hacktivists | Breaking Cybersecurity News | The Hacker News

It's one thing for hackers to target websites and proudly announce it on social media platforms for all to see. It's, however, an entirely different thing to leave a digital trail that leads cybersecurity researchers right to their doorsteps. That's exactly what happened in the case of a hacktivist under the name of VandaTheGod, who has been attributed to a series of attacks on government websites since July 2019. In a report shared with The Hacker News, researchers from Check Point said they were able to map VandaTheGod's activity over the years, and eventually zero down the attacker's real identity to a Brazilian individual from the city of Uberlândia. The cybersecurity firm said it notified concerned law enforcement of its findings for further action, adding the social media activities on profiles associated with VandaTheGod came to a halt towards the end of 2019. A Long Social Media Trail VandaTheGod has a long history of going after government we...

Julian Assange, the founder of popular whistleblower website WikiLeaks, is stepping down from the position of editor-in-chief of the organisation under "extraordinary circumstances." Assange, the 47-year-old Australian hacker, founded WikiLeaks in 2006 and has since made many high-profile leaks, exposing 'dirty' secrets of several individuals, political parties as well as government organisations across the world. Assange has been forced to live in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London since June 2012, after he was granted asylum by the Ecuador government when a British court ordered his extradition to Sweden to face questioning sexual assault and rape. Ecuador has cut Assange off the Internet and any communication with the outside world except for his lawyers since late March this year, making it difficult for him to do his job of editor-in-chief to run WikiLeaks. Wikileaks Appoints Its New Editor-in-Chief According to a recent tweet from Wikileaks, those ...

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Barrett Brown , a journalist, formerly served as an unofficial spokesman for the hacktivist collective Anonymous, finally walked free from prison on Tuesday morning after serving more than four years behind bars. The Dallas-born investigative journalist was arrested in 2012 from his home while he was in the middle of an online chat after posting tweets and YouTube video threatening revenge against an FBI agent. Brown, 35, initially attracted the law enforcement attention in 2011 when he shared a hyperlink to an IRC (Internet Relay Chat) channel where Anonymous members were distributing stolen information from the hack at security think tank Strategic Forecasting or Stratfor. The hack allegedly exposed 200 gigabytes of data, which included email addresses and credit card information from Stratfor clients, including the US Army, US Air Force, and Miami Police Department. Originally facing sentence to more than 100 years in prison, Brown was convicted in January 2015 under ...

Remember Steubenville High School Rape Case ? In 2012, Steubenville (Ohio) high school's football team players gang-raped an unconscious teenage girl from West Virginia and took photographs of the sexual assault. In December 2012, a member of the hacker collective Anonymous hacked into the Steubenville High School football fan website Roll Red Roll and leaked some evidence of the rape , including a video taken and shared by the crime's perpetrators in which they joked about the sexual assault. The hack exposed information about the gang rape by two football team players — Trent Mays and Ma'lik Richmond, both 16 at the time of the crime — who were eventually convicted and sentenced in 2013 to 2 and one years behind bars, respectively, but have since been released. In 2013, the FBI raided the home of Deric Lostutter — Anonymous member, also known online as " KYAnonymous " — and seized two laptops, flash drives, CD's, an external hard-drive, cell phones a...

British citizen and alleged hacker Lauri Love will be extradited to the United States to face allegations of hacking into United States government computer systems, a UK judge ruled on Friday. Love, 31, is currently facing up to 99 years in prison for allegedly hacking into the FBI, the US Army, the US Missile Defence Agency, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), and New York's Federal Reserve Bank during 2012 and 2013. US Prosecutors claim that Love was allegedly involved in #OpLastResort , an online protest linked with the Anonymous collective following the persecution and untimely death of activist Aaron Swartz, who committed suicide in 2013 while under federal charges for data theft. Speaking at Westminster Magistrates' Court in London, District Judge Nina Tempia said : "I'll be extraditing Mr. Love, by which I mean I'll be passing the case to the Secretary of State." Tempia said Love could appeal against the court decisi...

