company gets hacked i.e. BIPS ( bips.me ), one of the largest European Danish Bitcoin payment processors. On Friday evening, a bunch of cyber criminals just broke into BIPs - Bitcoin payment processor servers and wiped out around 1,295 Bitcoin from people's wallets, currently worth $1 Million. More than 22,000 consumer wallets have been compromised and BIPS will be contacting the affected users. Initially on 15th November, Hackers launched Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack on BIPS, originate from Russia and neighboring countries and then hackers attacked again on 17th November. This time somehow they got access to several online Bitcoin wallets, which allowed them to steal the 1,295 BTC. " As a consequence Bips will temporarily close down the wallet initiative to focus on real-time merchant processing business which does not include storing of Bitcoins. " company says. " All existing users will be aske

Two most important moments in the history of Bitcoin are : Its creation by Satoshi Nakamoto , and the burst of The Silk Road's Founder  Ross William Ulbricht . The silk Road's black market was a Bitcoin economy. According to a report published by two Israeli computer scientists,  Ross William Ulbricht , aka Dread Pirate Roberts , may be financially linked to Satoshi Nakamoto. Even if the Bitcoin buyers and sellers remained anonymous, but the transactions themselves are public, So the scientists were able to trace the interactions. The Scientists, Ron and Shamir were exploring the connection between the operator of Silk Road who was recently arrested by the FBI for running the Internet blackmarket Silk Road and the entity that invented the bitcoin. The bitcoin network was established in 2008 and it has been popularly believed that the first accounts in the early days of the bitcoin were of Satoshi Nakamoto , accumulated some 77,600 BTC as a result of 'mining' Bitcoins

Sweden today has announced the extradition of 30-year-old  The Pirate Bay Cofounder ' Gottfrid Svartholm Warg ' to Denmark where he is wanted for questioning on alleged hacking charges. He was living in Cambodia last year but was later arrested and deported to Sweden. Currently he is serving a one-year sentence in Sweden for hacking into the computer systems of contractors working for the national tax authority. His extradition will take place on 27th November . Along with a 20-year-old Dane, they are accused of hacking into the servers of a Denmark government contractor and stealing police files files between April and August 2012. The motivation for the hacks remains unknown, but the police say it can't be ruled out that changes were made to the records. There are, however, no indications that any of the downloaded files have been exploited. Even, The Pirate Bay may no longer be safe to use. It is no longer in the hands of the original owners. An Anonymous act

Today computer telecommunications have become one of the most prevalent techniques used by pedophiles to share illegal photographic images of minors and to lure children into illicit sexual relationships. The Internet has dramatically increased the access of the preferential sex offenders to the population they seek to victimize and provides them greater access to a community of people who validate their sexual preferences. The Fourth Amendment is the most implicated and litigated portion of the Constitution. Courts are increasingly confronting the problems associated with adapting Fourth Amendment principles to modern technology. If you think that your peer-to-peer file sharing can be kept under wraps, then please think again. A federal judge ' Christina Reiss ' in Vermont has ruled that there should be no expectation of privacy for data shared across peer-to-peer file-sharing services. In a Child pornography case, three defendants argued that information gained

A Singaporean hacker calling himself the " The Messiah " was arrested in Kuala Lumpur last Monday for hacking into a Singaporean government website over two weeks ago - from a Kuala Lumpur apartment. James Raj (35) charged with hacking of  Ang Mo Kio town council  website and posting a symbol associated with international hacker group Anonymous. He was charged under the Computer Misuse and Cybersecurity Act. If found guilty, he could be jailed for up to three years and fined S$10 , 000. Police said Raj was also linked to a series of hacking incidents, including penetrating the website of a charity group related to the ruling People's Action Party. Police declined to give details but suggested that Raj was not responsible for defacing the prime minister's office and presidential palace websites on November 7 and 8. Five other local men are being held for allegedly hacking the websites of Singapore's president and prime minister websites i.e.  Muhammad

We have a lot of information on Stuxnet virus, a powerful malware that for the first time has shown to governments the capabilities and efficiency of a cyber weapon. Eugene Kaspersky, CEO of Kasperky security firm revealed that Stuxnet had badly infected the internal network of a Russian nuclear plant, according to the information he obtained from an unnamed staffer at the Nuclear Plant. " So unfortunately these people who were responsible for offensive technologies, they recognize cyber weapons as an opportunity ." Kaspersky said. During a presentation given at the Canberra Press Club, Kaspersky provided an excellent overview on the security of cyberspace, in particular highlighting the effect of the activities of state-sponsored espionage and cyber crime. " All the data is stolen, " Kaspersky said. " At least twice ." The malware Stuxnet is widely considered to have been developed by the US Government in a joint work with Israel c

The US Federal Bureau of Investigation has added five new hackers to its Cyber most wanted list and is seeking information from the public regarding their whereabouts. The men are wanted in connection with hacking and fraud crimes both within the US as well as internationally. Rewards ranging from up to $50,000 to $100,000 are being offered for information that leads to their arrest. Two of them are Pakistani, Farnhan Arshad and Noor Aziz Uddin , who caused the damage of over $50 million after hacking business telephone systems between 2008 and 2012. Arshad and Uddin are part of an international criminal ring that the FBI believes extends into Pakistan, the Philippines, Saudi Arabia, Switzerland, Spain, Singapore, Italy, Malaysia, and other locations. Syrian national Andrey Nabilevich Taame , wanted for his alleged role in Operation Ghost Click , a malware scheme that compromised more than four million computers in more than 100 countries between 2007 and October 2011

12-year-old Canadian has pleaded guilty to breaking into multiple major government and police websites in the name of the hacker collective Anonymous . Surprisingly, this Fifth Grade student wreaked computer havoc during the Quebec student uprising in 2012, traded pirated information to Anonymous for video games. He had not just participated in  DDoS attacks , but also stole information belonging to users and administrators. The court estimates he did $60,000 worth of damage by attacking major government websites included those of Montreal police, the Quebec Institute of Public Health, the Chilean government and some non-public sites. His lawyer also described in the Court that buy saw it as a challenge, he was only 12 years old and was no political purpose. According to Montreal police, the boy also taught others how to hack. The 12 year old was among the several hackers arrested over the Anonymous protest. While others have been arrested in connection with t