Patriots’ defense writes alternate ending for Super Bowl

PHOENIX — Vince Wilfork was on the field when the Patriots defense let the Giants drive for the game-winning touchdown in the Super Bowl seven years ago.

He was on the field again three years ago when New England’s defense again couldn’t stop Eli Manning from leading the Giants down the field for the game-winning score in the final minutes.

This time, Wilfork and the defense finally got their redemption.

“To be a defensive player, to be on the field and put a stamp on it for us, that’s the most amazing feeling right now,” Wilfork said shortly after New England’s wild 28-24 win over the Seahawks in Super Bowl XLIX. “All year, we talked as a defense that we wanted to make plays when it counted. We wanted our teammates to count on us.”

And they delivered.

It took a total team effort, of course, to keep Seattle off the scoreboard for the final 19:54 of the game. After the Seahawks took a 24-14 lead, they gained just one first down on their next three possessions and punted all three times.

But the key play — the one Patriots fans will tell their grandkids about — was rookie Malcolm Butler’s interception in the end zone on second and goal from the 1 with 26 seconds left in the game.

“He just went down in history,” safety Patrick Chung said.

Seahawks coach Pete Carroll will be second-guessed for eternity for calling a pass on second down from the 1-yard line, especially with Marshawn Lynch running so well. Lynch rushed for 102 yards and a touchdown Sunday, and he had just rushed for 4 yards on the previous play.

“I think everybody was expecting run when you have Marshawn Lynch,” linebacker Dont’a Hightower said.

Everyone except Carroll and Butler, that is. Carroll explained that he didn’t like the matchup against New England’s goal-line package, which had a lot of beef up front — Wilfork, Alan Branch, Chris Jones, Sealver Siliga, Rob Ninkovich, Jamie Collins, Akeem Ayers, and Hightower. Carroll viewed second and 1 as almost a throw-away play, and if the Seahawks didn’t score there, he planned on running the ball on third and fourth down.

“It’s not the right matchup for us to run the football, so on second down we throw the ball, really, to kind of waste that play,” Carroll said. “No second thoughts or no hesitation in that at all.”

And credit Butler and the Patriots for doing their homework. They noticed the Seahawks came out in their three-receiver set, with Jermaine Kearse and Ricardo Lockette stacked on the right side.

“In preparation I remembered the formation they were in — two receiver stack. I just knew they were running a pick route,” Butler said.

Sure enough, Kearse ran a clear-out, and Lockette tried to run a quick slant underneath him. But Butler jumped the play perfectly and beat Lockette to the football, hauling in the interception and holding on for dear life. It was the first NFL interception for Butler, an undrafted rookie out of West Alabama, and he couldn’t have picked a better time for it.

“Goal line, three cornerbacks, you know they’re going to throw it,” Butler said. “I had a feeling I was going to make a big play, but not that big.”

“Boy, this is a hard thing to take,” Carroll said.

The script was different in this Super Bowl, but it almost finished like the last two. Just two plays before his interception, Butler was almost the Super Bowl goat, allowing a 33-yard pass to Kearse that he tipped in the air, was bobbled several times, and miraculously fell into Kearse’s lap. This was David Tyree, all over again.

Two plays later, though, Butler flipped the script.

“We call him ‘Scrap,’ because the first time we saw him, he was just so scrappy, around the ball the whole time,” Wilfork said of Butler. “That moment with him making that play, it’s just a fairytale end to the book because of what he’s done all year for us.”

The final sequence perfectly encapsulated the Patriots’ defensive performance on Sunday night — bad plays followed by spectacular plays. The Patriots completely shut down the Seahawks in the first quarter, holding them to just 15 yards of offense, while Wilson didn’t complete his first pass until less than six minutes remained in the second quarter. The Patriots did a good job of keeping Wilson in the pocket, and did a good job of swarming to Lynch.

But the Seahawks woke up in the second quarter thanks to unheralded receiver Chris Matthews, a former Arena and Canadian league player who entered Sunday’s game with zero career NFL catches.

But Matthews is the Seahawks’ biggest target at 6 feet 5 inches, and used every inch to his advantage. Matched up on Kyle Arrington, listed 7 inches shorter, Matthews caught a 44-yard jump ball in the second quarter and a 45-yarder in the third quarter to help Seattle crawl back into the game and eventually take the lead. He also caught a jump ball over Logan Ryan, listed at 6 inches shorter, for an 11-yard touchdown catch right before the half.

So the Patriots did what they do best — make halftime adjustments. Arrington and Ryan were taken out of the game in the third quarter, and Brandon Browner, the NFL’s tallest cornerback at 6-4, was moved over to Matthews.