The Anonymous Hacking group on Sunday declared Total War against the ISIS , the Islamic State terror organization that claimed responsibility for the Paris attacks on Friday that killed 129 people and hundreds more injured. In a sinister video posted on YouTube, the Cyber Hacktivists said they will launch their " biggest operation ever " with the warning that " Anonymous from all over the world will hunt you down." Also Read:   Would Encryption Backdoor Stop Paris-like Terror Attacks? Now, The Islamic State militant group (ISIS) has released a statement, responding to Anonymous's declaration of total war. They (ISIS) called Anonymous – IDIOTS , … and issued some anti-hacking tips to pro-ISIS supporters to protect against cyber attacks. The message from ISIS to Anonymous came through one of the ISIS-affiliated official channels, dubbed ELITE SECTION of IS , on the messaging app Telegram . The message read: " The #Anonymous hackers threatened in a new video r...

The Online Hacktivist group Anonymous announced it plans to reveal the identities of about 1,000 Ku Klux Klan (KKK) members on 5th November , the day of the Global Protest movement known as the Million Mask March. Million Mask March , where protesters don Guy Fawkes masks in hundreds of cities around the world, and march together against the corrupt Governments and corporations. Ku Klux Klan (KKK) is classified as a White Supremacist Racist group by the Anti-Defamation League and the Southern Poverty Law Center, allegedly having total 5,000 to 8,000 members. It was founded after the Civil War by former Confederate soldiers to fight against the reforms imposed by the North during Reconstruction. " We've gained access to yet another KKK Twitter account. Using the info obtained, we will be revealing about 1000 Klan member identities. ", Anonymous Hackers tweeted last week. The list of 1000 KKK Members, to be released on 5th November, apparently includes the...

The hacktivist group Anonymous has launched a massive cyber attack against the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) — the radical Islamic terrorist group who were  responsible for the terrorist attack against the Paris offices of satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo . With huge social media presence, ISIS is the most active terror group on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Instagram accounts. But unluckily, over dozens of Facebook and Twitter accounts linked to ISIS has recently been taken by the Anonymous group. In a video appeared on Youtube, Anonymous group and RedCult announced the operation  #OpISIS  and claimed to have carried out cyber attack against hundreds of Twitter and Facebook accounts used by ISIS for its own propaganda and to recruit new members. According to the video, Operation  #OpISIS  is coordinated by "Muslims, Christians, Jews"  alike and a masked individual discusses the aim of the campaign. They are " ...

The Norwegian police have arrested and charged a 17-year-old for a massive distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack earlier this week that disabled the websites of major financial institutions and other businesses in the country. Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack is designed to sabotage, shut down and overload the targeted website with web traffic more than its capacity in order to make it unavailable to users. The attack targeted five major banks, two telecommunication firms, three airlines and one insurance company, as their websites and online payment systems were disrupted. The unnamed teen claimed to be a part of the hacktivist group Anonymous Norway for what was thought to be the country's biggest ever cyber-attack on businesses. Although, the Anonymous Norway, via a Twitter message, has dismissed any connection to him or the cyber attack. The youngster was a resident of Bergen, on Norway's west coast. He was arrested on Thursday morning and que...

Since 2011, the collective hacking group, Anonymous and LulzSec were targeting both Government and law-enforcement websites of U.S and UK, by their own DDoS attack tactics which they used to communicate and plan on Chat rooms known as IRCs, but British intelligence agency GCHQ used their own weapon against them. According to the recent Edward Snowden document, a division of Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), which is also very well known as the British counterpart of the NSA, had shut down communications among Anonymous hacktivists by launching a " denial of service " (DDOS) attacks, making the British government the first western government known to have conducted such an attack, NBC news reports . The same DDoS technique the hackers use to take down government, political and industry websites, including the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), Federal bureau of Investigation (FBI), the Serious Organized Crime Agency (SOCA), Sony News International and Westbor...

