Articles about Hacking

This week's hack of HBO led to the release of stolen episodes of Ballers and Room 104, and the threat of Game of Thrones leaks. Now the hackers have made good on their threat and uploaded scripts and episode summaries for yet-to-be-aired episodes, and speculation is rife that it is just a matter of time before episodes hit torrent sites such as The Pirate Bay.

Season seven of the show is just getting underway, and details of episodes three and four have now been published online. Other files have also been leaked following the hack, including log in credentials for HBO staff.

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HBO is the latest company to suffer a hack and subsequent leak of shows. Hackers are said to have breached the network's security and gained access to 1.5TB of data including Game of Thrones scripts and unaired episodes of shows.

Episodes of Ballers and Room 104 have been leaked online, but it is the release of what appears to the script to next week's Game of Thrones that's drawing the most attention.

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This is why you never accept Facebook friend requests from people you don't know, kids.

Reuters has reported that Russian agents created two dozen fake Facebook accounts to try and infiltrate and spy on campaign officials working for Emmanuel Macron during his presidential campaign.

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WikiLeaks has published the latest of its Vault 7 CIA leaks, this time looking at a project going by the name Imperial. The project is made up of three tools: Achilles and SeaPea which target OS X, and Aeris which targets various flavors of Linux, including RedHat, Debian and CentOS.

User guides relating to the two Mac tools date from mid-2011 and show they can be used to Trojanize an OS X disk image or install a persistent rootkit. Aeris was designed to provide a backdoor into Linux-based systems.

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Some four months after the first Vault 7 leak, WikiLeaks continues to publish revealing CIA documents that detail the agency's ability to hack, infiltrate and surveil targets. The latest batch goes under the banner "UCL / Raytheon", and comprises documents from CIA contractor Raytheon Blackbird Technologies.

Dating from late 2014 and late 2015, the documents show how the CIA, through Raytheon Blackbird Technologies, monitored malware in the wild to see how it could be used by the agency. The documents cover tools produced by the infamous Hacking Team as well as the Russian HammerToss malware delivered via Twitter.

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A lightning-fast raid on a cryptocurrency platform's website earned a hacker $7 million in three minutes yesterday. Moments after CoinDash launched its ICO (Initial Coin Offering, the cryptocurrency version of an IPO), the attacker modified the address of the wallet it used and watched as millions poured into their own account.

The website was shut down as soon as the hack was discovered, but by this time $7 million had already disappeared. CoinDash managed to gather $6 million from investors, but funds stopped arriving with the shutdown.

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Businesses aren’t investing enough to protect their businesses from data breaches. What’s more, even the funds they are investing are going down the wrong path.

New research from digital security firm Gemalto found that, despite the increasing number of data breaches and nearly 1.4 billion data records being lost or stolen in 2016, the vast majority of IT Professionals still believe perimeter security is effective at keeping unauthorized users out of their networks.

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The meeting between Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin was always going to generate a great deal of interest. After the two presidents had their first (official) meeting on Friday, Trump tweeted on Sunday that the pair has discussed "forming an impenetrable Cyber Security unit."

Considering Trump has accused Russia of hacking the US election, such an arrangement would seem unlikely. Nonetheless, the topic was broached. It was brought up "so that election hacking, & many other negative things, will be guarded and safe." But it didn’t take Trump long to back down from the idea.

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Criminals behind the recent Petya/NotPetya attack have made a fresh ransom demand as they look to continue their mayhem

A post on online hub DeepPaste said to be from the attackers is demanding 100 bitcoins ($250,000) to decrypt anything that's been affected by the recent attack. Motherboard managed to get in touch with one of the individuals claiming to be from the group. They tried the decryption on a file, and after a two-hour wait, it was successful.

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The latest addition to WikiLeaks' Vault 7 cache of CIA tools and documents gives details of tools used by the agency to attack Windows and Linux computers. The BothanSpy and Gyrfalcon projects can be used to intercept and exfiltrate SSH (Secure Shell) credentials.

BothanSpy is used to target Windows, while Gyrfalcon is used for Linux machines, with both working in different ways. A number of popular distros can be hit by Gyrfalcon, including CentOS, Debian, RedHat, openSUSE and Ubuntu, and both tools function as implants that steal credentials before transmitting them to a CIA server.

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Adding extra features like plugins and social media links makes websites more likely to be compromised according to a new report.

The study by website security company SiteLock finds that sites with between one and five plugins have 1.5 times more chance of being compromised than the average site.

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Thanks to its rapidly growing value, relative anonymity, and easy trading opportunities, the cryptocurrency market is a highly attractive target for hackers. Making things even more interesting, the major exchanges deal with significant volumes throughout the day, making them a prime target for cryptocurrency thefts.

Bithumb is among the biggest targets, being the fourth-largest cryptocurrency exchange by volume and the largest in South Korea. And last week it got hacked, with users estimated to have lost billions of won as a result. I say estimated because Bithumb hasn't gone public yet with an accurate figure -- or any figure for that matter.

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The Vault 7 leaks continue to flow thick and fast from WikiLeaks, shedding more and more light on the hacking and infiltration capabilities of the CIA. The latest batch details the OutlawCountry project which finds the CIA targeting Linux systems.

With Linux-based operating systems usually lauded for their impenetrability, news of a possible chink in the armour will undoubtedly cause concern. With OutlawCountry, it seems the CIA was able to redirect network traffic from a target machine to an agency-controlled machine for infiltration.

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An investigation by the Times has found that passwords belonging to British officials have been traded by Russian hackers. The passwords and email addresses of tens of thousands of politicians, senior police officers and diplomats were sold or swapped following an attack on LinkedIn in 2012.

As well as LinkedIn, some information seems to have been garnered from MySpace. The credentials for politicians, including education secretary Justine Greening and business secretary Greg Clark, were initially put on the market for sale or trade, but were later made available free of charge.

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Virgin Media is urging hundreds of thousands of customers with its Super Hub 2 router to change their passwords after a Which? investigation uncovered a way for hackers to gain access to the device.

If the password for the router is not changed from its default there is a risk from hacking, but Virgin Media said the risk is small. Nevertheless, as a precautionary measure a password change is the advice for more than 800,000 users.

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