UK arrests teen suspected of hacking CIA chief

British authorities, with help from the FBI, have arrested a teenager who infiltrated the personal email account of the director of the CIA and posting personal details online.

The 16-year-old boy was arrested in the East Midlands on Tuesday Feb 09 as part of an investigation in to the data breach of John Brennan’s emails last year.

For the past several months, a group calling itself “Crackas With Attitude” has been disclosing private information associated with such high-ranking officials as CIA Director John Brennan, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson.

Information about rank-and-file employees working for the FBI, Justice Department and the Department of Homeland Security were posted online this week, though sources described the pilfered information as amounting to an internal phone directory.

Authorities suspect so-called “social engineering” may have helped those responsible gain access to the federal systems, according to one U.S. official.

But a spokesman for the South East Regional Organized Crime Unit would neither confirm nor deny what he called “speculation” linking the arrest to the hacks targeting U.S. officials.

Social engineering essentially involves a hacker gaining access to a system by sending an email to someone and pretending to be a known or trusted associate of the recipient.

“There is no indication at this time that there is any breach of sensitive or personally identifiable information,” DHS said in a statement earlier this week.

But officials expressed concern that more sensitive information was accessed and could be released.

In October, a personal AOL email account associated with CIA Director Brennan, and containing personally identifiable information, was hacked, as was an account linked to DHS Secretary Johnson.

Sources said it did not appear Brennan used the account for government business after he became CIA director. Johnson’s targeted account also was not used regularly, sources said at the time.

U.S. authorities began to identify what they thought was a group of suspects at least two months ago, ultimately narrowing in on the 16-year-old in England, the sources said.

Suspected Cyber Criminal Arrested In South London

A 28 year old man has been arrested in the area of New Addington, Croydon in South London in connection with an online banking scam during the wee hours of March 27, 2013. The arrest was made by the Metropolitan Police Central e-Crime Unit (PCeU) and the Serious Organized Crime Agency (SOCA).

Suspected cyber criminal arrested in south London

According to the Metropolitan Police, “This arrest is in connection with an ongoing operation investigating the distribution of malware designed to infect personal computers via the internet and then capture the user’s personal details to facilitate fraudulent transactions.”

Moreover, the police said that all the electric equipment and computer belonging to the man was seized for further investigation. The metropolitan police has posted the mechanism of such malware and its use in perpetrating fraudulent brank transactions in detail on their website and have also given the necessary precautions and safety measures that must be adopted by the public so as to stay clear of such scams. They advised the people to regularly update their antivirus and anti-spamming software for preventing such incidents of internet fraud.

The growing number of cyber crime incidents and similar frauds has led the legislation to propose the development of a specialized department to tackle cyber crime and the necessary procedure to establish such a cell is under consideration in the Parliament. The need for a special cell is growing by the day as numerous internet and malware based frauds are taking place in the United Kingdom and losses worth millions have been incurred by many during the last year and  this year has also seen a spate of cyber attacks.

BSNL telecom server hacked by Anonymous Group

BSNL telecom server hacked by Anonymous Group against Section 66A of IT Act

The Indian chapter of the hacking collective Anonymous has hacked the website of the largest state run telecom services provider in the country, the Bharatiya Sanchar Nigam Limited (BSNL). The hack was done in order to protest against the section 66A of the IT act, a law that is concerned with internet censorship and content regulation due to which a cartoonist named Aseem Trivedi was arrested on charges of sedition a while back by the Indian authorities when he put caricatures regarding the constitution and corruption in a rally. The company which is the fourth largest telecom provider and the biggest fixed telephony provider in India was hacked todayafternoon and the website was defaced. The BSNL website was last hacked in 2011 by a Pakistani hacker. Anonymous, which does not have a record of being active in India, rose to prominence when it hacked the Reliance Communications server earlier this year.

The homepage of the website was hacked and defaced with the message ” Hacked by Anonymous India, support Aseem trivedi (cartoonist) and alok dixit on the hunger strike, remove IT Act 66a, databases of all 250 bsnl site has been deleted………….Do not think of BACKUP” and showed an image of Aseem Trivedi being arrested by the police.

BSNL telecom server hacked by Anonymous Group

The hackers further claimed that they had hacked all the sites under BSNL and deleted their databases. To prove their claims, the hackers pasted the dump file of all the sites on pastebin. Upon analysis of the dump file, it can easily be observed that the level of security on the sites is really not up to the mark and is quite pathetic, and many sites had passwords such as “password123”, “password”, “vpt123”, “enquiry999” were being used. Such easy passwords can be bruteforced by hackers in minutes and this gave the hackers easy access to their sites and this carelessness has been criticized by one and all. The site has returned to  normal level of functioning at the time of writing.

 The Section 66A of the IT act is a law that provisions punishment for sending offensive messages through any communication medium or service and a censorship on any information offensive or menacing in character which causes annoyance, inconvenience, hatred etc. by making use of a communication device or a computer. The law also places a punishment on deceptive or offensive emails and messages and all of the above mentioned offenses can be given an imprisonment of up to 3 years with fine.

The Anonymous have urged all to support them and Aseem Trivedi in their fight against Internet censorship so that the government is forced to roll back the controversial law. The website of the Union IT Minister Kapil Sibal was also hacked last month by Anonymous India in regard with the issue of internet censorship.

The protests against censorship of the Internet in India has been gaining momentum in India with many experts and well known personalities criticizing it and terming it as an oppressor of the right to freedom of expression and speech and this incident will surely rouse the government.

Symantec Norton Utilities 2006 source code leaked by Anonymous

Hackers associate with the Anonymous hacktivist collective published the source code files for Symantec’s Norton Utilities 2006 product on the Pirate Bay Bit Torrent website on Monday, but according to the security vendor the same files had been released in january.

The Pirate Bay torrent was accompanied by a message in which the hackers reffered to Symantec as “the worth security vendor on planet earth” and hinted that the release is not the result of a new security breach. “As many of you know this was planned back before Sabu was arrested, ” the hacker said.

Symantec Norton Utilities 2006 source code leaked by Anonymous

Sabu, the founder of Anonymous- affiliated hacker group LulzSec, was arrested in june 2011 and subsequently worked as an informant for the FBI. However, the public didn’t learn about his arrest and FBI involvement until march 2012.

“Symantec is aware of the claims made online that a group has posted the source code for Norton Utilities 2006, “Cris Paden, manager of corporate communications at semantec, said Tuesday via email. “We have analyzed the code that was already posted by another group in january 2012.”

At the begining of January, a group of hackers called Lords of Dharmaraja, also affiliated with Anonymous, claimed to have stolen the source code for multiple Symantec products and tried to extort money from the company.

A few days later, the group released the source code for the 2006 version of Norton Utilities with the intention of helping a Washington state man’s lawsuit against Symantec. The man had filed a complaint claiming that the trial versions of Norton Utiilities and several other Symantec products display misleading information about the “health” of their user’s computers in order to scare them into buying the full version of the products.

Symantec Norton Utilities 2006 source code leaked by Anonymous

Norton Utilities is a product that includes different Windows system optimization and maintainance tools like registry defragmenter, registry cleaner, file recovery, services manager and others.

” As we stated at that time, the 2006 version of Norton Utilities is no longer sold or supported,”Paden said. The current version of Norton Utilities has been completely rebuilt and shares no common code with Norton Utilities 2006.”

Furthermore, the code’s leak poses no security threat to users of the latest version of Norton Utilities or other Symantec products, Paden Said.