by James T. Areddy, Reporter, The Wall Street Journal
China’s military is under attack. At least its Web site is…from hackers.
In a sign that China’s Ministry of National Defense faces the same kind of Internet security challenges that militaries around the world have reported, its new Web site was attacked more than 2.3 million times within a month of its August launch. The state-run People’s Daily newspaper reported that revelation Wednesday in an interview with the editor-in-chief of the Chinese defense department’s site, Ji Guilin.
by Dionne Searcey, Reporter, The Wall Street Journal
Benjamin Moody got hooked on calculators the moment his father bought him one to help with his math homework when he was 15. He squirreled away with it and devoured the 19-chapter owners’ manual.
For fast-growing technology start-ups, there are many approaches to employee hiring and retention.
Two of the more successful ones, Facebook and Zappos, have very different methods, each with different goals: Facebook wants to hire entrepreneurs even if that means they will eventually leave, while Zappos wants to hire the best people to fit its culture and figure out how to keep them.
Wal-Mart was the victim of a serious security breach in 2005 and 2006 in which hackers targeted the development team in charge of the chain’s point-of-sale system and siphoned source code and other sensitive data to a computer in Eastern Europe, Wired.com has learned.
by Nick Wingfield, Reporter, The Wall Street Journal
Microsoft says a phishing scheme is behind the exposure of passwords to thousands of Hotmail accounts late last week and adds that it’s helping affected customers regain control of their accounts.
On Monday, the Neowin technology blog posted a story saying that an anonymous user on Oct. 1 had uploaded a list with password details of more than 10,000 Hotmail accounts to a Web site called pastebin.com, where developers typically share programming code with each other.
Internet pranksters, gathered around the popular anonymous Internet forum 4chan, have seemingly orchestrated an attack on Twitter, creating a number of fake accounts and pushing the hashtag #gorillapenis to the trending topics.
by Sky Canaves, Lead Writer, China Journal, WSJ.com
New York City’s police department joins the Dalai Lama, the Joint Strike Fighter and the U.S. electrical grid as the latest alleged target of Chinese hackers.
New York Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly said Wednesday that hackers make at least 70,000 attempts every day to access computer systems of the New York Police Department, the largest police force in the U.S.
by Marisa Taylor, Reporter, The Wall Street Journal
Basketball fans, beware.
Hackers are taking advantage of bracket-related Web surfing and initiating some madness of their own, with tactics as sneaky as spreading malicious software through March Madness blog posts.
Online security company Websense discovered two March Madness-related malware scams earlier this week, one in the form of URLs posted in blog comments that took users to a phony antivirus scanning site, and another as a search-engine-optimization scam that infected basketball-related terms and pushed them to the top in Google.
Hackers and computer security experts gathering on March 18 in Vancouver, British Columbia, for the third annual Pwn2Own contest will be targeting five smartphones: an Apple iPhone, a Research in Motion BlackBerry and phones running on Google’s Android, Microsoft’s Windows Mobile and Nokia’s Symbian operating systems. The contest, sponsored by 3Com’s TippingPoint computer security division, will award $10,000 prizes to anyone who can break into one of the phones.
The Amish have the undeserved reputation of being Luddites, of people who refuse to employ new technology. It’s well known the strictest of them don’t use electricity, or automobiles, but rather farm with manual tools and ride in a horse and buggy. Yet Amish lives are anything but anti-technological.
Freedom of the press belongs to those who own one. After hackers took down SoapBlox, a one-man blog-hosting company which runs local political Web sites, a silenced liberal commentariat found out how true that was.
by Ben Worthen, Blogger, Business Technology, The Wall Street Journal
Here’s the latest sign that businesses are losing the tech security fight: The bad guys are starting to steal from one another.
That could sound like a good thing–better that hackers and other cyber criminals squabble amongst themselves than attack innocent businesses and consumers–but it really isn’t.
About two weeks ago, we covered the release of a DNS security fix meant to patch a vulnerability in the system that matches domain names with IP addresses. The flaw had been discovered by security researcher Dan Kaminsky some months earlier but, at the time, details on the exploit were being kept secret.
by Ben Worthen, Blogger, Business Technology, The Wall Street Journal
Hackers enjoy a reputation as computer whizzes who can break into the most sophisticated systems. They may be whizzes, but the reason for their success is that businesses rely on defenses filled with holes big enough to drive a truck through.
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