hacking

Hackers have gained access to 24 million customer records at Zappos (including mine). Will Amazon and your bank be next?

Anti-fraud firm Trusteer warns that spear phishers have expanded their repertoire by faking IDs in phone calls to get data they need to either hook a phish, or maneuver past obstacles using malware that's already planted.

New attack vector: YouTube. Last week, someone hacked Sesame Street's channel (shameful). This week, Microsoft's YouTube channel became the hacker's playground.

Diebold dominates the voting machine market in spite of multiple security issues raised over the years. The Vulnerability Assessment Team at Argone National Laboratory in Illinois just released information about a man-in-the-middle exploit that can change votes while leaving no trace of the attack.

Anonymous plans to lead the OccupyWallStreet protests scheduled to begin Saturday by launching #Ref#Ref, the more effective replacement for its aging DDOS app LOIC. Who or what it will attack isn't clear, but it wouldn't be a bad idea to hit the ATM Friday night, anyway.

Medical technology maker Medtronic says it's never seen any risk in a total lack of security on insulin pumps; it tries not to talk about the hackable pacemakers that hit the news less than a year after it had to recall a different model for faulty wiring.

A small Belgian site was probed last week by a botnet looking for easy targets. Analyzing the login attempts, the result laid out login weaknesses everyone talks about but no one specifies.

It turns out the Pentagon does have some chops when it comes to hacking, though it had to hand over reins of an attack on al-Queda in the Arabian Peninsula to MI-6.

Citi Card Japan, a unit of Citigroup, reports that the data of more than 92,000 customers has been breached.

The pursuit of LulzSec leader Sabu was quick and final, as far as his attackers are concerned. The Real Sabu keeps taunting pursuers on Twitter, though some think he's now Topiary.

During the Arab Spring and WikiLeak scandal, Anonymous led the growth of hactivism; it's back to sophomoric self-aggrandizement and hacks that endanger the wrong people.

U.S. Marshals stopped 30 billion spams per day shutting down the Rustock botnet in March, but no one filled that niche, presumably because spam is now riskier than other crimes.