“Kyle, no disrespect to my buddy, but that was just a mismatch,” Browner said. “Kyle was actually in good position, but the guy got him by a whole foot. I just said, ‘Let me get him. I match his size.’ ” 

With Browner matching him inch-for-inch, Matthews didn’t have another catch.

“I just match up well with big guys,” he said.

The Patriots were as stunned as everyone when Kearse made his circus catch late in the fourth quarter.

“My mom said she stopped watching in the last two minutes and just prayed,” safety Devin McCourty said.

But they fought through adversity all season, and stressed to each other in the huddle to do it one more time, and to just make one more play.

“We never lost faith, we never stopped believing,” Wilfork said. “To win the Super Bowl by a defensive stop, I’m telling you, it’s priceless.”

Islamic State Terror Group Makes Alliance With Anti-Israel Hackers to Increase Cyber Attacks

A number of Twit­ter accounts promoting the Islamic State terrorist group are col­lab­o­rat­ing with anti-Israel hack­ers in an effort to increase cyber attacks on behalf of the terror organization, the Anti-Defamation League reported on Thursday.

 The Alazm Cen­ter Twit­ter account posted a message on Jan. 13 asking hack­ers to con­tact them. Since then, a group of anti-Israel hack­ers called “Ter­ror­ists Team for Elec­tronic Jihad” has claimed respon­si­bil­ity for sev­eral attacks against Israeli web­sites in the name of the Islamic State.

The hackers said they breached the web­site of a secu­rity con­trac­tor in Israel, a tour orga­nizer and other Israeli busi­nesses, according to ADL. Vis­i­tors are redirected to web­sites fea­tur­ing the name and flag of the Islamic State, along with the sig­na­ture of the hacking group.

“Ter­ror­ists Team for Elec­tronic Jihad” declared their allegiance to the Islamic State in a video posted on YouTube on Nov. 29, 2014, ADL noted. They also have a Face­book page and a Twit­ter account that include mes­sages in sup­port of Islamic State terrorists.

The group of hackers declared respon­si­bil­ity for the anti-Israel attacks in a state­ment posted on JustPaste.it, a file-shar­ing website the Islamic State uses to anonymously pub­lish its own state­ments.

The message said, “Thanks to God, below is today’s sum­mary of hack­ing web­sites which is part of a cam­paign against Zion­ist web­sites” and included a list of indi­vid­ual hack­ers affil­i­ated with the group. Sev­eral of the hackers took part in other cyber attacks against Israeli web­sites on behalf of groups in North Africa, according to ADL.

Videos of the hackings were posted on Aljyyosh, an online forum for Arab hack­ers claiming respon­si­bil­ity for steal­ing per­sonal infor­ma­tion from Amer­i­can Jews and Israelis.

The Islamic State Twit­ter account @Mo7_AbuAzzamNM, which describes itself as the “Hacker of the Caliphate State,” posts messages prais­ing the hack­ing of “Zion­ist web­sites.”

“Amer­ica has drones, but we have cyber expe­ri­ence,” @Mo7_AbuAzzamNM tweeted on Jan. 16. ”Oh mule of the Jews [Obama], the com­ing days will show you.”

AnonG­host, another hacker group that tar­gets Jew­ish and Israeli web­sites, is also promoting the Islamic State and its propaganda. The Twit­ter account of Mau­ri­ta­nia Attacker, the pre­sumed leader of AnonG­host, posted sev­eral messages recently related to cyber attacks on behalf of the terrorist group. The account then shared a video that explained to Islamic State terrorists how to avoid being mon­i­tored by the CIA.

HACKER WAR: ANONYMOUS VS. THE LIZARD SQUAD

The UK Mirror reports a hacking crossfire between Anonymous Protection—a branch of famed hacker collective Anonymous—and the Lizard Squad, which has lately been renting itself out as a band of cyber-attack mercenaries, while threatening to release nude photos of singer Taylor Swift in its spare time.

 Anonymous Protection took to social media to crow about a successful effort to shut down the Lizard Squad’s website and Twitter account

As the Mirror recounts, this attack was carried out in retaliation for Lizard Squad threats against Anonymous, plus extremely annoying denial-of-service attacks carried against the Xbox and PlayStation gaming networks on Christmas Day. The Lizard Squad claims to have been behind the North Korean Internet crash in December. They’ve been named as the culprits behind Facebook and Instagram crashes just this week. They also hacked the website of the unfortunate Malaysia Airlines, littering the site with phony threats from ISIS and replacing the home page with a supremely tasteless riff on the standard error message for missing web pages: “404 – PLANE NOT FOUND.” lizard_squad_hack

It’s hard to know your hacker collectives without a scorecard these days, since new groups pull off headline-grabbing attacks on such a regular basis, but contrary to all the ISIS and “cyber caliphate” references, the Lizard Squad does not appear to be linked to the terrorist state.

