Top 10 Hackers in the World

0.   Kevin Mitnick

https://www.mitnicksecurity.com/

1. Vladimir Levin

Vladimir Leonidovitch Levin is a Russian Hacker of genius proportions. In 1994 while working with a dialup connection and a laptop from Saint Petersburg, Apartment he accessed the accounts of several large corporate customers of Citibank stealing USD 10.7 million. He ended up spending three years in jail. However, in 2005 an anonymous hacker group came claiming that they were the ones truly responsible for the theft and that they only sold Vladimir the data needed to steal the money.

2. Mathew Bevan and Richard Pryce

In 1996, Mathew Bevan and Richard Pierce were 21 and 17 respectively, when they broke into military computers. They didn’t only hack into US military computers, but the officials thought they might have also hacked into North Korean Systems as well. These people have the unique distinction of saying that they almost started a war.

3. Michael Calce a.k.a MafiaBoy

Michael Calce, a Canadian Hacker was responsible for a series of high profile cyber attacks in 2000. Project Rivolta a project name he called it meaning riot in Italian was a distributed denial of service attack that took down major websites Yahoo, FIFA, Amazon, eBay, CNN, and Dell among others. He was caught after bragging about the attacks in an IRC chat room for which he got eight months in jail. Why such a short sentence? Michael was only in high school at the time.

4. Adrian Lamo

Adrian Lamo is best-known for hacking into major cooperation’s like Yahoo, Bank of America, Citigroup, The New York Times and Microsoft but the way he did it made him famous. He used public internet connections like libraries and coffee shops to hack to hack into major sites. Because of that style he was named as ‘Homeless Hacker’. In 2004 after being caught he was given six months house arrest in order to pay $65,000 in restitution.

5. Jeanson James Ancheta

Jeanson James Ancheta has been first hacker ever to create a botnet a group hijacked computers that work together for a legal means. In 2004 he started to work with botnets rxbot, a computer worm that can spread his net of infected computers which gave him control to 500,000 computers including US military computers. He was forced to give up his BMW, pay more than $58,000 and serve 60 months in prison.

6. Gary Mckinnon

Gary Mckinnon a.ka Solo is a Scottish hacker who masterminded the largest military computer hack of all time. He hacked into 97 US armed forces and NASA computers between 2001 and 2002within a period of just 24 hours he deleted critical files including weapon logs. In total the damage that his hacking cost, cost the government an estimated $ 700,000.

7. Owen Walker

Owen Walker a.ka AKILL was only 17 when he let in an international hacking group that cause over 26 million dollars in damages. The high school teenager was responsible for creating the Bot virus which spread into 1.3 million computers around the world crashing them. Even though he was caught, despite all the damage, he was released without being convicted.

8. Astra

The hacker named Astra, whose real name was never revealed was a 58 year old Greek Mathematician.  He operated between 2002 and 2008.  During that five year period he stole weapon technology data in 3D modeling software from a company called the Salt Group, which he sold up to USD 361 million to buyers all around the world. He was tracked down in an apartment in Athens, Greece.

9. Albert Gonzalez

Albert Gonzalez, over a two year period he stole a total of 175 million credit card numbers selling them online. A massive yet undisclosed amount of money was stolen from his victims through identity theft, leaving them to battle to restore the credit ratings and get their money back. He was sentenced to 40 years jail.

More people taking to internet security after Heartbleed bug

NEW YORK - The Heartbleed bug scare seems to have made Facebook users smarter about security with Facebook witnessing a spike in password resets. Many Facebook users also went in for the Login Approvals, Facebook's version of the two-factor authentication, a spokesman told the IDG News Service. It appears that many people are taking the disclosure seriously and taking steps to protect themselves, he said. Many companies, including Google and Yahoo, say they have since patched their services.

 Heartbleed was a bug in OpenSSL, introduced in a new version of the software at the end of 2011 that under some circumstances allowed Internet attackers to steal data from the memory of a server in 64KB chunks, according to PC World.

 That data could include passwords or encryption keys, which could then be used to break into users' accounts or even make malicious sites mimic real ones and collect usernames and passwords

. Two-factor authentication, which forces users to give two separate pieces of information for access, can help to protect users against such attacks.

