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LulzSec hacker pleads guilty in Sony breach Accused LulzSec hacker Cody Kretsinger pleaded guilty today in a federal court in Los Angeles, California, to felony charges associated with the breach of Sony Pictures Entertainment that occurred in mid-2011. The hacker had previously pleaded not guilty.Kretsinger was arrested last September, months before the recent raid on the "leaders" of the group. The hacker had been charged with conspiracy and the unauthorized impairment of a protected computer and pleaded not guilty at the time for both counts. The indictment accused Kretsinger and co-conspirators of stealing confidential information from Sony Pictures' computer systems and distributing the material on LulzSec's website before trumpeting the attack on Twitter. The breach caused more than $600,000 in damages, according to court papers. He and other LulzSec hackers, including those known as "Sabu" and "Topiary," stole the personal information...

British Paypal hacker jailed for stealing millions Identities A UK cybercrook has been jailed for 26 months following his conviction for stealing millions of banking and PayPal identities. According to Report, Southwark Crown Court heard how Edward Pearson, 23, could have made about £834,000 if he chose to use the information he hacked out of people's Paypal accounts. Pearson, an 'incredibly talented' boarding school student who carried out the crime for an 'intellectual challenge', has been jailed for two years and two months. "One of his programs scanned through 200,000 accounts registered to online payment service PayPal - identifying names, passwords and current balances." according to the Daily Mail. Pearson might have been able to cash out the compromised accounts and make hundreds of thousands in ill-gotten gains. But in the event he actually only made £2,400 before his 21-year-old student girlfriend, Cassandra Mennim, used stolen credit cards to book...

Al-Qaeda websites hacked and remains down for past 12 days Al-Qaeda's main internet forums have been offline for the past 12 days in the longest sustained outages of the sites since they began operating. Several online forums frequently visited by al-Qaeda operatives were downed over the course of the last few weeks, including two of the terrorist organization's top sites, al-Fida and Shamukh al-Islam. No one has claimed responsibility for disabling the sites but the breadth and duration of the outages have prompted speculation the forums have been taken down in a cyber attack launched perhaps by a government or hacking group. The digital sabotage could have been carried out by any number of governments or private hackers, said James Lewis, director of the technology and public policy program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. Some analysts have speculated that the administrators of the sites might have taken them down if they suspected that the forums had...

" Reboot " - Upcoming latest Hacker Movie you should watch Rosa Entertainment and Jan-Ken-Po Pictures just announced that their cyberpunk thriller short film " Reboot " will launch with a Sneak Preview at DEFCON. Written and Directed by Joe Kawasaki, and Produced by Sidney Sherman, the film stars a bevy of hot up-and-coming actors including Emily Somers (Gabriele Muccino's upcoming "Playing the Field"), Travis Aaron Wade ("War of the Worlds"), Martin Copping (Australian series "Neighbours"), Sonalii Castillo ("NCIS"), and Janna Bossier (Slipnot's "Vermilion"). Set within a dystopian world that is a collision between technology and humanity, "Reboot" touches upon many of the current social and political concerns that arise from becoming more and more intertwined with the virtual. In contemporary Los Angeles, a young female hacker (Stat) awakens from unconsciousness to find an iPhone glued to her hand and a mysterious countdown ticking away on the display. Suffering fr...

More than 600000 Macs system infected with Flashback Botnet The computer security industry is buzzing with warnings that more than half a million Macintosh computers may have been infected with a virus targeting Apple machines. Dr. Web originally reported Wednesday that 550,000 Macintosh computers were infected by the growing Mac botnet. But later in the day, Dr. Web malware analyst Sorokin Ivan announced on Twitter that the number of Macs infected with Flashback had increased to 600,000, with 274 of those based in Cupertino, Calif. Dr. Web explained that a system gets infected with the Mac Flashback trojan " after a user is redirected to a bogus site from a compromised resource or via a traffic distribution system ." A specific JavaScript code on the site that contains the virus is then used to load a Java applet, which is how the malware makes its way onto a user's computer. This Trojan spreads via infected web pages and exploits Java vulnerabilities that have be...