They remain one of the more enigmatic hacker groups, without much in the way of a defining agenda thus far, although members interviewed under pseudonyms have claimed they want to demonstrate how easily major commercial networks such as Microsoft’s can be penetrated, to shame the companies into developing better security measures.

The Anonymous hacker collective has increasingly been at odds with the Lizard Squad, angrily warning them in December to stop messing around with the encrypted “dark web” network Tor. At the height of its attack, the Lizard Squad took control of almost half of Tor’s relays, using what it alleged were “zero-day” security flaws completely unknown to network engineers, as part of its mission to demonstrate that secure websites are not as secure as their proprietors claim. This angered Anonymous because the Tor network is used by dissidents and whistleblowers seeking to evade monitoring by corrupt governments.

The Lizard Squad’s response to Anonymous was “Do something,” and now it would appear Anonymous has, possibly with the assistance of disgruntled Lizard Squad members who formed yet another hacking collective called “Finest Squad.” The Finest Squad counted coup on their own Twitter account when the Lizard Squad’s account was suspended:

With all these hacker wars raging, using the Internet for constructive purposes is getting to be like crossing a Wild West street during a shootout.

Lizard Squad hackers get HACKED

Website offline and Twitter account suspended after series of cyberattacks

The Lizard Squad 'hackers' have been causing a lot of cyber mischief lately, but they've just got a taste of their own medicine. Their website has been taken offline and their Twitter account - @lizardmafia - has been suspended, with a branch of 'hacktivist' group Anonymous taking the credit.

The news was announced by Anonymous Protection with a tweet saying: “LizardSquad website has been cleaned out and is offline: lizardpatrol.com. LizardSquad Twitter is now suspended: @lizardmafia. We WIN.”

The Anonymous Protection group says it’s "dedicated to protect the people of the internet" and chose to take on Lizard Squad after the group made threats against Anonymous and carried out a number of denial of service cyberattacks (DDoS).

The cyberattacks took down a number of key websites, including Xbox Live and the PlayStation Network on Christmas day. The Lizards have since been using Twitter to advertise their "cyberattack-for-hire" service, Lizard Stresser.

Most recently Lizard Squad hacked Taylor Swift's Twitter account and threatened to release nude pictures.

Anonymous Protection seems to have delivered on its promise, taking down Lizard Squad’s website using a similar denial-of-service attack, and hammering Twitter with complaints so that social network took down the @lizardmafia account.

Twitter/@Lizardmafia

Lizard Squad Twitter page

Twitter doesn't comment on individual cases, but will take down accounts if they post other people’s private information without their permission or make threats. Twitter can also suspend accounts if they use the service “in furtherance of illegal activities”.

Potential hackers announce threats to airline flights

 

Several hacker-type accounts on Twitter announced threats to several flights on Monday, leading JetBlue to pull one flight back to the gate due to the safety of passengers, the airline said in a statement.

 USA TODAY

A Twitter account that includes an expletive issued a handful of tweets threatening five flights, including flight 321 that was due to take off from Boston for West Palm Beach, Fla., at 7:35 p.m.
The account tweeted to JetBlue at about 7 p.m. ET, "Guys, flight 321 and 334 have explosives on board, and you don't care? It's going to be funny watching them fall out of the sky."

JetBlue Airways Corp. spokeswoman Sebastian White issued the following statement: "Flight 321 from Boston to Palm Beach returned to the gate prior to takeoff earlier this evening due to a security situation. While we believe the threat to be non-credible, the safety of our customers is our first priority. We are cooperating with law enforcement officials who determine the appropriate security response."

JetBlue flight 334 travels from San Juan, Puerto Rico, to Orlando, Fla., and arrived 15 minutes late but safely on Monday night, according to the Flight Aware website.
In all, the Twitter account threatened five flights on Monday evening.

The account also sent a tweet to US Airways warning, "US Airways Flight 1721 has a semi-nuclear explosive on board. EVACUATE NOW!"

The flight that travels evenings from Philadelphia to New Orleans landed safely Monday night and even arrived 10 minutes early, Matt Miller, spokesman for US Airways parent company American Airlines, said by telephone. Tuesday night's flight has been cancelled because flights out of Philadelphia International Airport are suspended due to blizzard conditions, Miller said.

