14 DAY TRIAL // In the past week, Anonymous hackers have made a lot of threats, planned protests, and attacked various websites, which is why we’ll dedicate part of this security briefing to their campaigns.
Do you remember the ACTA protests? It appears that we may see similar actions against the newly uncovered TrapWire mass surveillance system and Europe’s old INDECT project. Protests are scheduled to take place in cities worldwide on October 20.
Anonymous also threatened to sabotage the Republican National Convention in Tampa. They plan on taking out cameras, attacking corporate headquarters, and destroying barricades set in place to prevent protesters from entering the city.
In the Anonymous operations section we had OpUkraine, with victims such as the City of Kiev, the Ukrainian Soccer Portal, the Football Federation of Ukraine, the Ministry of Internal Affairs, and the Ministry of Agriculture.
The campaign whose main goal is to free WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange also made some headlines. Anonymous launched distributed denial-of-service attacks on the sites of the UK Ministry of Justice, the Department of Work and Pensions, the Home Office, and the Prime Minister’s Office.
Several websites from the Faroe Islands were hacked as a form of protest against whaling.
This week, we learned that the hackers who breached the systems of oil giant Saudi Aramco issued another statement, threatening to attack the company once again on August 25 at 21:00 GMT.
Real Madrid fans were shocked this week when they saw that the profile of Croatian player Luka Modric appeared on the club’s official website, before the transfer was officially announced. The club’s representatives blamed hackers for the incident.
Hackers from r00tBeer Security Team also caused some waves after they managed to breach the official blog of AMD. One day later, they claimed to have hacked the website of world renowned electronics manufacturer Philips. However, all the clues pointed to the fact that the hack was fake.
As the title reveals, in the past days we also had some terrorist-related incidents. A PhD student was stopped from boarding a plane because of the message on his t-shirt, and a decorated US Marine was arrested for posting anti-government messages on Facebook.
This week we have covered some Microsoft stories as well. We learned that user password hints could be obtained without much difficulty from Windows registries.
Nadim Kobeissi, the developer of Cryptocat, has published his findings regarding the implications of the Windows 8 SmartScreen and its effects on user privacy. One day later, we got a decent explanation from Microsoft representatives.