 The use of password services software has gone up. One password management app, 1Password, skyrocketed in popularity from the low-200s to the top 10 in Apple's App Store in the U.S. shortly after the Heartbleed disclosures, according to its developer, AgileBits.

 The 1Password app is now ranked 67th in Apple's store.

 More people who may not be very tech-savvy are changing their passwords and thinking about being smarter with security online. "This has been a wake-up call for the general public," RedSeal's Lloyd said. For one thing, Heartbleed has made more people think about the strength of their passwords, he said, according to PC World, Heartbleed's OpenSSL security flaw affected a whopping 66% of the entire Internet during the time of its discovery. In addition, the bug also compromised the usernames and passwords on innumerable popular websites and services. The recent news is that, the Heartbleed bug also affected Android Apps in Google Play Store, says IB Times.

 The Heartbleed bug has turned cyber criminals from attackers into victims as researchers use it to grab material from chatrooms where they trade data.

 Discovered in early April, Heartbleed lets attackers steal data from computers using vulnerable versions of some widely used security programs.

 Now it has given anti-malware researchers access to forums that would otherwise be very hard to penetrate, says BBC

 The news comes as others warn that the bug will be a threat for many years.

 French anti-malware researcher Steven K told the BBC: "The potential of this vulnerability affecting black-hat services (where hackers use their skills for criminal ends) is just enormous."

 Heartbleed had put many such forums in a "critical" position, he said, leaving them vulnerable to attack using tools that exploit the bug.

Journalists, Media Under Attack From Hackers: Google Researchers

Twenty-one of the world's top-25 news organizations have been the target of likely state-sponsored hacking attacks, according to research by two Google security engineers.

While many internet users face attacks via email designed to steal personal data, journalists were "massively over-represented" among such targets, said Shane Huntley, a security software engineer at Google.
The attacks were launched by hackers either working for or in support of a government, and were specifically targeting journalists, Huntley and co-author Morgan Marquis-Boire said in interviews. Their paper was presented at a Black Hat hackers conference in Singapore on Friday.

"If you're a journalist or a journalistic organization we will see state-sponsored targeting and we see it happening regardless of region, we see it from all over the world both from where the targets are and where the targets are from," Huntley told Reuters.

Both researchers declined to go into detail about how Google monitors such attacks, but said it "tracks the state actors that attack our users." Recipients of such emails in Google's Gmail service typically receive a warning message.

Security researcher Ashkan Soltani said in an earlier Twitter post that nine of the top-25 news websites use Google for hosted email services. The list is based on traffic volumes measured by Alexa, a web information firm owned by Amazon.com Inc.
California-headquartered Google also owns VirusTotal, a website that analyses files and websites to check for malicious content.
"TIP OF THE ICEBERG"
Several U.S. news organizations have said they have been hacked in the past year, and Forbes, the Financial Times and the New York Times have all succumbed to attacks by the Syrian Electronic Army, a group of pro-government hackers.

Huntley said Chinese hackers recently gained access to a major Western news organization, which he declined to identify, via a fake questionnaire emailed to staff. Most such attacks involve carefully crafted emails carrying malware or directing users to a website crafted to trick them into giving up credentials.

Marquis-Boire said that while such attacks were nothing new, their research showed that the number of attacks on media organizations and journalists that went unreported was significantly higher than those made public.

"This is the tip of the iceberg," he said, noting a year-long spate of attacks on journalists and others interested in human rights in Vietnam, including an Associated Press reporter. The attacks usually involved sending the target an infected email attachment masquerading as a human rights document.

While many of the world's biggest media players have been targeted in these attacks, small news organizations, citizen journalists and bloggers were also targeted, Huntley said, noting hacking attacks on journalists in Morocco and Ethiopia.

The problem, Marquis-Boire said, was that news organizations have been slower than other businesses in recognizing the threat and taking action. "A lot of news organizations are just waking up to this," he said.
Many journalists are now taking individual action to protect their computers and email accounts, he said. "We're seeing a definite upswing of individual journalists who recognize this is important."
(Editing by Ian Geoghegan)

Old Infostealer Resurfaces, Now Delivers Ransomware

Sometime near the start of the year, we noticed that the old malware family TSPY_USTEAL resurfaced. This information stealing malware now includes new routines including malicious packers, obfuscation, and bundling ransomware.

