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Hacker charged for hacking into U.S. Energy Department Andrew James Miller, a 23-year-old resident of Devon, Pennsylvania, was arrested on Thursday and charged with one count of conspiracy, two counts of computer fraud, and one count of access device fraud, according to a statement issued by the Justice Department's Criminal Division. According to the indictment, between 2008 and 2011, Miller and others allegedly remotely hacked into computer networks belonging to RNK Telecommunications Inc., a Massachusetts company; Crispin Porter and Bogusky Inc., a Colorado advertising agency; the University of Massachusetts; the U.S. Department of Energy; and other institutions and companies. The indictment alleges that when Miller hacked into the computers, he obtained other users' access credentials to the compromised computers. He and his co-conspirators then allegedly sold access to these computer networks as well as other access credentials. After gaining unauthorized access to these

The Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman ' Patrick Leahy ' reintroduced a revamped version of the " Personal Data Privacy and Security Act " for tough criminal penalties for hackers, that he originally authored in 2005. During last Christmas Holidays, a massive data breach had occurred at the shopping giant  Target,  involving hack of 40 million credit & debit cards, used to pay for purchases at its 1500 stores nationwide in the U.S. Reason: "Target Data Breach? Seriously"?  In a statement, as published below, the Senator wrote: "The recent data breach at Target involving the debit and credit card data of as many as 40 million customers during the Christmas holidays is a reminder that developing a comprehensive national strategy to protect data privacy and cybersecurity remains one of the most challenging and important issues facing our Nation" It seems that the  TARGET Breach  was scheduled, as the best opportunity to ramp up the cyber secu

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

The United States Department of Justice has extradited two criminals from the Republic of Cyprus—one is a computer hacker suspected of cyber intrusions and extortion, and the other is a money launderer with known connections to the terrorist organization Hezbollah. Both suspects— Joshua Polloso Epifaniou , 21, a resident of Nicosia, and Ghassan Diab , 37, a citizen of Lebanon—were arrested earlier last year and extradited to the United States last weekend. According to the indictment , Epifaniou conducted a brute force attack against the Phoenix-based online review portal Ripoff Report (ROR) in October 2016 and successfully override ROR's login and password protection to gain access to its database through an existing account associated with a ROR employee. In November 2016, Epifaniou tried to extort the company by emailing ROR's CEO with a hyperlink to a video demonstrating Epifaniou's unauthorized access to the ROR CEO's account, threatening him to publicly di

United States federal government has charged a Pakistani national for bribing employees at AT&T telecommunication company over a period of five years to help unlock more than 2 million phones and plant malware on the company's network. Muhammad Fahd, a 34-year-old man from Pakistan, was arrested in Hong Kong last year in February at the request of the U.S. government and just extradited to the U.S. on Friday, August 2, 2019. According to an indictment unsealed Monday, Fahd recruited and paid AT&T insiders working at a call center in Bothell, Washington, more than $1 million in bribes between 2012 and 2017 to help them unlock cell phones associated with specified IMEI numbers that otherwise were not eligible to be removed from AT&T's network. Some telecommunication companies, including AT&T, Verizon, T-Mobile, and Sprint, sell flagship phones at discounted prices, but it comes with locked SIMs that prevent users from switching their network service for any

For millions of low income families, the federal government's Lifeline program offers affordable phone service. But an online security lapse has exposed tens of thousands of them to an increased risk of identity theft, after their Social Security numbers, birth dates and other pieces of highly sensitive information were included in files posted publicly online. Reporters with Scripps were investigating Lifeline, a government benefit-program that provides low-income Americans with discounted phone service, when they came across the sensitive data. They discovered 170,000 Lifeline phone customer records online through a basic Google search that contained everything needed for identity theft. They asked for an interview with the COO of TerraCom and YourTel, which are the telcos who look after Lifeline,but they threatened reporters who found a security hole in their Lifeline phone system with charges under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. Then, the blame-the-messenger hack

In Simple way we can say that cyber crime is unlawful acts wherein the computer is either a tool or a target or both Cyber crimes can involve criminal activities that are traditional in nature, such as theft, fraud, forgery, defamation and mischief, all of which are subject to the Indian Penal Code. The abuse of computers has also given birth to a gamut of new age crimes that are addressed by the Information Technology Act, 2000. We can categorize Cyber crimes in two ways The Computer as a Target : -  Using a computer to attack other computers. e.g. Hacking, Virus/Worm attacks, DOS attack etc. The computer as a weapon :- Using a computer to commit real world crimes. e.g. Cyber Terrorism, IPR violations, Credit card frauds, EFT frauds, Pornography etc. Cyber Crime regulated by Cyber Laws or Internet Laws Technical Aspects Technological advancements have created new possibilities for criminal activity, in particular the criminal misuse of information technologies such as

