taint.org: Justin Mason’s Weblog

Spam: WashPost: Computers Seized in Data-Theft Probe:

According to an account provided by the teenaged member of the hacker group — and confirmed by the law enforcement source who insisted on anonymity — the LexisNexis break-in was set in motion by a blast of junk e-mail. Sometime in February a small group of hackers … sent out hundreds of e-mails with a message urging recipients to open an attached file to view pornographic child images. The attachments had nothing to do with child porn; rather, the files harbored a virus (sic) that allowed the group’s members to record anything a recipient typed on his or her computer keyboard.

According to the teenage source, a police officer in Florida was among those who opened the infected e-mail message. Not long after his computer was infected with the keystroke-capturing virus, the officer logged on to his police department’s account at Accurint, a LexisNexis service provided by Florida-based subsidiary Seisint Inc. …

The young hacker said the group members then created a series of sub-accounts using the police department’s name and billing information. Over several days, the hacker said the group looked up thousands of names in the database, including friends and celebrities. The law enforcement source said the group eventually began selling Social Security numbers and other sensitive consumer information to a ring of identity thieves in California.

Tags: account, child, computer, group, hacker, message, officer, police, source, spam, virus

Conferences: I’m going to LayerOne; it looks interesting, and I’ve been hoping to bump into Danny O’Brien (who’s there doing his Life Hacks talk) for a couple of drinks and a blather for quite a while. Other speakers look similarly interesting, in an ‘offbeat hacker conference’ way, so I think it’ll be fun.

Conflicts with The Streets playing the Wiltern though, but c’est la vie ;)

Tags: blather, conference, conferences, couple, hacker, hacks, layerone, life, talk, way, while

Yahoo: al-Jazeera website redirected:

The hacker was able to gain control of the domain name by asking domain
seller Network Solutions for the account password on official al-Jazeera
stationery, said an industry source speaking on condition of anonymity.
A spokesman for Network Solutions’ parent company declined to comment on
how the hacker was able to hijack the domain name, but said the company
had fixed the problem and was trying to track the impostor down.
‘We followed our procedures, in this particular instance someone was able
to get around those procedures,’ said Brian O’Shaughnessy, a spokesman
for Internet security firm VeriSign.

They fixed the problem? Surely this is exactly what happened with the sex.com domain several years ago?

Tags: al, company, domain, hacker, name, network, problem, spokesman, website, yahoo

Adequacy.org: Is Your Son a Computer Hacker?:

Is your son obsessed with Lunix?

BSD, Lunix, Debian and Mandrake are all versions of an illegal hacker operation system, invented by a Soviet computer hacker named Linyos Torovoltos, before the Russians lost the Cold War.

Adequacy.org is pretty funny… but they really need to sort out some kind of comment voting system. They have some seriously humor-deficient readers.

Tags: adequacy, bsd, computer, debian, hacker, lunix, mandrake, org, son, system