Major websites like Twitter, Paypal, Spotify, Reddit, and many more were down today. It looks like the cause of this was hackers unleashing a large denial of service (DDoS) attack on the servers of Dyn, a major DNS host. It seems this DNS attach affected the United States and Europe mostly. While many people have reported that the sites are coming back up now, it seems there are more attacks happening.
It looks like the Cooler Master USA website was hacked and defaced over the weekend. From the looks of it the hacker did not have any real agenda just to blast Cooler Master USA for their poor website security. While the site is back to normal now, this is what the site looked like over the weekend.
About a week and a half ago I received two e-mails from both Paypal and Starbucks letting me know that I reloaded my Starbucks card with not one, but two $75 payments. That was a surprise to me as I did not reload my card. Upon accessing my account the card the money was put on was removed and I was out $150. I thought it was just a random isolated incident, but it looks like this is the latest way hackers have been stealing money from unsuspecting customers.
For years many people have thought that getting a Mac would be the solution to hackers, viruses, spyware and much more. And for quite a while this was the case as many hackers did not waste their time with OS X. In recent years though Apple has seen a steady increase in Mac sales and pretty much dominates the over $1000 notebook range. Since these computers are priced higher it brings more attention from hackers and other shady parties. The latest report from GFI shows that Apple's major operating system sits on top of the leaderboard when it comes to security vulnerabilities in 2014.
Over the weekend Russian computer security company Kaspersky Lab revealed that a multinational group of cybercriminals has stolen as much as $1 billion from as many as 100 financial institutions around the world. Kaspersky Lab is currently working with Interpol, Europol and other authorities to try and uncover more details on what they are calling The Great Bank Robbery.
It looks like we have another gaming-related hack. Hackers have posted a list containing 1800 usernames, passwords and e-mail addresses belonging to Minecraft players. While this is a very small number of the total number of Minecraft players the users listed run the risk of having their accounts broke into by anyone that has access to the list, which has been made public on Pastebin.
Obviously this is corporate level security, but what is going to be more interesting to you is the live attack tracker that can be viewed anytime on their website. This page presents a visual representation of the the electronic war being waged around the world 24/7.
As if the holiday season hasn't been hard enough on gamers and online users alike, it seems that hackers claiming affiliation with the infamous Anonymous hacking collective have been busy playing Santa. On Friday the group dumped a document that specified approximately 13,000 Username/Password combinations. The document found posted on Ghostbin appears to detail both usernames/passwords as well as credit card information. This comes at a time when hackers seem to be stepping up their game with LizardSquad taking down both the PlayStation network, and XBOX live over Christmas.
The research of these two specialists is being supported by the website "IsTouchIDHackedYet.com". Anyone willing to take on this challenge will be awarded with a cash amount which is slowly building up on the site. To make contributions to this donation which will support the research of these two security specialists, volunteers must quote their contribution on Twitter with the special hash tag #istouchidhackedye with a minimum amount of $50.
You might not have noticed it, but a few weeks ago the largest online attack that has ever happened took place. It was so severe that it slowed down the whole of the internet for a while, The Spamhaus Project is one of the internet’s front line assaults on spam email. The organization tracks spam service providers and spam senders across the internet and it supplies networks with spam protection in the real time. It also works with various international law enforcement agencies in order to track down spammers.
