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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

In today's digital world, where connectivity is rules all, endpoints serve as the gateway to a business's digital kingdom. And because of this, endpoints are one of hackers' favorite targets.  According to the IDC,  70% of successful breaches start at the endpoint . Unprotected endpoints provide vulnerable entry points to launch devastating cyberattacks. With IT teams needing to protect more endpoints—and more kinds of endpoints—than ever before, that perimeter has become more challenging to defend. You need to improve your endpoint security, but where do you start? That's where this guide comes in.  We've curated the top 10 must-know endpoint security tips that every IT and security professional should have in their arsenal. From identifying entry points to implementing EDR solutions, we'll dive into the insights you need to defend your endpoints with confidence.  1. Know Thy Endpoints: Identifying and Understanding Your Entry Points Understanding your network's

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

Anonymous Plans 7 April Attack on British government UK hackers linked to the Anonymous group are encouraging supporters to attack the Home Office website this Saturday (7 April) in protest at the extradition of three UK citizens to the US. Called #OpTrialAtHome , the hacktivist group @AnonOpUK posted a warning on its Twitter page that an attack on the Home Office was planned for Saturday, 7 April. An associated photo/poster shows images of Gary McKinnon, Richard O'Dwyer and Christopher Tappin. McKinnon and O'Dwyer are awaiting extradition from the UK to the US. Tappin's extradition was effected on 24 February when he was flown to El Paso, Texas. Supporters have been encouraged to launch denial-of-service attacks on the Home Office's IP address, which Anonymous has revealed. Those not savvy enough to launch automated attacks on the site could contribute to the effect by simply visiting the site in large numbers. Julian Assange, the editor-in-chief and founder of WikiLeaks,

Anonymous hacks 500  Chinese websites Messages by the international hacking group Anonymous went up on a number of Chinese government websites on Thursday to protest internet restrictions. " Dear Chinese Government, you are not infallible, today websites are hacked, tomorrow it will be your vile regime that will fall, " the message read in English. " So expect us because we do not forgive, never. What you are doing today to your Great People, tomorrow will be inflicted to you. With no mercy. Nothing will stop us, nor your anger nor your weapons. You do not scare us, because you cannot afraid an idea. " Some of the messages were directed at the Chinese people while others addressed the government. Some websites that Anonymous said it attacked were working Thursday, and government officials denied the sites were ever hacked. China's National Computer Network Emergency Response Technical Team was not available for immediate comment. The hacks were announced on

Internet #Censorship : CISPA - Newest Cyber Security Bill If you download and distribute copyrighted material on the Internet, or share any information that governments or corporations find inconvenient, you could soon be labeled a threat to national security in the United States. That's the aim of a bill in Congress called the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act (CISPA). The good news is that SOPA and PIPA haven't come to pass, but the bad news is that they could be followed by a bill that is even more invasive and could violate even more of your civil liberties. According to a press release issued last week, the bill already has over a 100 congressional co-sponsors. Yet the bill is only now beginning to appear on the public radar. CISPA would let companies spy on users and share private information with the federal government and other companies with near-total immunity from civil and criminal liability. It effectively creates a 'cybersecurity' exemption to all existi

Anonymous Exposes data of 10,000 Civic Democrats from Czech Last week, Hackers posted on the internet the private data of Czech Prime Minister Petr Necas, including the numbers of his three mobile telephones, after a series of cyber attacks on government web sites. Hacker groups Anonymous and TrollSec claimed responsibility for the cyber attacks and for posting private data of the prime minister, saying they were protesting the Czech authorities, who are ignoring public sentiment and want to ratify the controversial agreement. The cyber attacks on the Czech government web sites, including on the Cabinet's website, come in the wake of worldwide protests against the ratification of the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA). Today Anonymous Hackers claim to released personal details about members of the largest of the three parties in the ruling Czech coalition, the Civic Democrats (ODS). Details including mobile telephone numbers and personal ID card numbers were made publ

Adobe releases open source malware classification tool Adobe Systems has released a malware classification tool in order to help security incident first responders, malware analysts and security researchers more easily identify malicious binary files. The ' Adobe Malware Classifier ' tool uses machine learning algorithms to classify Windows executable and dynamic link library (DLL) files as clean, malicious or unknown, Adobe security engineer Karthik Raman said in a recent blog post , Raman originally developed Malware Classifier for in-house use by Adobe's Product Security Incident Response (PSIRT) Team. When run, the tool extracts seven key attributes from every analyzed binary file and compares them to data obtained by running the J48, J48 Graft, PART, and Ridor machine-learning algorithms on a set of 100,000 malicious programs and 16,000 clean ones, Raman said. " Malware classification can be a difficult task for even experienced analysts, especially in the modern