An Army private suspected of leaking classified information to WikiLeaks was admonished as a trainee in 2008 for uploading YouTube videos discussing classified facilities, according to an Army official with direct knowledge of the incident. Bradley Manning, now 22, was three months into his 16 weeks of training as an intelligence analyst when about 25 of his fellow students got together to report him for the videos in July 2008, says the official,... 

LAS VEGAS — Attribution is one of the biggest problems on the internet when it comes to cyberwarfare. How do you hold a nation responsible for malicious attacks if you can’t determine whether or not the activity was state-sponsored? Retired General Michael Hayden, former director of the National Security Agency, said on Thursday that one solution being discussed in government is to simply forget about trying to determine if the source... 

LAS VEGAS — Attribution is one of the biggest problems on the internet when it comes to cyberwarfare. How do you hold a nation responsible for malicious attacks if you can’t determine whether the activity was state-sponsored? Retired General Michael Hayden, former director of the National Security Agency, said Thursday that one solution being discussed in government is to simply forget about trying to determine if the source of an... 

LAS VEGAS — In a city filled with slot machines spilling jackpots, it was a “jackpotted” ATM machine that got the most attention Wednesday at the Black Hat security conference, when researcher Barnaby Jack demonstrated two suave hacks against automated teller machines that allowed him to program them to spew out dozens of crisp bills. The demonstration was greeted with hoots and applause. In one of the …  Read More →

A federal appeals court has ordered Virginia’s attorney general to back away from threats of suing a privacy advocate who publishes Social Security numbers of elected officials on the internet. The decision by the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals means Betty Ostergren avoids being sued by the state’s top law enforcement official for breaching a state law that prohibits publication of such information. The Richmond, Virginia, court,... 

LAS VEGAS — A hacker group known as the Ninjas has created what may be the best DefCon badge ever. The badge allows wireless ninja battle between badge holders. Unlike the official badge, attendees can’t buy this one: it’s free. DefCon, the world’s largest hacker convention, is more than just a group of hackers getting together to exchange the latest exploit code and hacking techniques. It’s a time for hackers who... 

A Ukrainian carder who earned more than $11 million selling credit and debit card data stolen from top U.S. retailers was lured to a meeting in Turkey in 2007 when he was arrested by local authorities, according to a new report released Wednesday. Maksym Yastremskiy, alleged to be the underground carding kingpin known as “Maksik,” was a key player in the criminal ring of TJX hacker Albert Gonzalez. Yastremskiy was seized by authorities... 

A Ukrainian carder who earned more than $11 million selling credit and debit card data stolen from top U.S. retailers was lured to a meeting in Turkey in 2007 where he was arrested by local authorities, according to a new report released Wednesday. Maksym Yastremskiy, alleged to be the underground carding kingpin known as “Maksik,” was sentenced to 30 years in a Turkish prison. He was a key player in the criminal ring of TJX hacker... 

A webcam scandal at a suburban Philadelphia school district expanded Tuesday to include a second student alleging his school-issued laptop secretly snapped images of him. The brouhaha commenced in February, when a student of Lower Merion School District was called into an administrator’s office . Sophomore Blake Robbins was shown a picture of himself that officials suggested was him popping pills. The family claimed it was candy. An invasion-of-privacy... 

The Pentagon regards Army intelligence analyst Bradley Manning as a possible suspect in leaking a classified six-year history of the U.S.-led war in Afghanistan that Wikileaks published over the weekend, a spokesman said Monday. “He is certainly one person that we would be looking at in terms of this leak,” said Col. Dave Lapan. “He’s not the only person. We’ve neither ruled in or ruled out PFC Manning. We’re... 

Federal regulators lifted a cloud of uncertainty when they announced it was lawful to hack or “jailbreak” an iPhone, declaring Monday there was “no basis for copyright law to assist Apple in protecting its restrictive business model.” Jailbreaking is hacking the phone’s OS to allow consumers to run any app on the phone they choose, including applications not authorized by Apple. The Electronic Frontier Foundation... 

The secret-spilling site Wikileaks on Sunday released a breathtaking classified compendium of 77,000 events covering six years of the U.S.-led war in Afghanistan. But they could have much more. The New York Times , the UK-based Guardian , and the German magazine Der Spiegel were given embargoed copies of the Secret-level database about a month ago, and all three have detailed reports and analysis. The logs “are a daily diary of an American-led... 

He didn’t speak with the voice of James Earl Jones or wield a light saber. But a 6-foot-tall man dressed as Darth Vader wasn’t playing games when he flashed a handgun and demanded that a New York bank teller fork over the loot. The unidentified Darth Vader got away Thursday from a Chase Bank branch in Suffolk County with an undisclosed amount of cash stuffed into a sack adorned with a New York Yankees logo, police said. A bank patron,... 

Steve Gibson has a plan to save the media world’s financial crisis — and it’s not the iPad. Borrowing a page from patent trolls, the CEO of fledgling Las Vegas-based Righthaven has begun buying out the copyrights to newspaper content for the sole purpose of suing blogs and websites that re-post those articles without permission. And he says he’s making money. “We believe it’s the best solution out there,”... 

Steve Gibson has a plan to save the media world’s financial crisis — and it’s not the iPad. Borrowing a page from patent trolls, the CEO of fledgling Las Vegas-based Righthaven has begun buying out the copyrights to newspaper content for the sole purpose of suing blogs and websites that re-post those articles without permission. And he says he’s making money. “We believe it’s the…  Read More →