‘Kuwait Hackers’ hijack several Israeli websites

A number of Israeli websites were hacked over the weekend by a group that calls itself Team Kuwait Hackers.

Debbie Goldsmith, a director at the site Aardvark Israel, said that on Saturday night, instead of offering explanations about gap-year programs in Israel, the site showed “a countdown and a clickable button, accompanied by eerie music. It sounded like Muslim prayers.”

Also, the network is not turned up when you start backtrack.  Perhaps that is missing?

What network adapter type have you given it? Host only? Bridged etc

Network error: Connection reused.

The Jester claims responsibility for taking down Westboro Baptist Church website, as Anonymous refuses to back down

The pro-American hacker ‘The Jester' has claimed responsibility for taking the controversial Westboro Baptist Church offline earlier this week.

As revealed by SC Magazine earlier this week, the website of the Topeka, Kansas church was taken offline, with an apparent claim by Anonymous that it could not abide this behaviour any longer ‘and the time for it to be idle spectators in its inhumane treatment of fellow man has reached its apex', and it was moved to action.

However a Twitter update from the Jester, who tweets at ‘th3j35t3r', said that it had taken Westboro's godhatesfags.com domain down ‘temporarily for celebrating the death of US troops'. It also said that there was a ‘honeypot fail', assumingly by Westboro's hosters.

Writing on its Twitter feed, Anonymous later said that it and the Jester are ‘still like Sun and Moon, following our own agendas' and the cooperation ‘was an eclipse'.

In an online debate on the David Pakman show, an Anonymous spokesperson denied that it was directly responsible. A spokesperson for Westboro Baptist Church taunted the Anonymous spokesperson to the point that the Anonymous group posted a message during the interview.

There was some uncertainty as to whether the statement by Anonymous was genuine or not, as some suggested that it was a hoax. However in this message, Anonymous claimed that Westboro's response was ‘rather poorly-written' and Anonymous said that its press release explained ‘clearly the hoax behind the initial declaration of war against your church'.

It said: “We had thought this latest release would be enough to make you realise that we have no interest in going to war with you. Your continued biting of the Anonymous hand, however, has earned you a swift and emotionless bitchslap, in the form of this very message. Despite having had the capability to hack your sites previously, we chose not to and instead responded maturely to your threats, but you have not respected this.

“For this unremitting display of overzealousness, we award you no points. Take this defacement as a simple warning: go away. The world (including Anonymous) disagrees with your hateful messages, but you have the right to voice them. This does not mean you can jump onto Anonymous for attention. God hates fags: assumption. Anonymous hates leeches: fact.”

The Jester previously hit the headlines after it hit the WikiLeaks website in late November with a ‘mass distributed denial-of-service attack'. This occurred before WikiLeaks began releasing the cache of confidential cables that led to it redirecting DNS configurations from its Swedish hosting provider to sites hosted around the world.

The Jester said at the time that it took down WikiLeaks ‘for attempting to endanger the lives of our troops and other assets'.

Workers continue to use unsecure methods when it comes to portable devices.
If a mystery USB stick was found, 76 per cent of workers would plug it into company PCs.

A survey of over 1,000 UK office workers by BlockMaster warned that these workers risk compromising corporate network security with this attitude. Anders Kjellander, CSO at BlockMaster, warned that this statistic was alarming as many viruses on USB sticks can run as soon as they are plugged into a PC.

“Indeed, the Stuxnet worm, the first ‘industrial' virus, was well-known for spreading via unsecure USB sticks. Furthermore, even if unprotected USB sticks are not infected with viruses or worms, they can contain sensitive corporate data, leaking important information to external organisations causing harm for the party that lost the device,” he said.

The research also found that a fifth of those surveyed had lost unprotected USB drives holding sensitive information, while 85 per cent of lost USB sticks were later found.

Kjellander said: “Organisations need to put technology and policies in place to secure and remotely manage their USB devices. A lost unsecured and unmanaged USB stick can contain sensitive data including customer details, or in the case of public sector organisations: details of patient records, benefits or tax details.

“So it is imperative that organisations put in place a managed secure USB drive solution that automatically protects stored data and allows administrators to centrally manage them to perform policy updates and remotely erase any lost device.”

Malware became more prominent on user-generated content websites and social networking platforms in 2010

Malware has moved from the dark corner of the internet to more popular areas, such as online storage and open/mixed content sources.

Blue Coat Systems' 2011 web security report, which examines web behaviour and the malware to which users are most frequently exposed, found that malware hides in acceptable web categories. The number of new online storage sites hosting malware increased by 13 per cent, while the number of new open/mixed content sites hosting malware increased by 29 per cent.

Dave Ewart, director of product marketing for Blue Coat, told SC Magazine that both of these categories typically fall within acceptable use policies for most companies, which could cause a problem when trying to avoid infection.

“If you asked some older users of the internet where you get viruses from they would say it is from pornography sites or online gambling and pornography is still popular as the area is dark and dangerous, but it is shocking that online storage went up by 13 per cent in a year, while open/mixed content mash-up sites went up by 29 per cent,” he said.

“Those websites typically do not get detected on a reputation-based system and user based reputation-based technology on a traditional system does not cut it anymore. This calls into question anyone who relies on reputation-based filtering and one of the technologies we offer is to scan in real-time to create a report on what is going on.”

The report, which analysed web requests from the Blue Coat WebPulse service, which rates nearly three billion requests in real-time on a weekly basis, also found that social networking sites are becoming more of a malware vector.

With social network phishing and click-jacking attacks two of the most common types of attacks on the likes of Facebook and Twitter thoughout 2010, the report said that the shift of phishing attacks to social networks is particularly driven by the attempt to obtain user credentials that can also provide access to banking, financial and other online accounts that use shared passwords.

Ewart said: “Social networking is now the second most requested category of website and we are also seeing that webmail applications are really suffering. It is obvious that traditional communications are falling as ‘generation Y' prefer to talk using Facebook.”

Steve Daheb, chief marketing officer and senior vice president at Blue Coat, said: “Today, dynamic web links are the most powerful tool cyber crime has and static web ratings that require update cycles are too slow when the bad guys can harvest users within minutes.”

Try this for Python:

Desire to Pass on Love of Programming, Man Pens Book with Pre-Teen Son

Recommended python book for beginners, even if you're over 10 years of age.

Don

Yes, Now securitytube.net has a new improved interface. I was changing the DNS records but it was taking time to propagate and hence the errors ... is it resolved now? please do let me know!

Also, replied to you in PM but got a blank screen, did it reach you?

Vivek

Redirect Failed
An error occurred in attempting to redirect ghs.google.com.
You can find more information on DynDNS' DNS Services Page

Fears about banking credentials being harvested, following the discovery of keyloggers plugged into library computers, have been played down.