The prosecution of alleged Pentagon uber-hacker Gary McKinnon shows that the US is failing to take even basic precautions to protect its military systems, according to a reformed computer hacker accused of similar crimes 10 years ago.
Mathew Bevan, whose hacker handle is Kuji, was accused of breaking into US military computer systems but escaped without punishment when a 1997 case at Woolwich Crown Court was dropped after a long-running legal battle.
General Motors Corp.’s chief information security officer, Eric Litt, used the chance to speak at the European Black Hat Convention in Amsterdam earlier this year to reach out to the hacker community and explain the problems large corporations face when dealing with software vulnerabilities. He discussed security issues in an interview with Computerworld last week.
Read more: GM Security Chief Gives Hackers a Lesson
Gary McKinnon, the British hacker who’s due to hear whether he will be extradited to the US on 10 May, rates his chances of avoiding trial in the States as only “50/50″.
McKinnon, 40, faces possible trial under US anti-terror laws over alleged attacks on military and NASA systems between 2001 and 2002.
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APRIL 27, 2006 (REUTERS) - To the U.S., he is a seriously dangerous man who put the nation’s security at risk by committing “the biggest military computer hack of all time.”
But Briton Gary McKinnon says he’s just an ordinary computer nerd who wanted to find out whether aliens and UFOs exist.
A dirt-cheap, do-it-yourself hacking kit sold by a Russian Web site is being used by more than 1,000 malicious Web sites, a security company said Monday.
Those sites have confiscated hundreds of thousands of computers using the “smartbomb” kit, which sniffs for seven unpatched vulnerabilities in Internet Explorer and Firefox, then attacks the easiest-to-exploit weakness.
Despite the apparent growth in security incidents and hacker attacks over recent years, a clear majority (72 per cent) of UK security professionals feel their organisation is more secure than it was 12 months ago.
Organisations are no longer on the back foot in the fight against security threats, with only 11 per cent of respondents in a survey of 100 chief security officers (CSOs) and IT directors saying they take a ‘reactive only’ approach to security.
If reports issued by several well-known anti-virus companies are on the money, IT administrators will continue to face new and sophisticated forms of malware that challenge the security industry’s ability to stay ahead of emerging threats.
Based on a new study released by software maker McAfee’s Avert Labs group, the technology used to cloak many different forms of malware, especially rootkits, is becoming increasingly complex and harder to detect.
Lawyers for a Briton fighting extradition to the US on charges that he perpetrated the biggest ever hack against US government systems fear their client could end up in Guantanamo. Gary McKinnon, 40, might be tried under US anti-terror laws over alleged attacks on military and NASA systems between 2001 and 2002.
Hackers are using excerpts from BBC news stories as a lure to trick surfers into visiting a website that exploits a new, unpatched vulnerability in Internet Explorer.
Malicious hackers have fitted rootkit features into the newest mutants of the Bagle worm, adding a stealthy new danger to an already virulent threat.
According to virus hunters at F-Secure, of Helsinki, Finland, the latest Bagle.GE variant loads a kernel-mode driver to hide the processes and registry keys of itself and other Bagle-related malware from security scanners.
