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.

Millions of email accounts, passwords stolen by hackers

The passwords and other details of 16 million email users in Germany have been stolen, the country’s security agency has revealed.

Millions of email accounts, passwords stolen by hackers

Researchers and prosecutors stumbled upon the hacked accounts while conducting research on a botnet, a network of computers infected with malware.

Germany’s Federal Office for Information Security (BSI) has created a website to help people find out whether or not their e-mail was among those hacked. The site temporarily crashed on Tuesday due to heavy traffic. Users who submit their email address to the website will be sent an message if their account has been compromised.

“If that happens, then your computer is most likely infected with malware,” Tim Griese, with the Federal Office for Information Security, told the news agency DPA.

Authorities have not released information on who stole the e-mail accounts.

Gmail Users Should Have No Expectation of Privacy

Google’s legal counsel says Gmail users should have no legitimate expectation of privacy

Google : Don’t Expect Privacy

In response to a lawsuit Google has disclosed that, from the company’s perspective, no one should be expecting their emails to remain private. This is likely news to most gmail users who create a password thinking that limits access to their account and probably expect their emails to be private.

“Plantiffs accuse Google of violating the privacy of its users by mining their personal messages for information that it uses to inform which targeted ads it displays. The suit calls for Google to fully disclose exactly what information it’s taking from emails, and to pay damages for these alleged violations of privacy.

The company argued in its motion to dismiss the lawsuit that “all users of email must necessarily expect that their emails will be subject to automated processing. “

That is an interesting attitude. A clear implication would be allowing the NSA to automatically process everyone’s gmail account emails.

“Google asserts that, in principle, if you entrust your personal messages to a third party, you can’t expect that the third party won’t touch any of that information:

Just as a sender of a letter to a business colleague cannot be surprised that the recipient’s assistant opens the letter, people who use web-based email today cannot be surprised if their communications are processed by the recipient’s ECS provider in the course of delivery. Indeed, “a person has no legitimate expectation of privacy in information he voluntarily turns over to third parties.” Smith v. Maryland, 442 U.S. 735, 743-44 (1979).“

On the surface this seems reasonable, that once you send information to someone else you can’t expect them not to share it with other people. However, that is not what Google is saying.

Instead, Google is saying that users of gmail should realize that Google is the third party. By writing an email in gmail the user is essentially sending Google the email and therefore cannot expect privacy. If Google shares those emails with whoever it wants, well, you should have known better.

ABC website hacked

ABC website hacked and personal details exposed

The website of the top broadcasting agency in Australia i.e. the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (www.abc.net.au) was hacked last night by a hacker. The hacker apparently hacked the channel’s website as retaliation for the broadcast of an interview of a Dutch Anti Islam leader Geert Wilder on February 22^nd. The hacker also leaked personal details of more than 50,000 users on the ABC website and released them online during the night.

ABC website hacked and personal details exposed

The leaked data includes usernames, passwords, email addresses and residential addresses along with other critical sensitive information and more than a 1000 of these users happen to be government employees.

The hacker announced the hack on his twitter handle @Phr0zenM in a tweet, “ABC hacked for giving a platform for Geert Wilders to spread hatred #OpWilders – database leaked!” at around 1pm. Certainly this person is protesting for the airing of the interview of the Dutch leader and performed the hack as part of Operation Wilder.  The hacker infiltrated the website of the program Making Australia Happy and from there the data was stolen.

ABC took prompt action as soon as it was intimated of the hacking. The spokesperson for the channel addressed the press via email and mentioned that the channel had been

“made aware that an ABC television programme website was hacked. The website relates to the ABC television programme Making Australia Happy, which aired in late 2010“.

 “At this stage, we are still investigating the details of the breach. However, we do know that it has exposed the name, username and a… version of the password that audience members used to register on the programme website,” she said.

 “As soon as the ABC was made aware of this activity the site was shut down.” 

Moreover, she also mentioned that “The ABC will be in contact with audience members who have been directly affected,” and stated that the attack had originated in some overseas location and that an activist had claimed direct responsibility for the breach.

The leaking of personal details of so many people has generated a lot of outcry by the Australian public and many are feeling anxious. One Mr. Tim Gresham of New South Wales told that he was appalled that his personal details had been leaked online and said that

“This hacker has probably got a lot of information about me, intimate information about me, having an idea of what that website asked me in terms of my relationships and personal life,”

“They’re asking a lot of people some very intimate stuff on that website, so these hackers have got some fairly intimate information on a number of people if they’ve managed to hack that website. This is big.“

However, the Federal Privacy Commissioner Timothy Pilgrim is pleased with the swift response of the channel in this matter and said that he will not investigate the matter personally as he found the handling done by the channel adequate.

The hacker, however, is not the only one to protest against Wilder’s visit to Australia as people had took to streets in Sydney where he made the speech and a minor scuffle had erupted between protesters and the authorities.