Linux Hacks & Cracks - Page 53

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For Hackers, the Next Lock to Pick

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Hackers have broken into the cellphones of celebrities like Scarlett Johansson and Prince William. But what about the rest of us, who might not have particularly salacious photos or voice messages stored in our phones, but nonetheless have e-mails, credit card numbers and records of our locations?

MySQL.com Hacked to Serve Malware

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The website for the open-source MySQL database was hacked and used to serve malware to visitors Monday. Security vendor Armorize noticed the problem at around 5 a.m. Pacific Time Monday. Hackers had installed JavaScript code that threw a variety of known browser attacks at visitors to the site, so those with out-of-date browsers or unpatched versions of Adobe Flash, Reader or Java on their Windows PCs could have been quietly infected with malicious software.

Breaking Into the Big Screen

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Hacking "is very, very difficult to put into an interesting movie story, because the technology is buried in code and programming, and it's about the most uninteresting kind of thing you could ever depict anybody engaging in," says Donn Parker, a security expert who has consulted on numerous hacker films.

uTorrent, possibly BitTorrent Web sites hacked

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The Web site that hosts uTorrent was hacked by an unknown person or group early this morning. After initially stating that the "mainline" BitTorrent site had been hacked as well, the company now says that it doesn't think that BitTorrent.com was affected. BitTorrent, the owner of the Web sites and the torrent clients hosted there, reported in a blog post that the breach occurred around 4:20 a.m PT.

Return of the BIOS trojans

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Chinese AV vendor 360 has discovered a virus in the wild that makes its home in a computer's BIOS, where it remains hidden from conventional virus scanners. The contaminant, called Mebromi, first checks to see whether the victim's computer uses an Award BIOS. If so, it uses the CBROM command-line tool to hook its extension into the BIOS.

CA hack: more bogus certificates

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Dutch SSL Certificate Authority (CA) DigiNotar is still keeping a low profile regarding the extent of the recently disclosed intrusion by hackers. The source code of the Chromium browser project, on which Google Chrome is based, has now provided some evidence of the extent of the compromise: its list of blocked certificates has grown from 10 to 257.

Linux Kernel Host Kernel.org Breached

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The site that hosts the Linux kernel's source code, Kernel.org was compromised earlier this month. The discovery was made on August 28th, and steps are being taken now to enhance security for the site and recovery is underway. The kernel code repositories are believed to be unaffected.