The Vatican's official website suffered an attack by Anonymous March 7, cutting off access by users for several hours. Italian media outlets reported that the website, Vatican.va, became unresponsive around mid-afternoon local time.
Jesuit Father Federico Lombardi, director of the Holy See Press Office, confirmed that vatican.va had been the "object of an attack," but said in a statement that he had no other information or comment to offer.
Anonymous was attacking the Vatican to protest the execution of heretics and the burning of books during the Inquisition and more recently the sexual abuse of children by priests.
Anonymous Replace Police Supplier Website With ‘Tribute to Jeremy Hammond’
Anonymous had successfully hacked the website of New York Iron Works, a police-equipment supplier, and replaced the homepage with a tribute of love to arrested hacker and Chicagoan Jeremy Hammond.
Anonymous also claimed responsibility for several other hacks on March 8, including posting the personal information of FBI agents in a public online message board called "Operation Piggy Bank."
JERUSALEM (AP) — A hacker network that claims to be based in Saudi Arabia paralyzed the websites of Israel's stock exchange and national airline on Monday, escalating an international cyber war that has jolted this security-obsessed country.
Neither website contains sensitive information and trading and flights were not affected. But the ongoing salvos by hackers who use anti-Israel language in their posts has revealed how vulnerable Israel is to cyber warfare, despite its sophisticated computer security units in the military and advanced high-tech sector.
A security guard stands at the entrance of the national Israeli air carrier El Al sales offices in Tel Aviv, Israel, Monday, Jan. 16, 2012. Hackers disrupted the websites of Israel's stock exchange and El Al on Monday in a deepening cyber war launched earlier this month by a group claiming to be Saudis. (AP Photo/Ariel Schalit)
The attacks began earlier this month when hackers identifying themselves as group-xp, a known Saudi hacking group, claimed on an Israeli sports website to have gained access to 400,000 Israeli credit card accounts. The group called it a "gift to the world for the New Year" designed to "hurt the Zionist pocket."
Israeli authorities said 15,000 accounts were hacked in that episode and credit card information about 6,000 other Israelis was disclosed online a few days later by the same network.
Last week, an Israeli hacker identifying himself as a soldier in an Israeli intelligence unit retaliated by posting information online about hundreds of Saudis, Egyptians, Syrians and others.
On Monday, El Al Israel Airlines took down its website after hacker OxOmar, who has been linked to the Saudi group, warned that both sites would be targeted by allied pro-Palestinian hackers, a person close to the company said. The source was not authorized to speak to the media and requested anonymity.
The company said in a statement that it was taking security measures to protect the website and that disruptions on the site were to be expected.
Orna Goren, a spokeswoman for the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange, said the site was overwhelmed by electronic requests that slowed it down dramatically but it was still operating. Trading was not affected, she said.
Cyber experts say Israel is a common target for online attackers who oppose the Jewish state and its policies toward the Palestinians, but there have been no confirmed reports of sensitive Israeli government sites being hacked.
"Right now, we're not seeing anything that's especially interesting or especially dangerous," said Gadi Evron, former head of Internet security for the Israeli government.
News of the hacking led to a linguistic counterattack at Israel's state radio. Continuing its decades-long battle against the use of English words in its Hebrew broadcasts, the radio's linguist insisted that reporters use a Hebrew word, "patzchan," meaning a person who cracks something open, instead of "hacker."
The recent Facebook hack has reportedly claimed over 2 lakh victims in Bangalore. According to a news report in Mid Day, some two lakh Facebook users in Bangalore had their accounts hacked and weblinks to their morphed pornographic pictures sent as feeds to friends and family.
Quoting social networking analysts, the report says that more than 2 lakh Bangalore Facebook accounts were hacked. The cybercrime department too is reported to have received calls and complaints regarding the mass hacking.
According to the report, there are around 50 posts on Facebook stating that the users are quitting the social networking site forever after being embarrassed before friends and family.
Incidentally, according to a Bloomberg report, Facebook claimed that it has identified those responsible for the deluge of hardcore porn and violent images in some users' newsfeeds, and said it is working with its legal team "to ensure appropriate consequences follow."
The social networking company made the statement after porn, pictures of extreme violence and faked photos of celebrities such as Justin Bieber in sexual situations had overrun the profiles of some Facebook users.
Facebook said that it has "drastically limited the damage caused" by a spam attack that took advantage of a browser vulnerability. "Protecting the people who use Facebook from spam and malicious content is a top priority for us," Palo Alto, California-based Facebook said in a statement.
Users were tricked into pasting malware into their browsers, which in turn resulted in the sharing of offensive content, Facebook said.
