Lulzsec hackers to be sentenced for cyber attacks on the CIA and Pentagon

A court has heard that four UK-based hackers involved with the Lulzsec group thought of themselves as being "modern-day pirates".

Ryan Ackroyd, Jake Davis, Mustafa al-Bassam and Ryan Cleary have all pleaded guilty to hacking offences.

Cleary has also pleaded guilty to possession of images showing child abuse, which were found by police on his hard drive.

The men will be sentenced at Southwark Crown Court later this week.

Lulzsec carried out a series of attacks in 2011. Targets included Sony Pictures, video games maker EA, the News International media group and Britain's Serious Organised Crime Agency (Soca).

'International notoriety'

Ackroyd, 26, from Mexborough, South Yorkshire, has admitted stealing data from Sony. The former soldier was also responsible for redirecting visitors trying to visit the Sun newspaper's site to a fake story about News Corp chairman Rupert Murdoch committing suicide.

He has pleaded guilty to carrying out an unauthorised act to impair the operation of a computer.

Bassam, 18, from south London, Davis, 20, from Lerwick, Shetland, and Cleary, 21, from Wickford, Essex, all pleaded guilty to two charges - hacking and launching cyber-attacks against organisations including the CIA and Soca.

In addition, Cleary pleaded guilty to a further four charges, including hacking into the US Air Force's computers and possession of indecent images of babies and children.

Prosecutor Sandip Patel said that unlike the others, Cleary was not a core member of Lulzsec although he had wanted to be.

"It's clear from the evidence that they intended to achieve extensive national and international notoriety and publicity," he said.

"This is not about young immature men messing about. They are at the cutting edge of a contemporary and emerging species of criminal offender known as a cybercriminal."

Judge Deborah Taylor will sentence the men after considering mitigating factors highlighted by their lawyers.

Cleary's lawyer said his client suffered from Asperger's syndrome, which had been misdiagnosed as attention deficit disorder.

Botnet attack

Lulzsec's name is combination of the acronym Lol - meaning laugh out loud - and security.

It emerged as a splinter-group from the hacking collective Anonymous two years ago.

Mr Patel said the spin-off lacked the "libertarian" political agenda of the larger group. Instead, its stated goal was to laugh at others' flawed security measures "just because we could".

This involved stealing emails, credit card details and passwords from their targets' computer servers and crashing victim's websites with distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks. This involved flooding organisations' web servers with requests sent from hijacked computers used as part of a botnet.

Lulzsec's original ringleader is alleged to be another man - US-based Hector Monsegur, also known as Sabu. He was arrested in June 2011 and later co-operated with the FBI to help it identify other members of Lulzsec. Monsegur has yet to be sentenced.

A 24-year-old Australian has also been arrested and accused of attacking and defacing a government website as part of Lulzsec's campaign.

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Hacker sentenced for funding terrorist groups

A hacker 'Cahya Fitrianta' sentenced to eight years in prison by the West Jakarta District Court judges for hacking into many economic websites to steal money and funding that money to terrorist groups.

He is also ordered to pay a Rp 500 million ($51,000) fine. He is charged with breaking into many sites, for running online fraud of billions of dollars and fund that money to terrorist training in Poso, Central Sulawesi.

Cahya was arrested in May last year in a Bandung hotel. The defendant, along with another man, Rizki Gunawan. Police in May arrested Rizki, accusing him of hacking a marketing firm’s website to steal money in order to fund militant training.

They both accused of channeling money to terrorism suspect Umar Patek, who was sentenced this year to 20 years for his role in the 2002 Bali bombing.

“Aside from engaging in a vicious conspiracy, the defendant was also found guilty of laundering money, which he obtained from hacking the www.speedline.com website and used the proceeds to fund military training in Poso”

Meanwhile, the prosecutor decided to appeal because the sentence received is lower than demand and even it is lighter than the 12 years prosecutors.

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YouTube, Gmail, Google, Intel Turkmenistan Sites Defaced by Iranian Hackers

Users from Turkmenistan who have attempted to access websites such as YouTube.tm, Gmail.tm, MSDN.tm, Intel.tm, Xbox.tm, Orkut.tm or Google.tm over the past few hours have been greeted with a defacement message posted by hackers.

Cyber News reports that this is the work of Iranian hackers.

The sites themselves have not been breached. For all we know, many of the domains might not even be actively used.

The hackers have actually penetrated the systems of nic.tm, the administrator of the .TM top level domains.

