Showing posts with label cyber attack. Show all posts
Showing posts with label cyber attack. Show all posts

Friday, February 13, 2015

#Anonymous Hackers Expose Child Sex Abusers

The network says it will publish information - including details of "torture and murder" - as part of 'Operation Death Eaters'.


 By Tom Parmenter,

Activist network Anonymous is planning a day of action to expose establishment child abuse and cover ups.

The group, best known for high-profile computer hacks, has codenamed its latest task 'Operation Death Eaters' and is demanding an end to secrecy around abuse networks.

It says it will collect and then publish mass information on abuse scandals in the UK and around the world in the hope of ensuring people are fully aware of "paedo-sadist" abuse.

A London-based activist, who uses the pseudonym Jake Davis, told Sky News: "This isn't a situation where we are looking to create mayhem. It's about giving the public information so we can confront these problems that go back decades.

"The stories that are coming out are the torture and murder of children with our trusted politicians and that is unacceptable.

"You have to ask: Why are they protecting them?"

The group has recently published videos to YouTube promising to expose "paedo-sadists" and warning abusers that they should have been "expecting us".

There are concerns though about Anonymous' plan to expose abusers and whether its activities may hamper ongoing investigations - potentially putting children at further risk.

Former head of the Child Exploitation and Online Protection centre (CEOP), Jim Gamble, told Sky News: "It's fraught with so many difficulties.

"If there are people that have skills and abilities within Anonymous who actually want to do something positive to help law enforcement and others to inhibit paedophiles operating so freely online, then coming forward and working in some kind of framework would be great.

"But in the absence of that framework then there is the chance there could be some reckless disclosure, and from that reckless disclosure lives, and innocent lives, could be ruined.

"People make mistakes. We, during my time in law enforcement, made mistakes.

"We had information that we thought meant one thing and when we got to the back end of it, it actually meant something different.

"So jumping to conclusions, sharing information that hasn't been verified and doing it in a mass public way is going to have a far bigger downside than the deterrents on the upside will be."

Anonymous said activists were due hand out flyers on its day of action at events later in Glasgow, London, Leeds, Rochdale and Birmingham.

Co-ordinator Heather Marsh told Sky News the purpose of Operation Death Eaters is to open people's eyes to the scale of abuse networks.

She said: "We need the database to connect all news articles and court cases because we cannot visualise a beach if we are only ever presented with isolated grains of sand."

Earlier this week the group claimed to have closed down Twitter and Facebook accounts used by Islamic State (IS) terrorists, also known as ISIS.

Another new video posted to YouTube warned: "ISIS, we will hunt you, take down your sites, accounts, emails and expose you."

Its campaign against jihadists' websites started after the shootings at Charlie Hebdo magazine in Paris.

A National Crime Agency spokesman said: "We understand anyone wanting to help protect children, but would always urge against any action which might jeopardise existing law enforcement investigations or other public inquiries.

"Anybody who thinks they have information relating to child sexual exploitation or abuse can report it to the NCA's CEOP Command via our website."

Friday, January 30, 2015

Hackers target UW website with ties to terror group

SEATTLE -- A group with ties to the Islamic State is claiming responsibility for hacking into several areas of a University of Washington website.




 The Moroccan Islamic Union-Mail posted pictures to Facebook Thursday of defaced UW website pages. The hacked site shows a photo of a memorial for American soldiers and warns other Americans in Iraq.

"Again site down. Iraq is the cemetery of American ... Hello to the death that awaits you at the hands of the Mujahideen in Iraq," the message reads.

The group has claimed responsibility for past hacks on various governmental and religious websites.

University of Washington officials sent out a statement on Thursday acknowledging that some websites were defaced, but they avoided calling the incident a "hack." The officials say they're investigating and have taken actions to resolve the issue.

As of Thursday night, at least one section of the website was still showing the message posted by the Moroccan Islamic Union-Mail.

Thursday, January 29, 2015

Facebook outage yesterday—a technical glitch, not a cyber attack


The Facebook outage yesterday, which lasted for about one hour, was an internal technical glitch, said Facebook in a statement on its website.

“This was not the result of a third party attack but instead occurred after we introduced a change that affected our configuration systems,” said the statement.

Facebook and its photo site Instagram were unavailable to its users between 7.15 pm and 8.15 pm NZ time across the United States, Europe and Asia.

