hacking

Not every MIT hack is brilliant. Some are the kind of prank any group of bright students could pull off. Not this time. Friday night a group of uber-geek MIT hackers turned the campus' Green Building into a game of Tetris that could be played using a console installed at ground level (with a sign reading DO NOT play TETRIS on the Green Building). Brilliant.

NATO announced a cyberwar rapid-response team whose mission is to counter sudden attacks and return systems to their original state. The idea sounds fine, but considering the speed and increasing aggression of cyberattackers, the new team sounds distinctly little league.

Once seen as, if anyone could be, the one honest, clean rider in cycling, Floyd Landis had theTour de France taken away, got banned, lost friends and got convicted of hack at French lab. Long trip for a Mennonite kid.

Bank of America is having uptime problems. Customers couldn't log in over the weekend and the home page was out today. Bank spokespeople wouldn't name the problem, but insist it wasn't external. BofA web technolgy is good enough to kill itself with no help from outside.

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.

They made fools out of a lot of security guys. They feed on attention. They'll be back.