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Operation Hackerazzi : FBI arrests alleged Hacker for Stealing naked photos of Hollywood stars FEDERAL officials on Wednesday arrested a 35-year-old Florida man, Christopher Chaney  and charged him with 26 counts of cyber-related crimes against Hollywood stars following an 11-month federal probe dubbed "Operation Hackerazzi". Twitter was ablaze earlier today with messages claiming to link to naked pictures of film actress Scarlett Johansson, which were allegedly stolen from her iPhone by a hacker earlier this year.The photographs may or may not be of Scarlett Johansson, but I would suggest that every hot-blooded male exercises some restraint as it's extremely possible that cybercriminals might exploit the interest to post dangerous links on the web designed to infect computers or steal information. To gain access to these email accounts, Chaney would search through details of celebrity lives within magazines as well as social media accounts like Twitter and figure ...

[Contest] Win " Ghost in the Wires " Book by Kevin Mitnick Some call him a saint, some a criminal, others adore him. Industry may loathe him but we here at The Hacker News say, “ Get ready, loyal subscribers! ” Enter our newest contest and win a copy of Kevin Mitnick’s new book titled, “ Ghost in the Wires .” Fellow hackers will be pleased to know that to celebrate the release of his book,  Kevin Mitnick  has teamed up with  The Hacker News  and is giving away 3 copies of the book to our readers who submit the coolest, keenest and most appealing comments or reviews about the book. Mitnick is no less than a genius as he knits a story of intrigue and suspense as he navigates through the mazes of high tech companies keeping them jumping and realizing they are not invincible……not even close. How you can be one of the Lucky Winners? Does this sound like something you might be interested in? All you need to do is head on over to the book page:   He...

Phoenix Exploit’s Kit 2.8 mini version Back in April of this year, we reported the leak of  Phoenix Exploit Kit 2.5 .  The version currently in circulation is 2.8, and despite its lower activity for the last half of this year, it remains one of the preferred exploit packs used by cyber-criminals. In comparison to the Black Hole Exploit Pack, the PEK has a similar licensing model.  The last version released offered an “alternative” to purchasing the exploit pack.  This “alternative” is the Phoenix Exploit’s Kit 2.8 mini. The current licensing model consists of the following: ·           Simple Domain (Closed) – USD $2,200.00 ·           Multithreaded Domain (Closed) – USD $2,700.00 ·           Extra-Encryption Service (ReFUDing) – USD $40.00 The mini version does not change the characteristics of the Exploit P...

Apple iOS 5 Released ! Apple’s iOS 5 has been released, with owners of the iPhone 4, iPhone 3GS, iPad and iPad 2, along with the third- and fourth-gen iPod touch all getting the latest version of the mobile platform as a free update. Available to download for existing devices via iTunes, iOS 5 will also be preloaded on the new iPhone 4S, Apple’s fifth-gen smartphone that goes on sale this Friday. " On non-mobile devices, our lives are quickly shifting from native applications [i.e. coded for a specific computer or smartphone's operating system] to Web applications, but by Apple dominating the consumer smartphone market first, and executing it beautifully, they have started to set some really unhealthy precedents that the rest of the industry is copying while simply trying to keep pace ," said Zeke Shore, the Co-Founder and Creative Director of design firm Type/Code. iOS 5 also brings with it iCloud, Apple’s new synchronization and backup system that promises to deli...

Sony hacked again - 93,000 accounts compromised with brute-force attack Sony has warned users against a massive bruteforce attack against PlayStation and Sony network accounts. The attack – which used password and user ID combinations from an unidentified third-party source – succeeded in compromising 60,000 PlayStation Network and 33,000 Sony Online Entertainment network accounts. These accounts have been locked and passwords reset. The attack took place between October 7 and 10 and succeeded in matching valid sign-in IDs. According to a blog post by Philip Reitinger, Sony's Chief Information Security Officer, credit card details were not compromised. Both the motive for the latest attack against Sony network users and the identity of the perpetrator(s) remains unclear. Sony shut down its PlayStation Network in April in the aftermath of a far more damaging hack attack. The service wasn't restored until a month later. Personal information on 77 million account-holders wa...

