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...

It’s natural for viruses to mutate in nature and become stronger over time. The scary thing is that it’s now happening to computer viruses. Mutating viruses are nothing new, they are used to infect machines in a way that can’t be stopped by traditional anti-virus software. The problem comes in with a new report from Softwin, the...

Dell’s  gaming computer brand, Alienware, has released a new desktop computer that — while not quite in keeping with the trend toward mobile gaming — is compact, powerful and sleek. The Alienware X51 The X51, which weighs about 12 pounds and measures roughly 13 inches tall by 12.5 inches deep by 4 inches wide, is unobtrusive...

The FBI shuttered file-sharing web site MegaUpload this afternoon, arrested its executives, and have called the site an “international organized criminal enterprise.” Even though there’s little doubt that MegaUpload was host to some copyrighted material, it was also a great way to upload and share large files, like photo...

Casey Anthony, who recently resurfaced in a video diary that went viral on the Web, says in her probation report that her computer was recently hacked.

The report released by the Florida Department of Corrections on Tuesday says Anthony told her probation officer that her computer had private videos that she had recorded. The probation officer describes Anthony as upset that videos had been downloaded from her computer and put on YouTube.

Anthony disappeared from public view after a Florida jury cleared her of killing her 2-year-old daughter, Caylee, last year in a case that drew intense national attention. Then video clips surfaced online last week showing Anthony talking to a camera in what she described as her video diary.

One of Anthony’s former defense attorneys, Cheney Mason, confirmed that last week that Anthony was the woman in the clip, but he said the video was not “legally obtained.”

In the four-minute video, she talks about her well-being and references being kept in an undisclosed location, which she doesn’t identify.

“I’m extremely excited,” Anthony says. “I’m excited that I’ll be able to Skype and obviously keep a video log, take some pictures and that I have something that I can finally call mine. … It’s been a long time since I’ve been able to call something mine.”

Mason said that his former client does not know how the clip landed on the Web.

Anthony is serving a year of probation in Florida on a check fraud charge. The 25-year-old was acquitted last July in the death Caylee, whose remains were found in a wooded area near the family’s home months after she disappeared in June 2008.

“Even if I get off of probation early, I’ll still be here at least until February — end of February, seven months, March, my birthday,” she says.

She makes no mention of Caylee. Instead, she speaks about a dog she’s adopted and says “a lot has changed” in her life since the trial.

“I just hope things stay good, and they only get better,” she says.

The course of events that led to the July 2011 compromise of a computer server used by German authorities for GPS surveillance might have started with a police official monitoring his daughter’s online activities, according to reports in German media.

The man, who is a senior official within the German Federal Police in Frankfurt, installed some type of spyware on his daughter’s computer in order to see what she does online, German weekly magazine Der Spiegel reported on Sunday.

Later, a friend of the girl, who had ties to the German hacker scene, stumbled over the Trojan installed on her computer. To get back at the curious father, the hacker friend decided to break into the man’s personal computer.

Apparently, the police officer had diverted official work-related emails to his private computer, which is most likely a serious violation of data handling policies. “I expect that this is against the rules and is almost always a bad idea,” said Chester Wisniewski, a senior security advisor at security company Sophos.

The emails contained information that helped hackers obtain unauthorized access to the PATRAS system used by police and customs authorities for GPS surveillance. The police official is now being investigated by authorities in Cologne.

A group of hackers calling themselves “n0-N4m3 Cr3w” (No Name Crew) announced in July 2011 that they had obtained access to a PATRAS server, prompting German authorities to temporarily shut down the entire system and launch an investigation.

The group leaked documentation, usernames, passwords, phone numbers, license plates and geographic coordinates related to police investigations that were copied from the compromised server.

The German Federal Police arrested two individuals suspected of being responsible for the security breach. One of them, a 23-year-old man from the North Rhine-Westphalia region, was believed to be the leader of “n0-N4m3 Cr3w.”

Gary McKinnon, the computer buff accused of hacking into the Pentagon, faces an ordeal of terrifying brutality if he is extradited to the United States.

That is the verdict of Gary Mulgrew, one of the NatWest Three and the author of a compelling new account of two blood-spattered years spent at the hands of America’s penal system. The book, Gang Of One, is serialised in The Mail on Sunday’s Review today.

Mr McKinnon, 45, suffers from Asperger’s syndrome, a form of autism which, say campaigners on his behalf, means he is too vulnerable for extradition and should be put on trial in the UK.

Mr Mulgrew’s experience will go some way to justifying their fears. Gang Of One details a regime of degradation that began from the moment his plane landed in Houston, Texas, in the summer of 2006.

Stripped naked, threatened and screamed at by the immigration service, he was later sent to a jail controlled by gangs. There, confined to a vast dormitory of ‘wall-to-wall psychos’, he witnessed savage beatings, including one of such ferocity he remains unclear whether the victim lived or died.

This, he says, was despite a promise from the then Prime Minister Tony Blair that he and his fellow accused, David Bermingham and Giles Darby, would be in safe hands.

