14 DAY TRIAL // In case you haven’t paid close attention to this week’s cyber security events, here’s your chance to catch up.
This week, we’ve had a large number of arrests, sentences, charges and pleas related to hackers – both hacktivists and cybercriminals.
So let’s take a look at the arrests. Police in Argentina have arrested a 19-year-old man said to have made $50,000 (€37,000) by running a sophisticated hacking operation aimed against gambling and money transfer websites.
Authorities from Finland have also been busy. They’ve detained a man who admitted hacking into hundreds of websites. He has allegedly stolen hundreds of thousands of usernames, email addresses and passwords since the first half of 2012.
British authorities have arrested 12 men accused of planning a cyber heist against a London branch of Santander. One of the crooks installed a KVM switch, which allowed them to take over the bank’s computers, by posing as a maintenance engineer.
Fortunately, their plan was foiled before any damage was caused. Four of the suspects have been charged. The rest have been released on bail.
As far as sentences are concerned, we learned that John Anthony Borell III of Toledo, Ohio, aka ItsKahuna of Anonymous, will spend three years in jail. He will also serve three years of supervised release and pay $227,000 (€171,000) in restitution.
Borell has been accused of hacking into the systems of several law enforcement agencies.
A Texas man has been sentenced to 63 months in prison for hacking into the networks of his former employer. Michael Musacchio, aged 62, left the logistics or intermodal transportation company to start his own. He conducted corporate espionage to steal confidential information from his former company.
In the meantime, 8 individuals of the 70 charged in the Armenian Power case have pleaded guilty to bank fraud, drug trafficking, racketeering conspiracy, illegal possession of firearms, and aggravated identity theft.
Previously, 51 others have pleaded guilty to taking part in the criminal ring’s activities.
A 37-year-old man from Wisconsin has pleaded guilty to taking part in the DDOS attack launched by Anonymous in 2011 against the website of Koch Industries. Fortunately for him, the attack didn’t cause too much direct damage so he will not spend any time in jail.
In the extradition case of Eric Eoin Marques, the alleged owner of the Freedom Hosting service on TOR, FBI representatives admitted that the agency was in control of the service’s servers when researchers identified the curious-looking piece of malware earlier this summer.
We’ve also had some interesting hacks this week. The most important of them is probably the one that impacted Vodafone Germany.
Someone with inside knowledge of the company, apparently a contractor, has been blamed for the theft of the details of 2 million customers. Experts highlight that the incident once again demonstrates the threat posed by insiders.
Anonymous hackers have also been busy. Hacktivists from Cambodia have disrupted several government websites in protest against election fraud.
RedHack has also made a few headlines this week. First, the hacktivists disrupted the website of the Turkish National Police.
Later, they leaked documents allegedly identifying three police officers involved in the killing of a Turkish protester. RedHack has also revealed its intentions of making sure that the upcoming elections will be fair.
Pro-Syria hackers of the SeCuR!TY L!0NS H4CK3RS group have breached and defaced MacTalk, Australia’s largest Apple community. It took the site’s administrators some time to restore the hacked website.
The Syrian Electronic Army has hijacked a large number of FOX Twitter accounts by gaining access to one HootSuite account.
Some less-known hacktivists have defaced a total of 14 NASA subdomains to protest against wars.
Finally, Anonymous members claimed to have hacked AzerEnerji, Azerbaijan’s largest electrical power producer. 7 GB of information allegedly stolen from the company’s systems have been published online.
Here are some other interesting stories worth reading:
The most extensive list of Chinese domain name scammers
Malicious entities should be the only ones blamed, security expert says
Another variant of the Tibet Mac malware found
John McAfee denies rumors that he has died
Don’t use more than one antivirus on your computer
Sophisticated Android Trojan distributed via mobile botnet