22-year-old Molly Katchpole and 300,000 other petition signer’s victory over Bank of America may be part of a much larger trend — a consumer backlash against corporate America. “Every company is now sitting on electronic quicksand,” PR guru Howard Rubenstein tells USA Today. Katchpole’s online petition was signed by 300,000 consumers, and was one reason why Bank of America dropped its decision to impose monthly fees on debit card users. Some see the instant backlash against Netflix and Bank of America as the Occupy Wall Street of the no longer silent majority.
Let your bank know your taking back control! #OpCashBack
Anonymous Hackers have successfully hacked the neo-Nazi website and published the database of its 16000 membership application database containing personal datas of some applicants from all around the country. The hack was motivated by an apparent desire to shame the Finnish government into improving data security.
In a Statement Anonymous says "We have no tolerance for any group based on racial, sexual and religion discrimination as well as for all the people belonging to them and sharing their ideologies, which is the reason why we decided to carry out last Monday's attack.". Authorities are investigating the security breaches, according to an online message attributed to Anonymous Finland.
According to the Helsingin Sanomat, the published information seems stolen from several sources: the Work Efficiency Institute, Student Alliance Osku, WinNova Länsirannikon koulutus Ltd, and Aducate - Centre for Training and Development at the University of Eastern Finland.
Mikko Hypponen, chief research officer of the Finnish internet security firm F-Secure, dubbed the attack 'irresponsible'.Israel recently rubbished claims that Anonymous had caused the failure of several governmental websites, putting the outage down to a server failure.
Sometimes hackers aren't as big and bad as they're made out to be. Sometimes they just want to help make the Web a safer place for everyone. That benevolent spirit is on display on a phishing site that was recently hacked to teach gullible Internet users about the dangers of — you guessed it — phishing sites.
A hacker modified a phishing website to teach people about phishing scams. Credit: Dreamstime
Researchers at the security firm GFI Labs found an email used to lure people to a phishing site, www.canal-i.com. The message attempts to scare unsuspecting readers by telling them they have exceeded the storage limit on their inbox, and says, "You will not be able to send or receive new mail until you upgrade your email. Click below link and fill the form to upgrade your account." When clicked, that link directs users to a Web page that asks for their username, email address and password.
For one hacker — he or she has not been identified — this was not just an ordinary phishing scam, but also a chance to teach others. The white-hat hacker — "white hat" refers to hackers who exploit security bugs to improve security — stripped the phishing page of its malicious content and replaced it with a stern educational message about the perils lurking in the online world.
"There is no such thing as a central Email service update," the website was manipulated to read. "A stupid criminal created this to steal your email account. I have modified it to educate you about online crime. He does not like that but that is too damn bad. You can submit this form to see a helpful video about phishing. Stop letting stupid criminals like this one hijack your account. Have a great day."
The altered phishing page included a "Submit Form" button at the bottom, the same way the original fraudulent page did, except this button redirected users to an instructional video about phishing scams. (The canal-i website currently shows an "under construction" message.)
As a general rule, any unsolicited emails that ask you to download software to fix a problem or restore any kind of service should not be trusted. Emails that appear to come from a bank or financial institution such as the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) should also be handled with a heavy dose of skepticism; online crooks know that people are likely to fall for scams when they fear their personal finances may be in trouble. If you suspect such an email is out for your personal details, delete it and contact your bank directly. Running up-to-date anti-virus and anti-malware software on your computer will also help detect phishing sites and malicious emails as threats.
He claim "I hack 700000 websites in one shot, this may be a new world Record. After submitting 200,000 domains,zone-h was going down again and again and became almost unresponsive in the end.so i was unable to submit all websites.so i've listed all domains in attachment. It was not just a server hack, actually whole data center got hacked."
At InMotion website they gave an announcement saying:
" Dear Customer,
At around 4am EST, our system administration team identified a website defacement attack affecting a large number of customers. We are still investigating, but it appears that files named index.php have been defaced.
We are evaluating how this has occurred and our security team will have more information shortly.
11:30am EST Update
If you have a backup of your site, you may upload your index.php files to correct this. You may need to do this for each directory. If your site uses an index.html or index.htm, you will need to upload those files, then delete the index.php. For more help, please see How to Restore a File from your own Backup.
It is possible our automated restore system will also be working on correcting the issue while you are. If you see this happen, just upload again.
If you do not have a backup of your site, it is best to wait until our automated system has completed its attempt at restoring. At this point, we feel that should solve a majority of the defaced sites.
1pm EST Update
Systems has been successful in restoring a portion of the affect sites. They are refining their repair method now and should be able to begin deploying the update to additional sites shortly. Please bear with us for another 1 hour when we feel we will have more information to share.