The airline's social media team passes on details of all threatening tweets to law enforcement, Miller said.

Earlier Monday, about a half dozen hacker-type accounts, one claiming to represent the ISIS "Penguins," tweeted threats against several commercial flights, including Southwest flight 4200 from San Diego to Dallas, according to WFAA-TV in Dallas. The plane landed without incident, the news organization reported.

A Delta Air Lines flight from Los Angeles to Orlando was diverted Sunday to Dallas after what reports say was a bomb threat made via Twitter.

Separately, in Seattle, airport spokesman Perry Cooper said a JetBlue flight from Long Beach, Calif., and a regional SkyWest jet from Phoenix were evacuated amid security concerns. The planes landed safely as scheduled.

Cooper said that out of an abundance of caution, passengers were bused to their gates from the airport's third runway. He provided no other details but said an investigation was underway.

Taylor Swift denies 'nude pictures' claim in defiant response to Twitter hackers

Taylor Swift has responded to hackers apparently claiming to have nude pictures of the star with the defiant message: “Have fun photoshopping cause you got NOTHING”.

The singer’s Twitter and Instagram accounts appeared to have been hacked overnight by users affiliated with the group Lizard Squad.

Messages were posted from both accounts and retweeted thousands of times before being removed.

Swift addressed the hack to her 51.4 million Twitter followers with the mocking tweet: “Cause the hackers gonna hack, hack, hack, hack, hack.”

The 25-year-old also thanked her friend Hayley Williams, lead singer of the band Paramore, for being the first to warn that her accounts had been compromised.

Her third tweet suggested those responsible had threatened to release nude pictures of her – a claim Swift wasted no time in clearing up.

The hackers also allegedly posted a screenshot of Swift’s private messages, which only served to cement her squeaky-clean reputation.

Lizard Squad first came to attention in August when they hacked Playstation, causing a shutdown of the network and the emergency diversion of a commercial airliner carrying one of the company's executives.

One of the messages on Swift's Twitter account told users to follow the now-suspended @lizzard account. That user’s Twitter biography described them as a “leader of Lizard Squad”.

Facebook: Hackers Didn’t Cause Worldwide Outage

Despite hacking group Lizard Squad's claims, Facebook said it was not hacked

Facebook says hackers didn’t cause a worldwide outage Tuesday morning, denying claims made by a rogue hacker group. Instead, the company said the 45-minute Facebook and Instagram outages were the result of an internal change made on the social network’s systems.

The disruption “was not the result of a third party attack but instead occurred after we introduced a change that affected our configuration systems,” a Facebook spokeswoman told The Wall Street Journal. “We moved quickly to fix the problem, and both services are back to 100% for everyone.”

Hacking group Lizard Squad appeared to claim responsibility for the outages, which made it impossible for Facebook and Instagram users to access those websites and apps.

British police have reportedly arrested a Lizard Squad member

British authorities have arrested a person said to have links with Lizard Squad, the hacking organization claiming responsibility for disrupting Xbox Live and PlayStation Network on Christmas Day, according to the Daily Dot.

A copy of the search warrant provided to the Dot identifies Vinnie Omari, a 22-year-old living in the United Kingdom, as the person behind the outages. Law enforcement officials reportedly seized phones, laptops and an Xbox from Omari's home, according to the Dot.

The Dot says Omari provided the media outlet with the search warrant and the information about the arrest, but that they were not able to confirm the details with local police.

Previous reports had speculated that the name Omari was an alias, but the police documents releasing him on bail used that name, according to the Dot story.

The arrest highlights the pressure that investigators are putting on Lizard Squad after a string of antics this year raised the group's profile. In an interview last week, another member of the group identifying himself as "Ryan," said Lizard Squad gave Sony employee logins to Guardians of Peace, the hackers suspected of breaking into Sony's network and initially prompting the company to pull "The Interview" from theaters. Lizard Squad also caused an American Airlines flight bearing a Sony executive to be diverted in August when the hackers tweeted a bomb threat to the airline. In the interview, Ryan expressed regret over how far the stunt went.

On Wednesday, Lizard Mafia's Twitter account began reporting that Ryan had been arrested by Finnish authorities.

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.

Taylor Swift’s Twitter and Instagram accounts hacked, apparently by Lizard Squad

 

A user affiliated with Lizard Squad appeared to briefly gain control of the Taylor Swift account, which has 51.4 million followers, and also took over the singer's Instagram account

A hacker affiliated with Lizard Squad appeared to have hacked Taylor Swift’s Twitter account this evening, posting messages that received thousands of retweets before they were removed.

