hackers

The media generally portrays hacker as criminals going after law-abiding computer users, but one Dutch hacker has turned his sights on more fertile prey: other less-skilled, or even aspirational hackers. Like a digital stickup boy, he has remotely kidnapped illegally (according to Apple) jailbroken iPhones in the Netherlands, holding them hostage for five Euros.

Patriotic geeks might want to brush off those resumes, because the long-awaited U.S. Cyber Command officially went live last Thursday, and hopes to recruit at least 1,000 cyber security experts over the next few years. But the newly formed group faces questions about its mission and responsibilities, as well as competition for recruits from U.S. intelligence agencies.

The announcement by the Department of Homeland Security also coincided with the kickoff of National Cybersecurity Awareness Month, which infuses the usual trick-or-treat spirit of October with additional meaning.

Sure, most Americans spent last weekend grilling meat, drinking beer and blowing thing up. But the pasty, lonely few that spent Forth of July weekend browsing the websites of the Department of Homeland Security and the Department of Transportation noticed something terribly amiss. Those websites, along with 12 other US government websites along with numerous South Korean government sites were loading very, very slowly, and sometimes, not at all. The culprit? A massive distributed denial-of-service attack.

After a year of alarm and hype, cybersecurity has finally made it to the top of the Obama administration's to-do list. President Obama, introducing a new report on U.S. cybersecurity in a speech on Friday, said cybersecurity represents "one of the most serious economic and national security challenges we face as a nation."

A possible threat to national security. Accusations of both media hype and underreporting. Cassandra-esque warnings of the dual catastrophes of under- and overreaction. More swine flu news? Thankfully not. This time the issue is another media darling: cyberwar.

After frightening revelations that hackers have already managed to break into the computer systems that control huge swaths of the United States' power grid and other pieces of national infrastructure, the Wall Street Journal reports that cyber-spies have broken into the Pentagon's Joint Strike Fighter program -- its costliest initiative -- and made off with several terabytes of sensitive data.

At 8 a.m. on May 4, 2001, anyone trying to access the White House Web site got an error message. By noon, whitehouse.gov was down entirely, the victim of a so-called distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack. Somewhere in the world, hackers were pinging White House servers with thousands of page requests per second, clogging the site. Also attacked were sites for the U.S. Navy and various other federal departments.

Hackers may be one step ahead of you once again. Sure, you can follow all the steps to protect your private data, like creating a password that's hard to guess or clearing your memory cache after browsing, but that may not be enough. It's very possible that hackers can sniff out your data with every keystroke—at least that's what Swiss researchers proved in a video demonstration, which showed four different ways to pick up sensitive information from people's keyboards as they typed.

Last Wednesday, after years of construction and months of planning, the Large Hadron Collider, which you just might have heard about, turned on its proton beam for the first time. At the same time, a team of Greek hackers was planning to break through the security of the world’s largest experiments. First reported by the British newspaper the Telegraph, the attack targeted a project website, defacing the website with a long message in Greek.

Imagine an encrypted data chip so secure that even the greatest hackers in history would find impossible to crack. That chip is very much a reality thanks to the combined efforts of Siemens, Austrian Research Centers (ARC) and Graz University of Technology who have teamed up to create the first quantum cryptology chip for commercial use to ensure securer electronic communication.