14 DAY TRIAL // This week has been fairly “slow” as far as cyber security news is concerned. However, hacktivists have kept themselves busy by continuing their campaigns.
The cyber war between India and Pakistan has made a lot of headlines. Pakistani hackers have been particularly active this week when the country celebrated its Independence Day.
6,000 commercial Indian websites have been defaced by Dr@cul@, state-owned telecoms firm MTNL and the Pune Traffic Police have been penetrated by MrCreepy, the personal site of Indian Minister Rajesh Tope was defaced by Xploiters Crew, Indian Railways was hacked by MindCracker, and the Embassy of India in Israel was breached by AnonGhost.
In addition, reports have surfaced regarding an alleged cyber espionage campaign of Pakistani intelligence services against Indian telecoms company SBNL.
Other hacktivists have targeted Egypt. Anonymous hackers have launched distributed denial-of-service (DDOS) attacks against several Egyptian websites, making many of them inaccessible.
In addition, some have reported that the official Twitter account of Egypt’s Ministry of Interior was also hacked. However, the ministry’s representatives blamed the incident on a defecting officer.
In Turkey, RedHack has breached the systems of the Adana Water and Sewage Administration. The hackers not only defaced the site, but they also changed the admin panel’s password to allow anyone to access it.
Other Turkish hackers have defaced over 1,500 websites in protest against the repression of Uyghur Muslims in east Turkestan.
In Italy, Anonymous hackers are protesting against the construction of a US Navy Mobile User Objective System (MUOS) station in Niscemi, Sicily. They’ve leaked some official emails related to the project and launched DDOS attacks against the websites of Italy’s Ministry of Defense, and the town of Niscemi.
The Bahrain Ministry of Interior has denied being hacked. Actually, no one has claimed to have breached the ministry’s systems. Some hacktivists have disrupted by Ministry of Interior’s site with a DDOS attack.
In the Phillipines, hacktivists defaced the website of the Adamson University to protest against the increased tuition fees.
The Syrian Electronic Army has also been busy. First, they breached the systems of SocialFlow, which allowed them to gain access to the social media accounts of the New York Post.
Later, they targeted Outbrain. By gaining access to the content recommendation service’s systems, the hacktivists managed to redirect the readers of certain CNN, Time and Washington Post articles to their own website.
The Syrian Electronic Army’s representatives claim these attacks are in response to Twitter’s decision to shut down their accounts.
Other noteworthy cyberattacks are the ones that targeted the US Department of Energy, Northrop Grumman, New Mexico ISP Plateau, the Central Tibetan Administration, and the US National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.
We’ve also had some interesting mobile security news this week.
Bitcoin wallet owners have been warned that their assets are at risk due to a random number generation flaw in Android. Google has released a patch for the issue and most developers have updated their wallet apps to address the problem.
As far as Apple is concerned, experts claim to have found a way to upload malicious apps to the App Store. They've created an application which contains pieces of code that are stitched together to become malicious only after the app is installed.
Here are some other interesting stories, in case you’ve missed them:
Dutch identity management platform DigiD disrupted by DDOS attack
Hacker blackmails Miss Teen USA 2013 with private photos taken via her webcam
Cybercriminals abuse Google Cloud Messaging for malware C&C
Hackers can hijack high-tech lighting systems to cause a sustained blackout (video)
Cybercriminal hijacks Texas family’s baby monitor