One of the messages told users to follow a user with the handle @Lizzard.
That user’s Twitter biography claims to be a “leader of Lizard Squad”, as well as a number of other famous hacking groups such as LulzSec and Anonymous. The account posted a number of tweets apparently revelling in the hack this evening.

Yes, I'm currently dating @taylorswift13 
— トカゲ (@Lizzard) January 27, 2015

The posts stayed up for a matter of minutes before they were apparently removed, but not before they had received thousands of retweets and favourites.

Swift's Instagram account was also hit by the hack, sending out similar messages before they were also taken down.

While some of Swift's fans (known as Swifties) rushed to defend the singer, others asked hackers to follow them from the official account while it was compromised.

All tweets since January 25 were deleted, including all of those apparently posted by hackers.
On Swift's official Tumblr she wrote: "My Twitter got hacked but don’t worry, Twitter is deleting the hacker tweets and locking my account until they can figure out how this happened and get me new passwords.
"Never a dull moment.

 

Piratean las cuentas de Taylor Swift en Instagram y Twitter

EFE

Los Ángeles (EEUU) - Las cuentas de la cantante Taylor Swift en Instagram y Twitter fueron hoy pirateadas y usadas con la intención de vender una supuestas fotografías en las que aparecería la artista desnuda.

Los mensajes publicados en Twitter en nombre de Swift hacían referencia a @lizzard y @veriuser, dos perfiles que se asocian con un grupo de piratas informáticos conocidos como Lizard Squad, según publicó la web de información dedicada a los famosos TMZ.

Ambas cuentas fueron bloqueadas por Twitter pocos minutos después del incidente y los mensajes eliminados.

El perfil de Swift en Instagram sufrió un ataque poco después y los responsables de ese acto dijeron tener en su poder imágenes de Swift desnuda que estarían dispuestos a vender a cambio de un pago en moneda virtual Bitcoin, explicó el portal The Verge.

Al igual que en el caso de Twitter, la cuenta de la cantante en Instagram regresó a la normalidad pocos minutos después.

"Mi cuenta de Twitter fue pirateada, pero no se preocupen. Twitter está borrando los mensajes de los "hackers" y ha congelado mi cuenta hasta que descubran cómo ocurrió esto y me den nuevas contraseñas", escribió Swift en su blog en la red Tumblr.

La cantante, tras recuperar el control de sus redes sociales, envió un mensaje a los autores del pirateo.

"¿Piratas informáticos que dicen que tienen (mis) desnudos? ¡Ya os gustaría, verdad! Pasadlo bien editando mis fotos porque no tenéis nada", comentó la artista en Twitter.

Taylor Swift tiene más de 51 millones de seguidores en Twitter, una cifra que solo superan los cantantes Katy Perry (64 millones) y Justin Bieber (59 millones), así como el presidente de EE.UU., Barack Obama (53 millones), y más de 20 millones en Instagram.

Twitter quiere ser el nuevo WhatsApp

Por Efe - Agencia - 27/01/2015

Los usuarios de la red de "microblogging" Twitter podrán enviar mensajes directos (privados) a grupos de hasta 20 personas y que podrán grabar, editar y compartir videos desde su aplicación móvil.

 La compañía estadounidense indicó que se podrán poner en marcha grupos de mensajería privada, pero los integrantes invitados tendrán que seguir al usuario que los crea.

Hasta ahora, los mensajes directos (conocidos como DM) de Twitter ponían en contacto únicamente a dos interlocutores y para enviarlos era (y es) necesario que el tuitero receptor siga al tuitero emisor.

"La mayoría de las personas con las que interactúas en Twitter tienden a ser desconocidos en la vida real, ni siquiera tienes su número de teléfono. Vemos ese tipo de conexiones estableciéndose en Twitter y creemos que sería fantástico darles a estas personas la posibilidad de charlar en grupo", explicó el jefe de producto de la red social, Jinen Kamdar.

Kamdar sostiene que, a diferencia de otros servicios que cuentan con opciones de mensajería, la de Twitter tiene dos "particularidades": que permite continuar en privado conversaciones iniciadas en público y que el tipo de usuario con el que se tiene contacto es diferente a aquellos con los que se chatea en otros lugares.

"La gente con la que interactúas en Twitter es distinta a aquella con la que lo haces en otros servicios de mensajería. Probablemente no los conoces y resulta interesante y ahí reside la belleza de la naturaleza pública de nuestra red social. Con los mensajes directos a grupos se van a establecer y fortalecer muchas conexiones", subrayó el ejecutivo.