14 DAY TRIAL // This week started off strong with news about Flame’s little brother. It turned out that SPE, which researchers believed was only a module, was actually a unique standalone malware. Considering the discovery, the “little guy” was baptized miniFlame.
On the same day, we learned that Santander Bank's UK website was designed to store sensitive information, including credit card numbers, usernames and passwords, in cookies. The financial institution’s representatives came forward with a statement to deny the allegations that they were exposing their customers.
This week, Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Cyber Fighters continued their operations against banks from the United States. They launched distributed denial-of-service (DDOS) attacks against the sites of BB&T, Capital One and Ally Financial.
However, this is only a presumption, since websites owned by HSBC were also affected by cyberattacks on Thursday. Anonymous hackers from Fawkes Security have taken credit for these attacks, but it’s difficult to precisely say who attacked what.
October 16 was a great day for famous UFO-seeking NASA hacker Garry McKinnon. The United Kingdom’s Home Secretary decided to block his extradition to the United States, citing human rights reasons.
She admitted she was afraid to send him over the Atlantic because he might commit suicide.
Another controversial topic is the conflict between some Anonymous hackers and WikiLeaks. The whistleblower site’s founder Julian Assange came forward with a statement to explain the purpose of the so-called paywall.
He also highlighted the fact that Anonymous’ servers had been controlled by the FBI on numerous occasions.
The Twitter account of the Garbage was taken over by a hacker who wanted to make a quick buck by tricking the rock band’s 55,000 followers into clicking on Adf.ly links that pointed to advertisements. Fortunately, the group’s members were able to regain access of the account in no time.
The official NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory Twitter account was also taken over. It’s still uncertain if an employee or a hacker is to blame, but what is certain is the fact that they didn’t like US presidential candidate Mitt Romney at all.
The Twitter and YouTube accounts of famous rap artist Soulja Boy also appear to have been overtaken by supporters of the UGNazi group. They altered the description of a 2007 video to read “Crank That UGNazi.”
Another group of hackers “trolled” Oprah Winfrey. Not by compromising her Twitter account, but her website. At least that’s what they say (we couldn’t verify their claims).
Steam users found out this week that cybercriminals could leverage the platform’s Browser Protocol to launch all sorts of attacks, some of which could even allow the attackers to take over computers.
Finally, the controversial spy story that surrounds the US government, China and telecoms equipment manufacturers Huawei and ZTE is not over just yet. Sources told Reuters that the White House performed its own investigation, but didn’t uncover any evidence that the firms were spying for Chinese authorities.