EA was forced to shut down its forums yesterday due to a hacker attack. The intruder “defaced” the forum’s front page, though it is not believed that any personal data was accessed or lost. EA thinks it has identified and repaired the vulnerability that permitted the actions and the forums are now back online. “As some of you...

A botnet capable of delivering almost four billion spam messages per day has been confirmed resurrected—more than four months after Microsoft celebrated its untimely demise. Researchers with Kaspersky Lab reported on Tuesday that Kelihos, a peer-to-peer botnet that also goes by the name Hlux, continues to spew spam in a variety of languages....

A group of Internet hackers said Tuesday it took down the website of Brazil’s second largest private sector bank, one day after it did the same with the country’s largest private bank. The group that calls itself “Anonymous Brasil” said on Twitter: “Attention sailors: Target hit! The http://bradesco.com.br is sinking. TANGO...

Earlier this week, it was reported that a nefarious hacker had taken it upon himself to infiltrate the PunkBuster client of Battlefield 3, and ban innocent players from the game. Electronic Arts has since posted an update to the situation on Battlelog, and says it has “taken steps” to reverse the estimated 150 bans and improve...

Once a threat confined to the margins of society, computer hackers have become a scourge of the modern age. Leading the charge is one group, Anonymous, launching online attacks on everything from scientology to credit card companies. As its fame has grown, Anonymous members have increasingly felt the real-world consequences of their...

For those who don’t know, s3rver.exe is the hacker that not long ago breached Sony Pictures, a couple of UFC sites, and countless government websites worldwide. “I started hacking when I was 11. I heard about Anonymous and then I started DDOS’ing sites,” S3rver said. In the course of the two years during which he learned...

The digital arms race is already underway, according to many global experts and their opinions included in McAfee’s global cyberdefence report. At least 57 per cent of the study participants concurred with this point, while another 36 per cent went so far as to argue that cybersecurity is more important than missile defence. For reference,...

The Microsoft Malware Protection Center has found a trojan downloader that does not have any suspicious routines in its initial state and is therefore difficult for virus scanners to detect. Once it has been started, the small Visual Basic program loads a web page for a Tibetan restaurant. The HTML for this site hides shell code that...

The activist hacker group Anonymous attacked three Mexican government websites on Friday in protest at a proposed bill that seeks to toughen local laws about online file-sharing. The affected sites belong to the Interior Ministry, the Senate and the Chamber of Deputies. The homepage of the Interior Ministry remained offline by mid-afternoon. “We...

Hacktivist group Anonymous has claimed responsibility for taking down a website operated by US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) that offers Internet security advice to consumers. The hit on OnGuardOnline.gov appears to go beyond the usual denial of service attack. The Pastebin post claiming responsibility for attack purports to show a...