On Tuesday AntiSec claimed that they had hacked into a FBI computer and stole a database containing 12 million UDID numbers for iPhones and iPads around the world, which of course the FBI commented on as false:

“At this time there is no evidence indicating that a FBI laptop was compromised or that the FBI either sought or obtained this data.”.

And now Apple has finally release their statement for the incident, denying that they have even provided the FBI or any other organisation with UDID’s:

“The FBI has not requested this information from Apple, nor have we provided it to the FBI or any organization. Additionally, with iOS 6 we introduced a new set of APIs meant to replace the use of the UDID and will soon be banning the use of UDID,” Which was sated by yhr Apple Spokeswoman Natalie Kerris to AllThingsD.

Chris Valasek, the Senior Security Reasearch Scientist from Coverity had this to say about the UDID leak:

“There appears to be a recent leak of Apple UDIDs. These identifiers are unique to an individual Apple device and cannot be changed. Many are concerned about having their UDIDs exposed. So exactly how worried should you be? The answer is, slightly concerned. Many times developers incorrectly use a user’s UDID to do certain types of tracking or worse, authentication [1]. Having someone’s UDID alone does not permit an attacker to actively attack and control your phone. There may be personal privacy concerns, such as location tracking or account hijacking, but while a dump of UDIDs is not good it should not provoke panic.”

So it seems that there’s no worry of your device getting taken over by hackers at the moment, and with the introduction of iOS 6 and the ban of the use of UDIDs in any application in the next few weeks there should be no reason to panic.

Sources: AllThingsD and Coverity

Although major cybersecurity breaches of large companies and government institutions are highly publicised, a former hacker claims that the majority of hacks are focused on making money.

Mike Calce, aka ‘mafiaboy’ believes that the shaking things up and changing the system are not the desired goals for hackers anymore. Instead, he says that it is the lure of making an easy payday that motivates them. In an interview for technology and social media news site Mashable, Calce said:

“The hacker motivation has changed immensely. It’s much more about monetary gain, whereas in my era, it was about pushing the status quo.”

Calce knows the life of a hacker, having successfully achieved a series of denial-of-service attacks on major players in the technology world, including Dell, Yahoo!, eBay and even Amazon. He managed to pull off this string of attacks in 2000 at the tender age of 15. The teenaged hacking expert couldn’t evade the law indefinitely though and he was eventually arrested, serving an 8 months in a correctional facility.

These days, Calce is on the other side of the cybersecurity fence, working as a digital security consultant and keynote speaker for IT conferences. Although he works to stop hackers, he still has connections to his former life and claims that their attention has shifted away from large corporations towards smaller, more vulnerable companies as well as individuals. He says that the IT departments of most companies don’t take online security seriously enough to adequately budget for it, often prioritising more immediate concerns like hiring for management and web developer jobs instead.

“Sometimes if you don’t find a way in electronically, you find a hole through a human being. Companies don’t budget enough for security. The IT department is often in charge, and they might not be looking at the how the company handles phone calls or the screening process for personnel.”

However, many companies are wising up to the dangers of ignoring cybersecurity issues. Some hire third-party consultants to plug the gaps and tighten their defences against hackers. Others actively recruit permanent staff in order to have their security solution managed in-house. This has caused a steady rise in IT jobs demanding the skills of cybersecurity experts over the past decade.

For individuals, Calce advises vigilance in their internet usage. Basic precautions are a must, such as choosing strong passwords with numbers and special characters, as well as using different passwords for each online account. He also advised being careful about using blue-tooth technology and turning the feature off when it isn’t needed.

Image Source: Flicker

Via: Mashable

As some of the stalkers out there might know, I was born in Leicester, a city well-known for the De Montfort University, which is one of the biggest universities in the country, and are now launching a new centre which they say is dedicated “cyber protection and the growing need for effective solutions in the face of a growing cyber crisis.”

As you may know hacks are becoming a daily thing, with massive businesses like Sony and even the FBI getting hacked by a group who call themselves Annoymous, DMU thinks it’s time we took security seriously, which they think they will achieve through their new Cyber Security Center, providing students with a new way of learning about cyber security.

The university will first of be launching a Cyber Security Higher Apprenticeship Scheme alongside a  Cyber Protection Intensive Summer School which will include a week of intensive lectures, seminars and exercises all aimed at helping students to understand the challenges and opportunities of the cyber domain.

