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...

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...

At DefCon, Itzhak “Zuk” Avraham, also known as @ihackbanme, showed off the new hacking tool, “The Android Network Toolkit,” dubbed Anti for short, which will soon be available for free in the Android Market. Looking for the catch for downloading and using the advanced hacking Anti app as a “penetration tool...

Visitors to the CBS.com website earlier today were met with nothing, that’s because the hacktivist group Anonymous managed to not only perform a DDoS attack on the network but actually hack the company’s website and delete all files. Fortunately for CBS a backup was made for obvious (hacking) reasons and the company responded quickly...

Earlier this week a hacking collective called Nightmare hit the Web sites of the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange, banks and El Al, the Israeli national airline. In a message posted on Pastebin, a group calling itself IDF-Team yesterday warned that “because of the lame hackers from Saudi Arabia” it would attack the Saudi Stock Exchange...

British police have found evidence that private investigators working for newspapers hacked into the email account of former Prime Minister Gordon Brown while he was finance minister, The Independent newspaper reported.

Hundreds of other people may have also had their emails intercepted, perhaps as many as were caught up in the phone hacking scandal at News International’s now defunct News of the World tabloid, the paper said on Monday.

Detectives were looking at evidence from about 20 computers seized from private investigators, the newspaper reported.

The team at London’s Scotland Yard police headquarters were looking into the possibility that several newspaper titles commissioned private detectives to access computers, The Independent said, citing an unnamed source.

The Brown emails under scrutiny dated from the time he was Britain’s finance minister before he became prime minister in 2007. Former Labour advisor and lobbyist Derek Draper was also targeted, The Independent said.

The Metropolitan police would not comment on the report.

“We are not prepared to give a running commentary on this investigation,” a spokesman said.

News International, the British newspaper arm of Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation, also declined to comment.

The group closed the News of the World in July 2011 after evidence emerged that investigators working for the title hacked into the mobile phone voicemails of celebrities, politicians and even murder victims.

It is the only newspaper that has admitted phone hacking, although some journalists and celebrities have said the practice was widespread in the tabloid press.

News International’s titles were not singled out in the Independent’s report on email hacking.

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.

A 52-year-old man has been questioned by Metropolitan Police officers investigating claims that private investigators hacked into computers on behalf of News International.

Scotland Yard said that the unnamed suspect is being held on suspicion of offences under the Computer Misuse Act after being arrested in Milton Keynes.

His arrest comes as part of the Met Police’s Operation Tuleta, an investigation into computer hacking that is running alongside the Operation Weeting phone hacking probe.

A spokesman for the Metropolitan Police said that the man remains in custody at a Thames Valley Police station, reports PA.

He added: “Operation Tuleta is investigating a number of allegations regarding breach of privacy, received by the Metropolitan Police Service (MPS) since January 2011, which fell outside the remit of Operation Weeting, including computer hacking.”

Operation Tuleta was launched in the summer to investigate the growing number of allegations surrounding the use of private detectives to steal personal information from computers.

Officers working in the operation have been reporting to deputy assistant commissioner Sue Akers, who heads the inquiry into voicemail interception at the now-defunct News of the World.

Scotland Yard’s phone and computer hacking teams are currently working their way through 300 million emails seized from News International.

They are also exploring the use of ‘Trojan horse’ viruses, which allow hackers to gain control over third-party computers and access information.

Since revelations that the News of the World hacked into the phone of murdered schoolgirl Milly Dowler emerged in July, the majority of attention has been on voicemail interception.

However, many commentators have said that this is just the tip of the iceberg in terms of criminal behaviour by the newspaper industry.

Last month, Labour MP Tom Watson warned shareholders at the annual meeting of Rupert Murdoch‘s News Corporation, parent company to News International, that there could be many more revelations to come in terms of computer hacking.

After the meeting, Watson said: “If my concerns are founded then this company is going to experience even more litigation in the future than it faces now.”

Various high-profile figures have claimed that they have been victims of the crime, including singer George Michael saying on Twitter in the summer that his computer was hacked into “all the time”.

Earlier in the month, 48-year-old Jamie Pyatt became the first journalist from The Sun to be arrested, as part of the Operation Elveden investigation into illegal payments to police officers.

The persons involved appeared to have used “auto script” technology

Telecom operator AT&T has reached out to its wireless customers to inform them that the company was recently a target of an “organised” hacking attempt to collect online information.

However, AT&T spokesman Mark Siegel said that no accounts were breached.

It was reported that the persons involved appeared to have used “auto script” technology to identify whether AT&T telephone numbers were linked to online AT&T accounts.

The company is carrying out investigations to determine the source of the attack and also the intent.

Earlier in 2010, hackers managed to breach AT&T website and managed to collect more than 1,00,000 email addresses belonging to Apple iPad 3G users. Two men, who were charged with the attack, revealed that their goal was to expose security flaws.