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...

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...

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 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...

An Indian hacking group known as “The Lords of Dharmaraja”celebrated swiping the Norton antivirus source code from Symantec earlier this month and promptly began releasing fragments to the public before promising to upload the full Monty on January 17, 2012. That’s today, but rather than release the source code in its...

Idiots, the world is full of them and sometimes that includes stupid social media hackers. Poor password practices allow Twitter accounts to be compromised every day, but yesterday several high profile Twitter accounts were hacked, Ashton Kutcher, the Huffington Post, and actor Eric Stonestreet. What makes this interesting is the...

After Danny Ayalon, Israel’s Deputy Foreign Minister, stated that the country was one of the best in the world when it came to cyber security, possessing the power to go after any hacker, a member of Anonymous published some information on Israeli SCADA systems.

“Who wanna have some fun with israeli scada systems,” FuryOfAnon wrote on Twitter a few hours ago.

The hacker published a list of IPs which allegedly belong to some Israeli organizations that utilize SCADA systems and even revealed that they could be accessed using the “100” default password.

“Find their systems. Login using default logins. (“100″ being the password),” the hacker said.

“100” has been revealed as being the default password for Siemens systems some time ago by security researcher Billy Rios who became upset by the fact that Siemens denied having any authentication bypass issues in their SIMATIC systems.

The password “100″ is allegedly the one utilized by the hacker called pr0f to access the SCADA systems of the South Houston water utility not long ago.

The leaked information also contains email addresses and passwords belonging to Israeli government officials, including ones from the Ministry of Defense, the Defense Force, Ministry of Health, and the Israeli Chinese Embassy.

FuryOfAnon also benefits from the support of Sabu, one of the early members of the Anonymous hacktivist collective.

Israel has been under heavy fire from hackers after Operation Free Palestine was launched and hacktivists from around the world started breaching and defacing websites as a form of protest.

One of the largest data leaks was performed by a hacker who calls himself 0xOmar, who managed to obtain tens of thousands of credit card details and other sensitive information after breaching a major sports website.

Israeli officials said they would retaliate against these hackers, but so far only an Israeli student managed to provide some information on 0xOmar, reportedly a Saudi man, currently working in Mexico. The hacker denies these claims.

A youth from the north was arrested on Sunday on suspicion of making online purchases to the tune of a few thousand shekels using credit-card information exposed on the Internet last week by a Saudi computer hacker.

According to police, an 18-year-old from a moshav near Tiberias, allegedly used four different credit card numbers to order a home cinema system, a Samsung Galaxy 2 cellular telephone and a tablet computer.

Northern District Fraud Division commander Superintendent Jihad Oueida said a complaint had been filed by Leumi Card after its security department had flagged down the orders coming in from several different card numbers that it knew had been exposed. According to Oueida, the youth has no criminal record “and comes from a totally normal family.”

Last week, a Saudi hacker succeeded in penetrating the One sports website and obtained, he claimed, personal details of several hundred thousand Israelis, along with, in some cases, their credit card numbers, and published them on the Internet for all to see.

Upon investigation, however, the credit card companies said that the files released by the hacker had contained the same information repeated several times. According to Isracard, only 14,000 numbers of active credit cards were exposed, and the companies succeeded in blocking them fairly quickly.

This past Thursday, 569 more credit card numbers, along with e-mail addresses and various passwords, were published online by a different hacker going by the nickname SRV.

Sony has once again fallen victim to hacker collective Anonymous, which has this time targeted Sony Pictures. The move comes just months after Sony recovered from a devastating series of attacks that shut down much of its online network for months in 2011.

Things just got a little bit easier and possibly closer to legal for hackers trying to bring Apple’s digital personal assistant Siri to iOS devices other than the iPhone 4S, according to a prominent iOS hacker.

A recent update for iOS 5.01 (build 9A406) specifically for the iPhone 4S makes it possible to explore the device’s filesystem unhindered using a Mac or PC, according to several tweets from iPhone Dev Team member Musclenerd.

The result is that a hacker could more easily extract and copy the iPhone 4S’s Siri files without resorting to piracy, the hacker says. The reason the filesystem is more accessible is reportedly that Apple made the filesystem encryption keys obtainable.

Basically, Apple locked the door to the filesystem but left the keys hanging in the door handle. Previously, to get at the iOS filesystem, hackers had to use a series of decryption tools to get past Apple’s software protections. It’s not clear if Apple has changed its policies or plans to lock things down again with another update.

But for the moment at least, Siri is more easily accessible and doesn’t require hackers to crack open Apple’s encryption with piracy tools. As a result, some critics expect this could lead to a surge in unofficial Siri development.

Hackers have issued number of releases in recent weeks claiming to have cracked Siri for non-iPhone 4S jailbroken iOS devices. The H1siri hack released earlier in December claims to bring Siri to older devices. But many critics, including PCWorld’s Kevin Lee, are advising people to stay away, because H1siri’s service is spotty and some have claimed the hack broke their devices.

In late November, another Siri port called Siri0us also claimed to bring Apple’s digital personal assistant to older iOS devices. But Siri0us is no longer available, and so the hunt continues for a workable Siri port for iPhone fans that don’t own Apple’s latest handset.