The university will also be teaching employees from certain organisations new skills in cyber security, and will be developing a new international multidisciplinary journal of cyber protection alongside new research into the Cyber Protection of Transport Systems and the Built Environment.

The Director of the CSC, Dr. Tim Watson said this about Cyber Security and why we need to do something to help stop these kind of hacks.

“Too much of the energy of the community of cyber experts has been devoted to well-intentioned but ultimately futile attempts to take security seriously. Too little effort has been directed at explaining what this should mean in practice.

“There is no precedent in human history for the breadth and depth of the challenges and opportunities presented by the cyber domain. We will fail in the task of ensuring the protection of cyberspace unless we move beyond the conventional boundaries between academia and the public and private sectors.

“The central mission of the Cyber Security Centre at DMU is the safety and security of the human experience, which is achieved through the development of a collaborative, international and multidisciplinary approach to cyber protection.

“If the purpose of computing is to serve humanity, then the purpose of cyber security is to do the same. We need to move towards the development of effective, pragmatic solutions that address concrete business and operational needs.”

After it hacked the PlayStation Network a long time ago, it has once again claimed that they have a 50 gigabyte database of email accounts and passwords, to which they say ten million accounts are currently at risk, even though they appear to be encrypted and many of the accounts in the document appear to be from northern Europe.

A spokesman from Sony Entertainment America, Shane Bettenhausen has said the claim is completely fake, and Kotaku has said the pastebin they tweeted is a copy from their previous hack from March 19th.

Via [Kotaku]

You may have heard that on Friday, Gizmondo had their Twitter account hacked as a result of one of their former writers getting their account hacked.

That former writer, is now the Wired writer, Mat Honan how had a pretty unfortunate series of events when it come to his accounts getting hacked:

“At 4:50 PM, someone got into my iCloud account, reset the password and sent the confirmation message about the reset to the trash. My password was a 7 digit alphanumeric that I didn’t use elsewhere.

…
The backup email address on my Gmail account is that same .mac email address. At 4:52 PM, they sent a Gmail password recovery email to the .mac account. Two minutes later, an email arrived notifying me that my Google Account password had changed.

At 5:00 PM, they remote wiped my iPhone
At 5:01 PM, they remote wiped my iPad
At 5:05, they remote wiped my MacBook Air.

A few minutes after that, they took over my Twitter. Because, a long time ago, I had linked my Twitter to Gizmodo’s they were then able to gain entry to that as well.”

The interesting part is how the hackers actually managed to gain access to his accounts, you’ll probably guess it was some type of guess, software or keylogger.

Well it wasn’t, it was actually the fault of Apple’s iCloud Support, who after being convinced that the hacker was in fact Honan they changed his iCloud password and gave the hackers full access, after which they where able to perform remote wipes of Honan’s devices and reset the password to his Gmail, and then finally reset the password to his Twitter where they were able to hack Gizmondo’s account.

I’ve gotta say, that defiantly makes you think about how secure your account truly is, and that maybe it’s time for two-step verification access across all platforms.

Via [Macrumors and Gizmondo]

You may be familiar with the question and answer site called Formspring, well if you’ve only just signed in again you may be in for a surprise as due to a security breach the service has disabled everyone’s password after Formspring was alerted that someone posted cryptographic hashes of 420,000 of user passwords on a security forum.

As no usernames where attached there’s not much that can be done with them but as a precaution they have reset the passwords anyway.

In an effort to show the world that they are not a terrorist organisation, the hacktivists named Anonymous recently took to the Japanese streets of Tokyo to pick up litter in a protest against the Japanese revision of laws against illegal downloads on the web.

The whole idea of picking up litter what an act of public good showing their dissent against the internet laws, the group of 80 complete with their mass and iconic black suits cleaning up Tokyo’s Shibuya Ward, up to know the group have been extremely vocal with their plans releasing videos to every operation they perform, this one called Operation Cleaning Service, pretty imaginative eh.

I think maybe more towns should revise their plans and get the new Anonymous cleaning service in, would defiantly make for a cleaner city.

All we ever seem to hear nowadays is one company after another getting hacked, the most recent the be attacked is the RTS video game, League of Legends which has seen hackers gain access to its users personal player data with certain EU West, Nordic and East databases.

