The Spanish Ministry of the Interior has expressed its regret that an international crackdown on IT masterminds inside the violent Basque separatist group ETA was dubbed “Operation Linux”. Apparently, penguin-loving outfits are complaining that the antiterrorist operation sullies their good name. “The Ministry of Home Affairs regrets the coincidence [involving] the trade name of some [...]

Worried about someone ease dropping on your cell phone calls? Then try out a new mobile application called Kryptos. “It enables you to have conversations that are free from being intercepted by anybody,” said Stephen Carnes, president of Kryptos Communications Inc. He developed the application to protect your privacy from hackers or even investigators, “that [...]

THE IRISH-LANGUAGE ‘hacktivist’ who defaced the website of the Democratic Unionist Party, and the sites of two of its most prominent leaders, has said he first defaced the site on New Year’s Eve – and that he was “shocked” to find that the site’s security holes had not been fixed two weeks later. ‘Hector O’Hackatdawn’, [...]

Computer hacker George Samuel Bronk, 23, of Citrus Heights California, pleaded guilty to seven felony charges which included hacking into e-mail accounts and Facebook accounts of women in 17 states and in England.The felony charges include “computer intrusion, false impersonation and possession of child pornography.” Bronk faces up to six years in imprisonment and will [...]

More than three years after the iPhone was first hacked, computer security experts think they’ve found a whole new way to break into mobile phones — one that could become a big headache for Apple, or for smartphone makers using Google’s Android software. In a presentation set for next week’s Black Hat conference in Washington [...]

Facebook has added APIs for developers to access the home address and mobile numbers of users, so FarmVille can see where, as well as who, you are. Permission to access such data must be given through the usual notification system, but with the vast majority of users simply agreeing with everything they’re asked, the new [...]

The developers of the Tor (The Onion Routing project) anonymisation solution has released version 0.2.1.29 to close a hole that can be remotely exploited. According to the developers, the problem is caused by a heap overflow. Version 0.2.1.28, which was released in late December, had already fixed another heap overflow in Tor. This flaw could [...]

A German hacker says he cracked the wireless LAN password of his neighbour in 20 minutes – using the cloud computing power available on Amazon in a demonstration which he says should sensitise people and businesses to security issues.Thomas Roth, described in Der Spiegel magazine as an IT security expert, will report on his experiment [...]