TSPY_USTEAL variants were seen in the wild as early as 2009, and is known to steal sensitive information like machine details and passwords stored in browsers. It can act as a dropper, dropping plugins or binaries in its resource section. The stolen information is stored in an encrypted .bin file, which is uploaded to a C&C server via FTP. This was part of the behavior of the previous variants, and continues on in newer variants.

A newer variant that we detect as TSPY_USTEAL.USRJ, drops ransomware—detected as TROJ_RANSOM.SMAR—on affected systems. These ransomware files are created by a new toolkit builder that gives the attacker full control over the ransomware’s behavior, from the types of files it will encrypt to the ransom note to be displayed.

We detect this toolkit as TROJ_TOOLKIT.WRN. Below are the features translated from Russian to English. Included are the file types to be encrypted, the ransom note, the appended extension to encrypted file, and the name of the dropped copy of the encoder.

Figure 1. Translated ransomware toolkit
(Click image above to enlarge)

The ransomware, TROJ_RANSOM.SMAR, drops a copy of itself in the user’s machine. It then encrypts certain files with the same icon and extension name. For example, it can add the extension .EnCiPhErEd on selected extension names like .LNK, .ZIP, etc., as marker. Next, it drops an image file containing the ransom details.

Figure 2. Ransom note

When encrypted files are accessed, it shows the ransom note along with the contact details to retrieve the password. The retrieval method may either be through a text message or an email. Next, it displays a message asking for the password. If password given is correct, it decrypts and restores the encrypted files to its original form. Consequently, the ransomware file deletes itself. On the other hand, if the password is incorrect and the number of attempts has reached the pre-set limit, it displays the error message shown below. It then searches for files to encrypt (besides the already-encrypted files) and deletes itself afterward.

Figure 3. Error message

This particular combination of threats is worrisome because it steals your credentials and information while the ransomware extorts additional money from the victim by encrypting their files. It’s highly probable that the malware author wanted to wring a fortune out of the victim, extorting any leftover funds from the same victim with the use of ransomware.

Feedback from the Trend Micro Smart Protection Network shows that there was a spike mid-April for TROJ_RANSOM.SMAR, with the United States as the affected country . Trend Micro protects users from all threats releated to this attack.

With additional analysis from Adremel Redondo and Nazario Tolentino II

Contemporary developments within ProCo

It's been an interesting day.  Started up checking up on my latest twitter tech feed I've been micro-blogging on for exactly one month counting today: https://twitter.com/Extraceptional  It's such a shame, my previous one @covertbulletin has been suspended now for 2-4 months now.  Apparently following 100 people a day off of famous hackers feeds is not considered a legitimate strategy for acquiring followers.  I repeat, such a shame, as the method was seemingly accruing quite a nice amount of followers using this method of real legitimate followers.  So, this time around, I've limited myself to 10 a day and am thereby being more selective in who I follow.  Taking into account things like their background, self descriptive analysis of themselves and determining whether or not their posts written in the English language are sure to prove this new list of followers to be even more reliable.  I'm so far about half way back to where I was, and all that I've learned from this process is that it might be wist to keep a text backup of your current list of followers, taking into account that the majority of my old ones, which I sadly can not access the list of, would most likely have followed me back considering the method of obtaining their follow-ship was because of them looking over the quality of my posts.  Lesson learned, always keep a back up, of everything.

Hmmmm, so secondly today, still involving twitter, I found myself perusing the most influential people I follow and taking the time to look at their latest posts to see if any of them were worth retweeting.  A few of them were and some were even left open enough that they inspired a bit of a debate.  The moment of fruition that I found was when I got a reply from one of them.  I don't take this lightly as I had first learned of this person after googling: top 10 hackers.

@Extraceptional Sure thing.
— Adrián Lamo (@6) November 20, 2013

I just couldn't believe that someone of that stature would have the time to bother replying to me but oh well, maybe I'm worth more than I thought.  Interesting.  Keep going.

