There are plenty of stories about dumb criminals doing dumb things, but we don’t get to hear as often about dumb prisons allowing smart criminals to make them look dumb. At HM Prison Isis in London, teen hacker Nicholas Webber enrolled in an IT class, from which he hacked the prison’s computer systems. The founder of Ghost Market, a website where criminals were able to buy and sell identities as well as learn the ins and outs of digital identity theft, was arrested in October, 2009. He was sentenced in May, 2011, to five years at HM Prison Isis. There, he met IT teacher Michael Fox who claims he was sacked…

One of the most personal online violations that can occur to anyone is getting hacked. It could be a personal attack such as a Facebook account, on which 600k successful hacks are achieved daily. It could be something more general such as a database hack that exposes personal information. It could be much, much worse. With all of the security measures out there and counter-hacking attempts, many systems and accounts can be easily secured by having a strong password. There are plenty of hacks that can hit a system or an account that have nothing to do with front door password access, so there’s no reason…

While high-profile hacking made headlines in 2012, some of the most famous hack jobs took place years ago. The masterminds behind these notorious events are outlined below. Kevin Mitnick Labeled as the most wanted cyber criminal in United States history, Mitnick took down the dedicated servers of Motorola, Fujitsu and Nokia. After his 1995 arrest and five-year prison term, he went on to found a computer security firm. Kevin Poulson Using the name “Dark Dante”, Poulson gained notoriety by hacking into telephone systems, notably that of Los Angeles radio station KIIS, in order to win a contest….

If you consider the amount of attempts to hack into government systems and databases, and how many times your personal information is compromised – you’d understand just how important application security really is. The following infographic from Veracode details some of the biggest hacking attempts in recent history and the work behind the scenes to keep them from happening again. Infographic by Veracode Application Security …

If reports from the hacker group are to be believed, the FBI has over 12 million Unique Device Identifiers (UDIDs) on file and now 1,000,001 of them have been leaked to the public. Using the AtomicReferenceArray vulnerability in Java, the group allegedly hacked into Supervisor Special Agent Christopher K Stangl’s notebook in March of this year and retrieved a file with information about Apple iOS device users. The file, named “NCFTA_iOS_device_intel.csv”, is claimed to have usernames, device names, device types, push notification tokens, zip codes, phone numbers, addresses, and other…

It’s understandable when a Twitter account or other social media profile is hacked when a current employee gets their computer or cloud service hacked. It’s unforgivable when the accounts are taken over because a  former employee gets hacked. Gizmodo learned that lesson the hard way when their account was taken over by “foul-mouthed hackers” as reported by Mike Isaac at AllThingsD: The technology site Gizmodo’s Twitter account was taken over on Friday evening for a brief period from approximately 5:15 to 5:30 PT. The hijackers appear to be part of a hacking group named “Clan Vv3,” and…

With less than $50 of store-bought hardware and some programming, a hacker can gain instantaneous and untraceable access into over four million hotel rooms around the world, according to Cody Brocious, a Mozilla software developer. He details his findings on his website. The time it takes once installed: around 200 milliseconds. “With how stupidly simple this is, it wouldn’t surprise me if a thousand other people have found this same vulnerability and sold it to other governments,” said Brocious. “An intern at the NSA could find this in five minutes.” * * * “Hotel Key Card” image courtesy of…

Hackers are becoming increasingly clever and conniving, while small businesses remain shockingly naive about the threat they face from cyber-attacks. This infographic conveys a clear message to all small businesses worldwide: You’re not as secure as you think. Far too many small businesses mistakenly believe that they are simply too small to be on hackers’ radars. The reality of the matter is that 72 percent of the known hacker breaches in 2011 affected businesses with 100 employees or less. 85 percent of small businesses believe they have taken adequate measures to keep safe from hackers….

For 22 minutes, kids around the world were greeted with a surprise when they went to the Sesame Street YouTube channel, and it wasn’t the kind of surprise that Elmo would have approved. Hackers took over the account on Sunday, deleted all of the videos uploaded by Sesame Street, and uploaded porn. Google and YouTube responded quickly and the account is currently down. The name on the account was changed to MrEdxwx, a YouTube user who has since responded with a video saying that he wasn’t responsible. His channel has been hit with hundreds of comments ranging from admiration to death threats. Here’s…

It has been 5 years since a British leader has visited Moscow. On the eve of the first visit since a Kremlin critic was killed in London, the website for the Russian Embassy in London was attacked by a distributed denial of service attack. British Prime Minister David Cameron has been very vocal in the past about the killing of Alexander Litvinenko who was poisoned in 2006 by radioactive polonium-210, but has worked in the last year since taking over as Prime Minister to mend the relationship with Russia and President Dmitry Medvedev. “Prior to the visit of Prime Minister David Cameron to Russia,…