WineHQ database compromise - One More Linux Project Fail Jeremy White, Codeweavers Founder has announced that access to the WineHQ database has been compromised. " On the one hand, we saw no evidence of harm to any database. We saw no evidence of any attempt to change the database (and candidly, using the real appdb or bugzilla is the easy way to change the database). Unfortunately, the attackers were able to download the full login database for both the appdb and bugzilla. This means that they have all of those emails, as well as the passwords. The passwords are stored encrypted, but with enough effort and depending on the quality of the password, they can be cracked ." Anybody who has reused a password stored there probably wants to make some changes fairly soon. Attackers have used phpMyAdmin, an open source database administration tool, to access the WineHQ project's database and harvest users' appdb and bugzilla access credentials. Wine (Wine Is Not an Emu...

Your Browser Matters - Microsoft Launches Tool For Checking Browser Security Microsoft launched a website today designed to give users a detailed look at how secure their browser is. The site, called Your Browser Matters , automatically detects the visitor's browser and returns a browser security score on a scale of four points. When you visit the site, called Your Browser Matters, it allows you to see a score for the browser you’re using. Well, if you’re using IE, Chrome, or Firefox—other browsers are excluded. Not surprisingly, Microsoft’s latest release, Internet Explorer 9, gets a perfect 4 out of 4: If you visit the site with the most recent public releases of Firefox or Google Chrome, however, the results are less than perfect. Here, for example, are the detailed results for Chrome 14 and Firefox 7: Microsoft's new site is primarily intended to encourage users of older versions of Internet Explorer to upgrade. The bane of the existence of Web developers everywhere,...

iPad Finally Has a Facebook Application Facebook has just released its official iPad app . The tablet device was unveiled in January 2010, but development and negotiations with Apple stalled the release of Facebook’s app until now. Facebook for iPad is now available in App Store . We’ve been waiting for a Facebook iPad app almost as long as there’s been an iPad, and there has been talk that Facebook has been working on the app for more than a year. The lack of an app for Facebook has been a pretty massive hole in the functionality of the iPad, given the social network’s unrivaled popularity. And tons of third-party apps have sprung up to fill the void – but none of them were the official, sanctioned apps of Mark Zuckerberg, and none included the kind of power that Facebook has baked into its own native app. Here are some of the top Features of the new app: Bigger, better photos: Photos appear bigger and in high-resolution with easy to flip and rotate features in the photo album ...

blueHOMES hacked - 500k users data and Password in Plain text leaked Some Anonymous Hacker hack the French property and property Germany Dealers website blueHOMES.com  . About 500,000 Users data claim to be hacked by Hacker and also database include all customer passwords in plaintext, including full addresses, skype account, and mailboxes of bluehomes. Specified data leaked on pastebin  with sample data of some users.

VeriSign demands Power to takedown non-legitimate website VeriSign, which manages the database of all .com internet addresses, wants powers to shut down "non-legitimate" domain names when asked to by law enforcement. VeriSign should be able to shut down a .com or .net domain, and therefore its associated website and email, " to comply with any applicable court orders, laws, government rules or requirements, requests of law enforcement or other governmental or quasi-governmental agency, or any dispute resolution process ", according to a document it filed today with domain name industry overseer ICANN. The new powers would be international and, according to VeriSign's filing, could enable it to shut down a domain also when it receives " requests from law enforcement ", without a court order." Various law enforcement personnel, around the globe, have asked us to mitigate domain name abuse, and have validated our approach to rapid suspension of...

German Researchers Break RFID Smartcard Encryption Scientists have found a way to circumvent the encryption used to protect a smartcard used to restrict access to buildings and to process public transit system payments. A team of German scientists have demonstrated a hack that lets them make a perfect clone of the kind of magnetic security card used to give access to workers in corporate or government buildings -- including NASA -- and as a daily ticket replacement on buses and subways. The same team broke a previous version of contactless-ID cards from Mifare in 2008.  This prompted the company to upgrade its security to create a card able to be programmed only once and which contained a unique identifying number that could be checked against the programmed content on the card for extra security. The new hack is carried out using a side channel attack, which bypasses the defensive features intended to prevent attacks on the card. To achieve this, the researchers made repeat...