The 22 year old shooter, Jared Lee Loughner, is no exception. He had a MySpace profile and a Youtube channel, revealing both what he looks like, some biographical details, and a bizarre personal philosophy mentioning grammer, the timeline of man, and currency creation.
The Jester, a hacktivist who is normally known for short term denial of service attacks against Jihadist web forums and who recently claimed responsibility for an outage at Wikileaks in the middle of Cablegate (Wikileaks publication of U.S. diplomatic cables) has himself become the target of the large scale hacktivist protest called Operation Payback.
The Twitter account of the French Foreign Ministry was compromised, and an anti-Romanian message posted, in the midst of the deportation of some 100 Roma from the country.
Twitter user 0wn3d_5ys has demonstrated a persistent cross site scripting (XSS) vulnerability he found on June 21st using his own Twitter account (visit at your own risk) that appears to be due to a lack of input validation of the application name field when accepting new requests for Twitter applications.
A video recently went up where Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg took the time to apologize to Facebook’s users for the multiple recent confusing and “open by default” changes to Facebook’s privacy settings.
It’s becoming a familiar story, an angry parent of a student reports finding inappropriate images, self taken naked pictures and videos, on that student’s cell phone. But this story has an unusual wrinkle: the student is a 20 year-old at the University of Central Florida, the girlfriend of 32 year-old Mandarin High School football coach Jason Robinson.
Gal Shpantzer, friend of the blog, fellow blogger, and a writer for CSO Online asked us to bring some attention to a worthy cause. As part of his talk at Security B-Sides Boston in Cambridge, MA, he will partake in certain unabashed activities for each monetary contribution threshold reached for Hackers for Charity.
James Lipton’s new public service announcements (PSA’s) on texting (text messaging) for teenagers gives the concept a whole new meaning. The campaign “Before you test, give it a ponder” features videos of Lipton loaning his trademark beard to teenagers so that its magical properties of forethought can be temporarily bestowed on them effectively uses humor to combat the problems of sexting and cyber-bullying.
Historically the “Is this you?” style Twitter attack seems to be seeded by either an original break in to the victim’s Twitter account, or that user having provided his or her credentials to a phishing style web site made to look like Twitter as the attack propagates through the popular micro-blogging service. This time around however, the account of security consultant and former cracker Kevin Mitnick was caught up in this generic, untargeted Twitter “worm”.
Around 9pm EST on Monday the Twitter account of pop singer Lady Gaga, @ladygaga was cracked in to and a series of messages added to her tweet stream. This is the second high profile Twitter account to be cracked in the last few days, on Friday the account of pop singer Britney Spears, @BritneySpears, started professing sympathy for the devil. The Lady Gaga one is interesting though, because like an homage to old school cracks of the past, the attackers appear to have left their name. Further these are two high profile accounts broken into after Twitter has implemented at least three major changes to their web site’s authentication process.