Riot Games say that data accessed included email address, encrypted account password, summoner name, date of birth, and for some first and last name and encrypted security question and answer, but do say no payment or billing information was taken.

Here’s the e-mail we received from them just now:

Greetings Summoner,

Keeping your information secure is very important to us. That’s why we’re sorry to inform you that some of the account information you provided us may have been accessed by hackers. Most critically, some players’ email address, encrypted account password, and date of birth. No payment or billing information of any kind was accessed.

As a safety precaution, please change your account passwords by logging in to euw.leagueoflegends.com and visiting the “my account” page (linked in the upper-right hand corner of the page after login). If you use the same password for accounts on other services, you should change those passwords as well.

For your security, the URL above isn’t clickable. If you need to access your account, type the URL in directly. On that note, please be extra vigilant about emails you receive, especially if those emails contain attachments or links.

We’re keeping this note short, but have created a forum post with much more information and the latest official updates on this situation at euw.leagueoflegends.com/board within the announcements forum.

We apologize for the inconvenience, and appreciate your immediate attention to resetting your password.

The League of Legends Security Team

As a precaution you should go ahead and change your password, as well as you secret questions and answers, as it’s always better to be safe then sorry right?

Fugaldad just sent us a brilliant infographic detailing how Hacktivism become a virtual weapon, and as you probably know by now at TechNutty we have strong feelings about these groups and thought we would share it with you guy:

Source: frugaldad.com

You may remember when Anonymous hacked Sony a short time ago, more recently on the 28th December, Anonymous announced through their YouTube channel that they will again be attacking Sony’s network.

[stream provider=youtube flv=http%3A//www.youtube.com/watch%3Fv%3DWjOPXpd9PSU img=x:/img.youtube.com/vi/WjOPXpd9PSU/0.jpg embed=true share=true width=640 height=360 dock=true controlbar=over bandwidth=high autostart=false /]

The reason for this attack is due to Sony’s support towards the Stop Online Piracy Act, or SOPA. If you don’t want to watch the video or your finding it hard to follow here’s the rundown of what it is saying:

It has come to the attention of the Anonymous activist community that you have chosen to stand by the Stop Online Piracy Act. This act will halt online businesses and restrict access to many sites for many users. Supporting SOPA is like trying to throw an entire company from off a bridge. Your support to the act is a signed death warrant to SONY Company and Associates. Therefore, yet again, we have decided to destroy your network. We will dismantle your phantom from the internet. Prepare to be extinguished. Justice will be swift, and it will be for the people, whether some like it or not. Sony, you have been warned. [sic]

Alongside this Anonymous have also said that this will not be an attack on the PS Network itself but instead on Sony’s entire network. As of yet though the actions for this threat are still yet to be seen, personally I have no doubt they may just attack Sony again, but just not sure why they need to.

What do you think?

Drop us a line or two in the comments below, and don’t forget to follow us on Twitter @technuttyblog and like our Facebook page @TechNutty

[stream provider=youtube flv=http%3A//www.youtube.com/watch%3Fv%3DLL1_0U1diOo img=x:/img.youtube.com/vi/LL1_0U1diOo/0.jpg embed=true share=true width=640 height=360 dock=true controlbar=over bandwidth=high autostart=false /]

Not to sure if this video was made by Annoymous themselves as I cannot seem to find it anywhere else, but it does point out some pretty eye opening policies that I for one did not know I signed for, I have been thinking about leaving Facebook for a while now and this is one reason I should, check out the video above to find out more, and if you cannot here it very well we have typed it out for you below:

Hello World. Hello Facebook.
We are Anonymous.
You may think that you will be unable to login at Facebook after November 5th. But our target is not to hack facebook or shoot its servers.
Our target is to open the users eyes.
Over 600 Million people are registered at facebook. The user data of over 600 Million people is visible to everyone in the world wide web.
There is absolutely no Anonymity.
Most of you didnt even read the Privacy Policy of Facebook. So we gonna show you some aspects from the privacy policy of Facebook you have signed with your name.
Facebook allows advertisers to choose the characteristics of users and may use any of the non-personally identifiable attributes they have collected
(including information you may have decided not to show to other users, such as your birth year or other sensitive personal information or preferences)
to select the appropriate audience for those advertisements.
That means that facebook is looking up every detail on your profile for an effective spam of advertisement.
You also agree with facebook to allow every advertiser to place a cookie in your browser.
On Point 2 is written, that facebook logs nearly every action you do there.
They log it when you add a friend, join a group, create a photo album, send a gift, poke another user,
like a post, attend an event or connect to an application.
Whatever you do will be logged in the database of facebook.
You also allow facebook to collect information about your browser type, your location, your IP adress, and every page you visit.
You should better have a look at the privacy policy at facebook to know what else you allow facebook to do with your data.
You will find it at facebook.com/policy.php.
We are Anonymous
We are Legion
We do not forgive Facebook
We do not forget Facebook
Expect us!

