14 DAY TRIAL // We’ve had a lot of interesting stories over the past week, and in case you haven’t been online, here’s your chance to catch up on the things you might have missed.
Many of this week’s stories revolved around two major topics: surveillance and espionage.
US officials once again complained about cyberattacks coming from China. They said Chinese hackers targeted the 2008 presidential campaigns and the Department of Veterans Affairs.
However, China once again denied the accusations, saying that it too had mountains of data to prove that the US was hacking their systems.
An interesting spy story came to light after a US woman accused the supporters of a secretive Turkish movement of targeting her with a spy tool that was sold by an Italian company only to governments.
Another surveillance story that made a lot of headlines was the one about the NSA collecting information on US citizens via various organizations.
Many people say they’re not surprised. On the other hand, former US Vice President Al Gore and the Electronic Frontier Foundation lashed out at the US government for the outrageous surveillance practices.
Anonymous has also stepped in, claiming to have leaked “private” NSA documents. However, the data doesn’t seem private at all. The documents the hackers published have been available for anyone for years on government websites.
Spanish police might be allowed to install spyware on the devices of suspected criminals. That’s if a new bill drafted by the country’s Justice Ministry becomes law. As expected, civil liberties groups are concerned about the impact of such a piece of legislation on privacy.
Kaspersky has revealed the existence of a massive cyber espionage campaign dubbed NetTraveler. Experts say Chinese hackers have targeted over 350 high-profile organizations located in 40 countries.
Of course, we’ve also had our share of hacktivist operations. The most notable is OpTurkey, an operation initiated by Anonymous in support of the OccupyGezi protests.
Sites were defaced and data was leaked. The Syrian Electronic Army has also stepped in, leaking information from the websites of the Turkish Prime Minister and the Ministry of Interior.
As far as DDOS attacks are concerned, DNS providers easyDNS and DNSimple have been hit this week. It turns out that the attacks weren’t aimed at them directly. Instead, cybercriminals abused their systems for a DNS amplification attack aimed at another organization.
Here are other interesting stories in case you’ve missed them:
Interview with Alberto Redi, the head of defacement archive Zone-H
The world’s most sophisticated Android Trojan identified by Kaspersky
Spammers abuse open redirect vulnerability in CNN site. Rapper 50 Cent falls for it.
Web hosting provider Hetzner hacked
FBI and Microsoft disrupt large number of Citadel botnets
Credit card fraud site mattfeuter.ru disrupted by authorities