‘What awaits Gary McKinnon if  he is actually extradited to the US is unthinkable,’ said Mr Mulgrew, 49. ‘Why subject a British citizen to such stress and degradation when they could and should be dealt with here in the United Kingdom?’

The case of the NatWest Three generated years of controversy. They were extradited using highly contentious fast-track procedures that require little or no evidence and were originally aimed at tackling international terrorism. The same fast-track treaty has been employed in the McKinnon case.

Despite a parliamentary vote in favour of the three bankers and overwhelming public criticism of the American stance, the Blair Government failed to intervene. The NatWest Three had been accused, wrongly, of playing a part in the 2001 collapse of Enron, one of the world’s biggest commodities and energy companies.

They later pleaded guilty only to breaking the terms of their employment contracts with NatWest – pleas extracted from them, says Mr Mulgrew, as a result of threats from the US Department of Justice.

Referring to his treatment at the Houston immigration suite, where he was abused by two official ‘goons’, he writes: ‘It all seemed so unnecessary, although I learned later this was just the standard fare – everyone extradited got to enjoy this experience. Even then I wondered how Gary McKinnon, for example, a hacker with Asperger’s, would ever cope with such a welcome.

‘I thought of England. Of Tony Blair. I remembered I had heard him saying how we would be well treated.

‘I thought of my family, sitting at home wondering what was happening to me. Probably tuned into News At Ten by now, with some Labour puppet assuring everyone we were in the best possible hands. I wished they could see the hands I was in.’

Mr Mulgrew is now attempting to re-establish his life. Following his release, a video was published in which he described the US trial process as akin to torture. He is particularly angry at the tactics of the US DoJ, which told him that without a guilty plea, he faced a jail sentence so long he would never see his two children grow up.

And he is also critical of America’s claim that any ‘wire fraud’ crossing its national boundaries gives it the right to prosecute. ‘British parents with teenage children should know that a simple email sent through a US server could be enough – in the wrong circumstances – to see them extradited,’ he writes.

Mr McKinnon was arrested ten years ago after allegations he hacked into Nasa and Pentagon computers from his North London home, causing £450,000 damage. He admits breaching the computer systems, saying he was looking for the existence of ‘little green men’, but denies causing damage. US authorities want to jail him for up to 60 years.

His mother Janis Sharp says her son has lived through ten years of daily terror and his mental health is continuing to decline. After failed legal appeals, Mr McKinnon is waiting for a judicial review of whether he is fit to travel to the US.

Talk about a huge to-go order: Federal authorities arrested four Romanian nationals in connection with a sophisticated multimillion-dollar cybercrime scheme against Subway restaurants and other retailers.

The indictment, obtained by Wired, alleges that from about April 2008 until May 2011, the defendants remotely hacked into the point-of-sale checkout terminals at more than 150 Subway restaurants, including ones in Plaistow, N.H., East Northport, N.Y., Ocala, Fla., Tulare, Calif. and Fairborn, Ohio. The suspected crooks implanted keystroke loggers and Trojans on the point-of-sale machines, which were connected to the Internet, and used the hacking devices to steal more than 80,000 customers’ credit-card details. The suspects allegedly tapped into the point-of-sale terminals of 50 other retailers as well.

The suspected cybercriminals harvested victims’ payment information and stored it on several “dump sites” hosted by the domain-name company GoDaddy. They then transferred the swiped credit-card data to FTP sites, where they could share it with overseas computers they controlled. The suspects used the details to create fraudulent credit cards and make “unauthorized charges with various merchants, primarily located throughout Europe,” the indictment reads.

The defendants, Adrian-Tiberiu Oprea (age 27), Iulian Dolan (27), Cezar Iulian Butu (26) and Florin Radu (23), were charged with conspiracy to commit computer fraud, wire fraud and access-device fraud. They face a maximum of five years in prison for each count of conspiracy to commit computer-related fraud, 30 years for each count of conspiracy to commit wire fraud and five years for each count of conspiracy to commit access-device fraud. Oprea, Dolan and Butu are all in custody; Radu is still at large.

From the let’s get futuristically freaky department, future hacking crimes could take a decidedly sinister twist; not hacking to breach systems but brains, bodies and behaviors. This DNA hacking goes way beyond potentially using police bees to bust biohackers, or even storing unhackable data in box of bio-encrypted bacteria. It’s not science fiction to hack insulin pumps or to usejamming signals to stop hackers from lethal pacemaker attacks, but now bioengineers and security futurists are warning that the day is coming when criminals and bioterrorists hunt for vulnerabilities that will give a new meaning to zero-day exploits. In the future, a weaponized virus will aim to infect you, your brain and body biology, and not just your computer or mobile device.

While some people resist the idea of needing antivirus or other security software defenses for their smartphones, in the world of synthetic biology, a world where bits, bytes, atoms and biology mix dreams with nightmare realities, it could be lethal to lag behind in patching potential vulnerabilities. Some day, when you hear about something going ‘viral,’ it will not apply to an idea or video but to a DNA hack going viral to infect the masses. When a computer is infected with malware or a virus, you can reformat a hard drive, but will a future security scenario include needing to worry about BSOD and reformatting your brain?

