According to The Smoking Gun, a hacker using the name Guccifer recently accessed and leaked the personal photos and e-mails of several members of the Bush family.
"In e-mail exchanges with the person who claimed responsibility for the hack, the individual claimed to have swiped 'a lot of stuff,' including 'interesting mails' about George H.W. Bush’s recent hospitalization, 'Bush 43,' and other Bush family members. ... Asked if he was concerned about the FBI/Secret Service investigation that will no doubt follow shortly, he replied crytically, 'i have an old game with the f**king bastards inside, this is just another chapter in the game,'" The Smoking Gun reports.
"The Smoking Gun posted several of the hacked photographs, including one that shows the senior Bush in a hospital bed, another with him and former President Bill Clinton at the Bush family home in Maine and one of George W. Bush posing next to a cardboard cut-out of his face," writes Computerworld's Jaikumar Vijayan.
"Four photos display the younger President Bush's artistic endeavors, including two paintings, a photo of him working on a third painting and a photo of him posing with a cardboard cutout of himself dressed as a Parisian artist, complete with mustache and beret," writs TechNewsDaily's Paul Wagenseil.
"The Smoking Gun site, known for posting legal documents and arrest records related to celebrities, said the hacker invaded six email accounts, including one belonging to Dorothy Bush Koch, daughter of George H.W. Bush, as well as other Bush family members and friends," writes Reuters' Samuel P. Jacobs. "The U.S. Secret Service is investigating whether former President George H.W. Bush's email was hacked as well, the agency said on Friday."
Information Security, Ethical Hacking, website Security, Database Security, IT Audit and Compliance, Security news, Programming, Linux and Security.
Tuesday, 12 February 2013
Children as young as 11 years old are developing malware
In a recent blog post, Yuval Ben-Itzhak, CTO of AVG Technologies, said AVG's Virus Labs team has uncovered evidence that children as young as 11 years old are developing malware.
"Mostly kids writing malware are doing it to show off to their peers, by demonstrating 'hacking' ability," Ben-Itzhak wrote. "It could be stealing someone’s game logins. This might seem trivial at first, but online gaming accounts are often connected to credit card details to enable in-game purchases, and these may also have virtual currency accounts amounting to hundreds of dollars. Furthermore, many gamers unfortunately use the same login details for social networks such as Facebook and Twitter, potentially putting the victim at risk of cyber-bullying, in addition to identity theft and major inconvenience."
"The researchers found that many instances of malware targeting games popular with children shared the same characteristics," writes BBC News' Dave Lee. "Most were written using basic coding languages such as Visual Basic and C#, and were written in a way that contain quite literal schoolboy errors that professional hackers were unlikely to make -- many exposing the original source of the code."
"In one instance, a program that gathered login details from unsuspecting users of online game Runescape contained code that sent the information back to an email address in Canada," The Telegraph reports. "Researchers traced the email to an 11-year-old boy."
"Now, AVG is saying children must be taught the 'rights and wrongs' of coding by parents and schools, teaching them that using code to cheat or steal from a game is the same as theft," writse redOrbit's Michael Harper.
"Mostly kids writing malware are doing it to show off to their peers, by demonstrating 'hacking' ability," Ben-Itzhak wrote. "It could be stealing someone’s game logins. This might seem trivial at first, but online gaming accounts are often connected to credit card details to enable in-game purchases, and these may also have virtual currency accounts amounting to hundreds of dollars. Furthermore, many gamers unfortunately use the same login details for social networks such as Facebook and Twitter, potentially putting the victim at risk of cyber-bullying, in addition to identity theft and major inconvenience."
"The researchers found that many instances of malware targeting games popular with children shared the same characteristics," writes BBC News' Dave Lee. "Most were written using basic coding languages such as Visual Basic and C#, and were written in a way that contain quite literal schoolboy errors that professional hackers were unlikely to make -- many exposing the original source of the code."
"In one instance, a program that gathered login details from unsuspecting users of online game Runescape contained code that sent the information back to an email address in Canada," The Telegraph reports. "Researchers traced the email to an 11-year-old boy."
"Now, AVG is saying children must be taught the 'rights and wrongs' of coding by parents and schools, teaching them that using code to cheat or steal from a game is the same as theft," writse redOrbit's Michael Harper.
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