A pro-hacker group, aligned with president Bashar al-Assad, very well known as Syrian Electronic Army (SEA) has again gained the media attention by adding the popular sites, i.e. eBay UK and PayPal UK to its victim list. After targeting websites of various media agencies, government organizations and big enterprises, including the latest defaced CNN and Microsoft, today they targeted and defaced the official websites of UK's Ebay ( ebay.co.uk ) and PayPal ( paypal.co.uk ). The group also left a deface page along with a message on the hacked PayPal UK site: " Hacked by Syrian Electronic Army! Fuck the United States Government. " It is clear that the attack on PayPal could put millions of peoples' bank information at risk, but the group said that the attack is not to target account information of people instead was ' Purely a Hacktivist Operation ' with the reason behind is the discrimination of Syrian citizens by PayPal company. " For denying Syrian citizens ...

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 u...

The FBI is warning that members of the hacktivist group Anonymous hacking collective have secretly accessed US Government computers and stolen sensitive information in a campaign that began almost a year ago. The Hacktivists have exploited a flaw in Adobe applications to compromise the target systems and install software backdoors to maintain the control of the victims computers over the time, the facts dated back to last December, according to a Reuters report. The hacking campaign affected the U.S. Army, Department of Energy , Department of Health and Human Services, and other government agencies,  FBI reveals.  The Federal Bureau of Investigation memo called the hacking campaign " a widespread problem that should be addressed. " and provided useful information for system administrators that how to determine if their networks were compromised. Government investigators are investigating the scope of the hacking, believed that hackers are still oper...

Israel is considered one of the most advanced country in cyber security, but at the same time is a privileged target for hostile governments intent in sabotage and cyber espionage on his technology. Yesterday, Cybersecurity experts revealed that a major artery in Israel's national road network located in the northern the city of Haifa suffered a cyber attack, that caused massive traffic congestion in the City. Isreal military officials are aware of cyber threats that could hit the infrastructure of the country and they afraid the possible effect of a cyber attack on a large scale. Israeli government websites suffer thousands of cyberattacks each day according Ofir Ben Avi, head of the government's website division. The Israel Electric Corp. confirmed that its servers register about 6,000 unique computer attacks every second. In June, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu stated that Iran militia, Hezbollah and Hamas have targeted in numerous occasions Israel...

A pro-Palestinian hacktivist group ' KDMS Team ', who recently managed to briefly hijack the Metasploit website of security firm Rapid7 and become popular after Hacking World's largest Web Hosting Network Leaseweb website and antivirus vendors AVG, Avira as well as mobile messaging service WhatsApp's websites. Now even I have to say that - Security is just an Illusion, because just now the group aligned with Anonymous has successfully hijacked another two Antivirus firm website - ESET and Bitdefender . The KDMS Team successfully changed the DNS records of both sites to redirect people to a website playing the Palestinian national anthem and displaying a political message under the title " You Got Pwned ". Message posted on Bitdefender and Eset website says: Hello bitdefender Touched By KDMS team We was thinking about quitting hacking and disappear again ..! But we said : there is some sites must be hacked You are one of our targe...

#OpUSA campaign is officially started, the day has come, today May 7 as announced by Anonymous , a coordinated online attack will hit Banking and government websites. The announcement made by popular group of hacktivists is creating great concerns between US security experts in charge of defense the potential targets. The message passed sent by Anonymous to US authorities is eloquent, " We Will Wipe You Off the Cyber Map "  A new wave of attacks, presumably distributed-denial-of-service attack , is expected to hit principal US financial institutions exactly as already happened in the last months. The hacktivists participating to OpUSA campaign protest against the policy of the US Government blamed to have committed war crimes in foreign states and in its countries. "A nonymous will make sure that's this May 7 will be a day to remember. On that day anonymous will start phase one of operation USA. America you have committed multiple war crimes in Iraq, Afg...