Hacking

Yet another “connected” device was outed as a potential spy this week – as researchers showed how Google’s Nest thermostat could be turned into a “fully-fledged spying device”.

Today’s fashion for high-end electronics in luxury hotels allowed a hacker to wreak havoc in 200 suites at once in a five-star hotel in China – switching off lights, changing the TV channel, raising blinds and fiddling with the temperature.

Ancestry.com has become the latest site to be taken down by a distributed denial-of-service (DDOS) attack. The genealogy website was shut down from Monday-Tuesday this week, along with its sister site, Findagrave.com.

Nokia paid several million euros to criminals who threatened to reveal the source code for part of its smartphone operating system seven years ago, a Finnish TV station has revealed.

Picture-sharing social media site Pinterest appears to have been hacked, as multiple users reported weight-loss spam messages both on Pinterest itself and on Twitter.

Baby monitors which shipped with security flaws that allowed hackers to watch and listen to babies from remote locations have led to an FTC complaint against the company responsible, Trendnet.

Internet users are becoming more savvy about keeping their private data safe – but many have already fallen victim to crime and scams, a study by the Pew Research Institute’s Internet Project has found. One in five (21%) of internet users have had an email or social networking account compromised or taken over without their permission.

I was recently contacted by a journalist researching a story about ‘hackers’ quitting the dark side (and virus writing in particular) for the bright(-er) side. He cited this set of examples – 7 Hackers Who Got Legit Jobs From Their Exploits – and also mentioned Mike Ellison (formerly known as Stormbringer and Black Wolf, among

A top internet security official in China has said that his organization has “mountains of data” on U.S. cyber attacks against the country. Huang Chengqing, the director of the National Computer Network Emergency Response Technical Team Coordination Center of China (CNCERT), made the comments in the state-run China Daily newspaper, calling for greater cooperation between the two states on hacking.

China has accused the United States of being, “the real hacking empire” after a Pentagon report which said for the first time that cyber attacks on the U.S. were “directly attributable” to Beijing.

Up to 600,000 gamers at risk as emails and other details stolen from online zombie game

The Associated Press reports that celebrities, including ashton Kutcher and Kim Kardashian, along with top government officials have had private financial information stolen and posted to a rogue website.

Several email accounts belonging to family members of former President George W. Bush were hacked and the contents made public, exposing private data, correspondence and personal photos, according to The Smoking Gun. The apparent hack affected email threads between several members of the Bush family, including both former U.S. Presidents. According to the report, the

The uncertainty around Java shows no sign of abating as Apple blocks all versions of Java on OS 10.6 and above through its anti-malware security applet, XProtect. This follows the blocking in all but name by Mozilla as it moved to end auto-loading of plug ins for the Firefox browser.

Hamza Bendelladj, the Algerian alleged bank hacker responsible for defrauding US banks of millions of dollars has been detained in Thailand, following three years of tracking by the FBI.

A hacker who broke into celebrity email accounts and leaked nude pictures of Hollywood actors, including Scarlett Johansson, has been sentenced to 10 years in prison, according to an Associated Press report.

An attack on the Australian Defence Force Academy servers held at the University of New South Wales (UNSW) resulted in the loss of 20,000 user records. According to a report in the Sydney Morning Herald  the hacker, known as Darwinare, managed to break in and steal the records, including passwords and email addresses in a

In May we read that game maker Blizzard, developer of a series of popular games including World of Warcraft, Diablo III and Starcraft, was hacked, but that turned out to just be individual compromised accounts from some of its users. Now we read, from Blizzard itself rather than a third party, that they have been

We read in the New York Times that Google is rolling out a service that will attempt to alert users when it thinks their accounts might be subject to hacking by a government, hoping the user will take precautions after getting a notice that says “Warning: We believe state-sponsored attackers may be attempting to compromise