The Facebook breakdown flooded Twitter with complains and jokes, with “#facebookdown”and “#SocialMeltdown2015” trending.

Some suggested Lizard Squad, a hacker group that claimed to attack Microsoft and Sony gaming networks over Christmas, were behind the outage. A twitter read, “Facebook, Instagram, Tinder, AIM, Hipchat #offline #LizardSquad.”

For legions of users, it was just a blip while companies dependent upon Facebook, such as Tinder and over 75,000 other websites, were affected by the disruption.

A technical fault sounded more plausible than a cyberattack because a DDoS attack would have made sites inaccessible to its users rather than displaying an error message, said Guillermo Lafuente, security consultant at MWR InfoSecurity.

Additionally, the outage was global and had it been a cybercrime, the impact would have been localized to one particular area as Facebook has multiple data centers.

Facebook, headquartered at California, has more than 1.35 billion active users globally, with more than 80% of its users outside the US and Canada.

Facebook had suffered a massive outage in September 2010 that lasted for about 2.5 hours. Early then outages were common as the system was not robust. However, off late a Californian company, Menlo Park, routinely checks its infrastructure and resilience.

Wednesday, January 28, 2015

Hackers en Bolivia y Chile toman parte del diferendo marítimo atacando páginas web


El grupo @BoliviaNextHackers se atribuyó hoy el ataque cibernético al portal chileno de promoción de sitios turísticos. Poco después, un grupo chileno asumió la autoría del hackeo de la página de la Armada Boliviana.

 La Razón Digital / Carlos Corz / La Paz 
10:45 / 28 de enero de 2015
 
El diferendo marítimo entre Bolivia y Chile pasó a ser un asunto de hackers en las últimas horas, ya que ayer tomaron control de la página web de la Armada Boliviana y poco después, en respuesta, fue hackeado el portal de un servicio privado que promociona sitios turísticos chilenos.

Los hackers bloquearon la página de una de las fuerzas de la institución armada con frases como “Nunca tendrán mar”, mientras que en el portal de la empresa turística parte de la respuesta señala: “…Trágense su mar¡ (sic)”.

El grupo @BoliviaNextHackers se atribuye el ataque cibernético al portal chileno con los créditos de "ToxicDz" y "N3v3rm0r3".

Chilean Hackers asumió la responsabilidad del bloqueo de la página de la institución armada.

 

Social media sites knocked offline, #LizardSquad hack group claims responsibility

 

 

The hacking group Lizard Squad has claimed responsibility for what it said was an attack that briefly knocked several social networking sites, including Facebook and Instagram, offline early Tuesday. 


The Facebook glitch was reported in the United States, Asia, Australia, and the U.K. and affected access to the site from personal computers and from Facebook's mobile app. The social media giant's Instagram service was also inaccessible.

Lizard Squad claimed responsibility for the outage in a Twitter posting that listed the sites it said it had affected, which included matchmaking app Tinder, AIM, and HipChat. The message concluded with the hashtagged statements "offline" and "LizardSquad."

Facebook denied that it had been hacked and claimed that the disruption was caused by a technical change it made to the site. On its website for developers, Facebook said the "major outage" lasted one hour.

The LizardSquad group has previously claimed to have been responsible for a Christmas Day outage that affected Xbox and PlayStation Live services late last year. On Monday, the group said it had hacked the website of Malaysia Airlines, changing the site to display a message reading "404 - Plane Not Found" and that it was "Hacked by Cyber Caliphate," with a photo of one of the airline's Airbus A380 superjumbo jets. The browser tab for the website said "ISIS will prevail", a reference to the Islamic State terror group.

Lizard Squad occasionally makes tongue-in-cheek claims to support Islamic State, although there are no known links between the groups. The group also claimed that it was "going to dump some loot found on malaysiaairlines.com servers soon," and posted a link to a screenshot of what appeared to be a passenger flight booking from the airline's internal email system.

Facebook has about 1.35 billion active users and Instagram has some 300 million.
News of the Facebook outage set rival social network Twitter alight, propelling the hashtag "facebookdown" to top trend on the site. It comes ahead of Facebook reporting its quarterly earnings on Wednesday.

As access to Facebook returned, some users in Asia reported that the site was loading slowly or not offering full functionality.

The temporary loss of service may be Facebook's biggest outage since Sept. 24, 2010 when it was down for about 2.5 hours.