So after that I attempted to install some games on an old 350 Mhz tower that I drug out of the stacks of ancient hardware that I sit around with so that this other flat-screen monitor that I happened to have come across could be of some use and possibly light up and entertain somewhat.  After many failed attempts at converting .flv videos to a workable format, the archaic video playing software finally began acting as I had hoped and begun playing a documentary that I had wanted to watch off to the side.  Great success, or so I thought and then fail.  Retry, fail.  Everytime, it seamed, no matter which video format I had tried on multiple videos it seams that 30 seconds in it just crashes.  FML  Next up I figured, why not try and get the old original Sims game to play.  I got the .ISO to fit onto a thumb drive, ported it over and then it asked for a CD key.  Found it, installed.  Success, time to run this thing and put in the code so I can build my little virtual people a house to live in while I go about my business but...fail.  Kept crashing.  2/2, not bad, this feels like familiar territory.  So finally I figured I could at least watch the intro screens on an F-Zero Rom for a SNES emulator over and over but that gets old faster than an unchecked bag of Cheetos.  I'll have to find a better idea on what to do with this near-worthless box until I manage to find the time to come across another 50 feet of Ethernet cable because if I remember right I could then at least listen to the full movies and documentaries that they have on youtube at 5fpm(frames per minute, not frames per second, this thing is that close to the junkyard).  If the vidz I had attempted to port over had actually worked as intended I would most likely be listening/half-watching a plethora of hacker documentaries while writing this, bishing about my inability to properly get The Sims to cooperate.  Alas the fight is not over yet.  As exausted as the attempts I have made at these two operations may feel at their present moment I know that I must continue to try other ways to get them to work.  Possibly try porting over an alternative video player software or .ISO mounter.  I think for the time being though I will just have to watch the original Mario Kart in action.  I'm sure there was a better SNES rom that acted as a screen saver that I'm forgetting yet.  Leave a comment if you have any ideas popping into mind.

Then you have my friend Steve on the other hand, who seams to have actually accomplished something with his time today.  Just check it out.

The whole entire time I was trying to get something happening with that old computer, I'm talking to him on Skype about his latest project.  It appears to be some king of camera/cell-phone mount to be used for a top-down view made out of Kinex.  He does a lot of cool stuff.  Be sure to check out: http://www.stevenjacks.com to see what kind of crazy stuff he does with it as there is sure to be something new up by the time you read this :D

-Extraceptional 11/21/2013

How i sent 300k emails through Github’s API in a matter of minutes

To all watchers of the libgdx repository: i’m terribly sorry and hope i didn’t interfer with your work in any way

     This is meant as a cautionary tale about using Github’s API on a repository with quite a few watchers (460 in this case).

     Earlier this year we migrated our code from Google Code to Github. We didn’t have a good migration plan for the 1200 or so issues back then, so we kept them on Google Code. We now have about 1700 issues on the tracker

     Today i finally wanted to tackle the issue tracker migration, using a Python script i found on Github. The script requires one to specify a Github user account that owns the repository the issues will get migrated to. I did a dry run on a fork of the main repo using my Github account, fixed up some issues in the script, and validated things to the best of my abilities. Things looked good.

     Then i ran it on the main repository. Luckily i was watching our IRC channel. After about 4 minutes, people started to scream. They each received 789 e-mails from Github. Every single issue i migrated, and every single comment of each issue triggered an e-mail notification to all watchers of the main repository.

     This wasn’t apparent to me during the dry runs, as i used my own Github account. The script posts all issues/comments with the user account i supplied, so naturally, i did not get any notification mails.

     I stopped the script after 130 issues (4 minutes), and immediately started sending out apologies and a mail to Github support, to which i haven’t received an answer yet. I sent roughly 300k mails through their servers in a matter of minutes. If i hadn’t watched IRC, i’d have send out about 4 million mails to 460 people within an hour.

     Let me assure you that i’m extremely sorry about this incident. I know that things like this can interrupt daily workflows quite a bit, even if getting rid of those mails is not a Herculean task. I’d be rather upset if a repo maintainer pulled something like this on me. Please accept my deepest apologies.

     The lesson for Github API users: think hard about the implications of automating tasks through the Github API if you have more than a few watchers.

     The lesson for Github/API designers: consider safe-guarding against such issues in your API, in case other idiots like me pull off something similar in the future.

Michael Jackson's Final Phone Call

https://soundcloud.com/covert-bulletin/michael-jacksons-final-phone