Just as you can personalize your computer and mobile devices, advances in synthetic biology are allowing DNA hackers to personalize biology so that we will be able to use a DNA printer that will allow us “to print out our own treatments.” Think of it as a patch you need to close a vulnerability on a system. In this case, you would download it, print it, and swallow the “cure.” You will be able to search for a flu or cold vaccine and then print out the genetic designs or download the “cure” via a smartphone app, reported Genomeweb. Cures for horrific diseases could spread quickly through social media, but with all good so too comes the bad. Just as a tainted app, poisoned link, phishing email, or malicious drive-by-download can target individuals to infect computers for espionage or cybercrime, computer-designed viruses like biologically engineered biotoxins could target groups to try to wipe them out.

Bioengineer Andrew Hessel, co-chair of Biotechnology at Singularity University, has talked extensively about the Internet of Living Things and how synthetic biology will be the next big IT industry. Hessel likes to play with molecules, DNA and computers, and explained ”synthetic biology as computer-assisted genetic design will go ‘from an idea to printing DNA to ultimately booting DNA’.” SmartPlanet reported, “Mobile phones equipped with genome decoders are coming. DIY fabricators that work with cells are already here…The cost barriers around genetic engineering are, in fact, falling, and what are essentially life-form design tools are increasingly accessible.”

When Aldith Hunkar interviewed Hessel at TEDx Amsterdam, Hessel said the barriers to engineering bacteria, viruses and much higher forms of life are falling away to create a “parallel biology, one that is moving at about 100 million years of evolutionary time for every calendar year.” Synthetic biology “will grow faster than some computer technology” and then almost anyone can play God; the stuff of dreams and nightmares will become real. Hessel looks at cells as computers and viruses as software. To describe his biggest synthetic biology nightmare, he said, “When I look at the world of computing today, I see all of these hacks, all of these little exploits, whether it’s spam or whether it’s literally hacking into different systems and manipulating them in different ways. And I see the potential for biology to be used in very similar ways.”

At Techonomy 2011, Hessel discussed the emerging field of synthetic biology and bioengineering. He said in this video that the engineering of life is like software engineering and computer-assisted genetic design will give us the ability to make viruses and vaccines. He asked, “What happens when we can make a vaccine as easily as we can make a tweet?”

Hessel explained that living systems can be programmed with new functions to do commercially or intellectually useful tasks. That could be great, so long as the people who are creating the bacteria are not out to wreak havoc. At TedXm, Hessel said our bodies have a relationship with bacteria which is constantly sending chemicals into our brains. However an evil bacteria or virus has no borders and hypothetically there might be a bacteria that strikes like a drive-by-download, made to appear like an innocent or helpful cure which we might print out on a DNA printer. But after we “ingest” it into our systems, it might trigger chemicals in the brain that change behavior. The security landscape will change if we have “to learn how to counterattack” such weaponized viruses.

Now consider when we will have the ability to “boot DNA” in the same way as booting up a PC, but the data wirelessly transmits into us to perhaps keep us “healthy.” Another scary example from Hessel was if two companies were business competitors and one company infected the other with a virus or bacteria that made the company employees lazy or unhappy. If viruses are like biological spam, we could be infected with bacteria that manipulates our behavior and we might not even know it’s happening.

Synthetic biology, when tweaked by bioterrorists, could be used for exploitation and “not only to drive large-scale outbreaks. They will also be able to create targeted attacks against a single individual based on his or her own unique biology,” reported The Washington Post. “We will need anti-virus software and defenses just as we have for computer software. But although we can reformat our hard disks to remove a computer virus, we can’t reformat our genomes … yet.”

If DNA becomes the next big hacking frontier, it would open a plethora of “Pandora’s Box problems.” The Washington Post quoted security futurist Marc Goodman, the founder of Future Crimes:

Synthetic biology will lead to new forms of bioterrorism – opportunities for the bad guys to create never-before-seen forms of bio-toxins. These bio-threats might be nearly impossible to detect because they can be customized to the genome of a certain person or groups of people. Goodman, who has long worked on cyber crime and terrorism with organizations such as Interpol and the United Nations, believes the potential bio-threat is greatly underestimated. “Bio-crime today is akin to computer crime in the early 1980s. Few initially recognized the problem, but one need only observe how the threat grew exponentially over time.”

 

The more I read about the topic, and the more synthetic biology videos I watched, the possibilities blew my mind. There would be so many ways to ‘save the world’ or to destroy it. It’s a fictional story waiting to be written. I know people who can’t even keep their computers protected, updated and patched . . . I wonder if they will be become more security-minded when the hacking could be literally lethal?

FBI agents have interviewed officials from England’s failed 2018 World Cup bid as part of an investigation into possible computer hacking.

The FBI is understood to be looking into claims that the USA and England World Cup bids were the victims of attempts to hack into their email accounts by outside organisations.

The interviews with the England 2018 officials, who are not suspected of wrongdoing, were conducted in November, and are part of a wider FBI investigation into allegations around the bidding process.

Russia won the bid for 2018 in the controversial vote by Fifa’s executive committee a year ago, while England went out in the first round. Qatar won the right to host the 2022 World Cup, beating USA in the final round.