What do you think? Did you already know about this? Do you think this is all Annoymous would do?

Drop us a line or two in the comments below.

Remember those recent hackings on News Corp, Sony and the Pentigon well they where all hacked by a group called ‘Annoymous’ who have sent out a statement with their next attack called Operation Facebook which had been scheduled for the 5th November, promising to “destroy” the social network and the “medium of communication [we] all so dearly adore.”

The reason for this attack is that Anonymous believes “Facebook has been selling information to government agencies and giving clandestine access to information security firms so that they can spy on people from all around the world.”

The group of ‘hacktivists’ also state that Facebook knows more about you than your own family, regardless of any privacy settings and even if you delete you account your information is still stored, check out the dull statement from Annoymous below:

Operation Facebook

DATE: November 5, 2011.
TARGET: https://facebook.com

Press:
Twitter : https://twitter.com/OP_Facebook
http://piratepad.net/YCPcpwrl09
Irc.Anonops.Li #OpFaceBook
Message:

Attention citizens of the world,

We wish to get your attention, hoping you heed the warnings as follows:
Your medium of communication you all so dearly adore will be destroyed. If you are a willing hacktivist or a guy who just wants to protect the freedom of information then join the cause and kill facebook for the sake of your own privacy.

Facebook has been selling information to government agencies and giving clandestine access to information security firms so that they can spy on people from all around the world. Some of these so-called whitehat infosec firms are working for authoritarian governments, such as those of Egypt and Syria.

Everything you do on Facebook stays on Facebook regardless of your “privacy” settings, and deleting your account is impossible, even if you “delete” your account, all your personal info stays on Facebook and can be recovered at any time. Changing the privacy settings to make your Facebook account more “private” is also a delusion. Facebook knows more about you than your family. 

http://www.physorg.com/news170614271.htmlhttp://itgrunts.com/2010/10/07/facebook-steals-numbers-and-data-from-your-iph….

You cannot hide from the reality in which you, the people of the internet, live in. Facebook is the opposite of the Antisec cause. You are not safe from them nor from any government. One day you will look back on this and realise what we have done here is right, you will thank the rulers of the internet, we are not harming you but saving you.

The riots are underway. It is not a battle over the future of privacy and publicity. It is a battle for choice and informed consent. It’s unfolding because people are being raped, tickled, molested, and confused into doing things where they don’t understand the consequences. Facebook keeps saying that it gives users choices, but that is completely false. It gives users the illusion of and hides the details away from them “for their own good” while they then make millions off of you. When a service is “free,” it really means they’re making money off of you and your information.

Think for a while and prepare for a day that will go down in history. November 5 2011, #opfacebook . Engaged.

This is our world now. We exist without nationality, without religious bias. We have the right to not be surveilled, not be stalked, and not be used for profit. We have the right to not live as slaves.

We are anonymous
We are legion
We do not forgive
We do not forget
Expect us

Check out this video from Anonymous:

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SWQTS8zqYXU

What do you think? Will Annoymous ‘destroy’ Facebook? Has Facebook been selling our information?

Drop us a line or two in the comments below.

One of the suspects who was arrested was found in Gijon with a server inside his home that was used to breach the Sony online store, the national police also confirmed the server to have been used to hack to spanish banks, BBVA and Bankia. The over to men (not so interesting) where arrested in Barcelona and Valencia.

The Anoymous group also attracted attention last Decemeber during a breach within PayPal and Visa, in Sony’s case, dozend of its websites where hacked and security was breached on all, compromising millions of accounts, during the attack Sony where forced to suspend its Playstation Network costing them a total of around 173 million dollars.

Formal charrges arre yet to be filed but are likely to include forming an illegal association to attack public and corporate websites, meaning the suspects could serve as long as three years in prison, for now though they have been released without bail.