The attackers claim they’ve identified an SQL Injection vulnerability in nic.tm, which has allowed them to steal and leak all the user credentials stored in the company's databases.

Besides leaking the data, the hackers have also gained access to DNS records. By altering them, they’ve been able to redirect the visitors of the aforementioned websites to their own domain.

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Yamaha and Mitsubishi India website was Hacked and Leaked by Ur0b0r0x

Yamaha and Mitsubishi India has been hit by hackers on one of their insecure websites. The attack which is on the Yamaha & Mitsubishi India website has been carried out by Ur0br0x and contains emails, usernames and passwords.

The hacker gain access of the website a couple of hours ago. Downloaded the database and leaked it publicly on Pastebin

This is not the first time when Yamahaserver have been compromised, in past @_VAND and other hackers have also gained access of the servers.
 

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Brazil Hackers Group Leaked FBI Official Database

The official website server of Federal Bureau of investigation (FBI) has been hacked and database has bee Leaked by UG Brazil Hack3r Group.

The hacker gain access of the website a couple of hours ago. dowloaded the database and leaked it publicly on pastebin.



The Leak data contains address, server address, network ip, Bureau's address, Vulnerable open ports in FBI intercomunnication Intranet and total 155 official email address and with there plain text email passwords of FBI officials.

This is not the first time when FBI's servers have been compromised, in past Anonymous and other hackers have also gained access of the servers.

The complete details related to FBI's leaked database can be see here

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NBC website was Hacked

Several NBC websites were hacked on Sunday (04-11-2012) by a Hacktivist group calling itself "pyknic" and suggesting a possible link to the cyber-attack group Anonymous.

It appeared that the "defacement" of the affected sub-sites was cleaned up in a couple of hours. NBC and its various websites

Appeared to be functioning normally as of Sunday evening Eastern time. However, older versions maintained by search engines such as Google and Bing still bore the message "hacked by pyknic" a possible reference to an obscure hacker or "hacktivist" group.

The message said "REMEMBER, REMEMBER THE FIFTH OF NOVEMBER, THE GUNPOWDER TREASON AND PLOT. I KNOW OF NO REASON WHY THE GUNPOWDER TREASON SHOULD EVER BE FORGOT."

Additionally, the site's attackers claimed to have stolen user names and passwords from NBC's site, but NBC hasn't officially verified the these claims, nor suggested which of its users might be affected if the attackers' claims are actually true.

 

 

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Assange Book Cypherpunks

Julian Assange is set to publish a book based on his interview with the people he believes know the solution to the problems of privacy and freedom.

­The book called ‘Cypherpunks: Freedom and the Future of the Internet,’ was written by Assange with three co-authors: Jacob Appelbaum, Jeremie Zimmermann and Andy Muller-Maguhn.

“In March 2012 I gathered together three of today’s leading cypherpunks to discuss the resistance,” said Assange, referring to the 8th episode of the Julian Assange Show aired by RT in the summer.

“Two of them, besides myself, have been targeted by law enforcement agencies as a result of their work to safeguard privacy and to keep governments accountable. Their words, and their stories, need to be heard,” quoted the New York Times.

The members of the Cypherpunks movement, shared their stories with Julian Assange whilst sitting down to discuss the problems of privacy, online communication and freedom on the Internet. The new 192-page book is based on the transcripts of the interview show, but also incorporates many ideas that remained behind the scenes.

Cypherpunks is a movement originating from Cypherpunks’ Electronic Mailing List, which was set up by activists aiming to improve Internet privacy and security through proactive use of cryptography. The movement has been active since the late 1980s. WikiLeaks is one of the many projects derived from Cypherpunks.

The publisher OR Books announced that the work is scheduled for release on November 26 in paperback and as an e-book. The publisher did not disclose how much Assange would receive for this new work.

The publication notice comes a year after the release of Julian Assange: The Unauthorized Autobiography, which was published against Assange’s wishes after he cancelled his contract with the publishing house but failed to return his advance.

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CYBER WAR TARGETS MIDDLE EAST OIL COMPANIES

Middle Eastern oil and gas companies have been targeted in massive attacks on their computer networks in an increasingly open cyber war where a new virus was discovered just this past week.

The United States and Israel, believed to behind the first cyber sabotage campaign that targeted Iran's nuclear programme, are now worried about becoming targeted themselves.

"There have been increasing efforts to carry out cyberattacks on Israel's computer infrastructure," Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said earlier this month, without giving details.

Netanyahu spoke just days after Washington issued a veiled warning to Iran over digital attacks and outlined a new digital warfare doctrine.