Google, the FBI, ad-fraud fighting company WhiteOps and a collection of cyber security companies worked together to shut down one of the largest and most sophisticated digital ad-fraud schemes that infected over 1.7 million computers to generate fake clicks used to defraud online advertisers for years and made tens of millions of dollars in revenue. Dubbed 3ve (pronounced "Eve"), the online ad-fraud campaign is believed to have been active since at least 2014, but its fraudulent activity grew last year, turning it into a large-scale business and earning their operators more than $30 million in profit. Meanwhile, the United States Department of Justice (DoJ) also unsealed Tuesday a 13-count indictment against 8 people from Russia, Kazakhstan, and Ukraine who allegedly ran this massive online advertising scheme. The 3ve botnet scheme deployed different tactics, such as creating their own botnets, creating fake versions of both websites and visitors, selling fraudulent

Before Ransomware, Click fraud was one of the popular and efficient ways for cybercriminals to make money and with the explosive growth in the size of the online threats it is still making its way on the Internet. " Click-Fraud " is the practice of deceptively clicking on search ads with the intention of either increasing third-party website revenues or exhausting an advertiser's budget. Besides the search results, we all have seen advertisements placed in the search engine's WebPage. If the visitor clicks the Ad, the advertiser has to pay a fee to the search engine. A problem that has arisen with pay-per-click is results in Click-Fraud. The term " fraud " is used because in either case, the advertiser is paying for a click without receiving any true value. Of course, the number of clicks has to be large enough in order to gain a considerable amount of money, and in order to do that an attacker can use an automated script or malicious program to simulate multiple clicks b

The United States Justice Department today announced charges against a Chinese hacker and his hacking team member for their alleged role in the 2015 massive data breach at health insurance giant Anthem and three other unnamed American companies. Fujie Wang (王 福 杰) and another hacker named John Doe with three different aliases—Deniel Jack, Kim Young, and Zhou Zhihong—are charged with four counts of conspiracy to commit fraud, wire fraud, and damage to a protected computer, according to an indictment [ pdf ] unsealed today in federal court in Indianapolis. In 2015, the hackers managed to breach Anthem, the country's second-largest health insurance company and stole personal information of over 80 Millions of its customers, including their Social Security Numbers, birthdates, email addresses, residential addresses, medical identification numbers, employment information, and income data. The incident marked as one of the worst data breaches in history, with the company paying

A 26-year-old Ukrainian national has been charged in the U.S. for his alleged role in the  Raccoon Stealer  malware-as-a-service (MaaS) operation. Mark Sokolovsky, who was arrested by Dutch law enforcement after leaving Ukraine on March 4, 2022, in what's said to be a Porsche Cayenne, is currently being held in the Netherlands and awaits extradition to the U.S. "Individuals who deployed Raccoon Infostealer to steal data from victims leased access to the malware for approximately $200 per month, paid for by cryptocurrency," the U.S. Department of Justice (DoJ)  said . "These individuals used various ruses, such as email phishing, to install the malware onto the computers of unsuspecting victims." Sokolovsky is said to have gone by various online monikers like Photix, raccoonstealer, and black21jack77777 on online cybercrime forums to advertise the service for sale. Raccoon Stealer, mainly distributed under the guise of cracked software, is known to be one o

The US government on Monday formally charged six Russian intelligence officers for carrying out destructive malware attacks with an aim to disrupt and destabilize other nations and cause monetary losses. The individuals, who work for Unit 74455 of the Russian Main Intelligence Directorate (GRU), have been accused of perpetrating the "most disruptive and destructive series of computer attacks ever attributed to a single group," according to the Justice Department ( DoJ ). All the six men — Yuriy Sergeyevich Andrienko, Sergey Vladimirovich Detistov, Pavel Valeryevich Frolov, Anatoliy Sergeyevich Kovalev, Artem Valeryevich Ochichenko, and Petr Nikolayevich Pliskin — have been charged with seven counts of conspiracy to conduct computer fraud and abuse, conspiracy to commit wire fraud, wire fraud, damaging protected computers, and aggravated identity theft. "The object of the conspiracy was to deploy destructive malware and take other disruptive actions, for the strateg

These hackers are the ones that you've seen in shackles arrested for cybercrimes when they were just getting out of puberty. Some have done it for financial gain others just for fun. 1. Kevin Mitnick. Mitnick is perhaps synonymous with Hacker. The Department of Justice still refers to him as "the most wanted computer criminal in United States history." His accomplishments were memorialized into two Hollywood movies: Takedown and Freedom Downtime. Mitnick got his start by exploiting the Los Angeles bus punch card system and getting free rides. Then similar to Steve Wozniak, of Apple, Mitnick tried Phone Phreaking. Mitnick was first convicted for hacking into the Digital Equipment Corporation's computer network and stealing software. Mitnick then embarked on a two and a half year coast to coast hacking spree. He has stated that he hacked into computers, scrambled phone networks, stole corporate secrets and hacked into the national defense warning system. His fall came w