US Defense Secretary Leon Panetta also referred publicly for the first time about the "Shamoon" virus that hit Saudi Arabia's state oil company Aramco in August, disabling more than 300,000 computers.

The virus also hit Rasgas, a joint venture between US oil firm Exxon Mobil Corp and state-controlled Qatar Petroleum.

Panetta called the sophisticated virus "the most destructive attack that the private sector has seen to date."

It took Aramco, the world's biggest oil company, two weeks after the August 15 attack to restore its main internal network, but the group said that oil production had not been disrupted.

However the threat that digital attacks could cripple vital infrastructure is real, with Panetta warning of the possibility of a "cyber-Pearl Harbor" to justify a policy of moving aggressively against threats.

A disruption to Saudi Arabia's oil exports could cause oil prices to spike from their already elevated prices and tip the fragile global economy into recession.

In what was interpreted as a veiled threat against Iran, Panetta said the US military "has developed the capability to conduct effective operations to counter (cyber) threats to our national interests."

A senior US administration official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, told AFP the cyber attack on the Gulf oil giants was believed to be carried out by a "state actor" and acknowledged that Iran would be a prime suspect.

US officials have "more than a suspicion" that Iran was to blame for the August attacks, said James Lewis, who has worked for the State Department and other government agencies on national security and cyber issues and who is now a senior fellow at the Center

for Strategic and International Studies think tank.

He said the US authorities were used to cyber espionage from Russia and China, but were surprised by the swift rise in Iran's digital warfare capability.

"A lot of people didn't think it would develop this quickly," he said.

However it is unsurprising that Iran would seek a cyber warfare capability after having hundreds of centrifuges used to enrich uranium ruined by the Stuxnet virus in 2010.

Stuxnet marked a transformation for computer viruses, which had previously been used for spying or by organised crime, into a tool for sabotage.

It is widely suspected to have been the work of the United States and Israel, which believe Iran's nuclear programme aims to produce a bomb.

Tehran insists its nuclear programme is for peaceful uses only.

Iran has been victim of other digital attacks as well.

In April it was forced to unplug computers at its Kharg oil terminal from the Internet after they came under cyber attack, and in November last year an explosion at a missile terminal was attributed by US media to a computer virus.

Kaspersky Labs, which detected the "Flame" and "Gauss" viruses believed behind those attacks, announced Monday it had found a new cyber espionage weapon it dubbed "miniFlame".

It described the virus as "a high precision, surgical attack tool ... designed to steal data and control infected systems during targeted cyber espionage operations."

Kaspersky said "we have only just scratched the surface of the massive cyber espionage operations ongoing in the Middle East. Their full purpose remains obscure and the identity of the victims and the attackers remains unknown."

Christian Harbulot, the head of the Economic Warfare School in Paris, warned that "it is extremely difficult to undo the knot" in what is also a propaganda war.

He said Iran could be behind the "Shamoon" virus, but that "it could be an additional pretext to weaken Iran" which is already under international embargo over its nuclear programme.

For Nicolas Arpagian at France's National Institute of Advanced Security and Justice Studies, the latest attacks "show that arsenal of digital weapons is getting bigger, and that when you have such an arsenal the use of cyberweapons is bound to become more commonplace."

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HSBC Banking website Hit by Anonymous DDOS Attack

Major bank HSBC's websites are now all back online, following a denial-of-service (DoS) attack that left customers locked out of their account for nearly 10 hours.

People first began reporting problems accessing us.hsbc.co.uk, hsbc.co.uk and offshore.hsbc.com on Twitter on Thursday at around 5:45pm in the UK, saying they were unable to log in and use the services.
Others said they could not get to First Direct's website. First Direct, which does online and telephone banking only, is part of the HSBC group of companies.
On Friday, HSBC said its sites around the world were now back online.
"All HSBC websites have been available since 3am UK time. Thank you for your patience," the bank said in a post to its Twitter account on Friday morning.
According to the bank, its customers' personal details were not compromised in the attack, which disrupted online services but did not affect the other services such as the use of credit cards, debit cards or cash machines.
A hacker with apparent links to Anonymous has laid claim to the attack, and the Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Cyber Fighters group is also suspected of being behind it. The latter, which claims to be a Muslim activist group, made a now-removed post to Pastebin with a timetable of attacks on named financial institutions. Bank of America, Wells Fargo and Ally Financial are among a number of banks to have seen disruption to their sites in the past five weeks, according to reports.

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