AntiSec Attacks – The gathering storm?

Since Lulzsec downed their tools, those in the security community have been waiting for the AntiSec community and now we have the first warning shots across our bows. The LulzSec group were highly active for a period of 50 days claiming that this period of activism was planned to wake up the AntiSec community.

Monday 4th July – Apple servers hacked.
Hacker group Anonymous claims it has hacked one of Apple’s servers and posted usernames and passwords to prove it on their Twitter account, together with a warning that Apple could be a target of one of their attacks.

“Not being so serious, but well (…) #Apple could be target, too. But don’t worry, we are busy elsewhere”, tweeted @AnonymousIRC

Along with the tweet there was a link to a text file on Pastebin reported to be from one of Apple’s servers that contained a list of user names and passwords. As the passwords are encrypted so it will require some work to try to extract information from the tables (it would be possible for instance if someone has used a weak password for that to be recovered through a brute force hack… This may give hints to the encryption key). The server hacked was related to managing surveys and has been taken offline since the attack.

At the same time that the Anonymous tweet was posted there was another post from a lone hacker named Idahc claiming the he had found an SQL vulnerability in Apple’s servers but did not release any data from the hack.

It may well be that the upcoming cloud storage solutions of iTunes and iCloud may be looking like rich pickings from hacking groups.

Tuesday 6th July – Fox news political Twitter account hacked.
On Tuesday, the Fox News political Twitter account began posting suspicious messages including tweets that said that the US president had been fatally wounded in a shooting. A hacker group calling themselves Scriptkiddies claimed responsibility for gaining access to the account. The group gained control of @foxnewspolitics, bragging about it on several Twitter accounts (now suspended).

“BREAKING NEWS: President @BarackObama assassinated, 2 gunshot wounds have proved too much. It’s a sad 4th for #america. #obamadead RIP

Fox News said that they were working with Twitter to address the situation “We will be requesting a detailed investigation from Twitter about how this occurred, and measures to prevent future unauthorized access into FoxNews.com accounts”, said Jeff Misenti, vice president and general manager of Fox News Digital.

The US Secret Service are also looking into the attack.

Tuesday 5th July – PayPal UK Twitter Account Hacked
Also reported on Tuesday was news of another hack, the Twitter account of Paypal UK this time. The hacked account was then used to post links to a. Anti-Paypal site called paypalsucks.com which describes itself as “exposing the nightmare of doing business ‘the PayPal way.”

“This account was hacked earlier. We have it in our control now. Your personal data is still 100% safe, hack occurred on Twitter not PayPal,” tweeted PayPal UK after regaining control of the account late Tuesday.

The tweets were later removed by PayPal UK.

Recent Tech articles – 6th-12th June

Last week there was a quiet hum going on in the Tech World. It wasn’t as if there was nothing going on, it was just that a lot of the Journalists were either at the WWDC or at E3.

The E3 covers consumer electronics so other than to mention that the New Playstation Vita and the Nintendo Wii U shows us the advancement of new tech, I’m not covering it here, I will however make mention of the WWDC and you can read my overview and underlying posts on that starting here…. There is more in depth coverage of the main highlights of Lion, OS5 and iCloud too. It wasn’t mentioned in the original post but it’s worth mentioning that us here in the UK are just going to have to wait for iCloud to fully come to us as the record labels over here have yet to settle on a deal…

Moving on to social media, Twitter announced that they were gong to be providing their own link shortening service for the Twitter web service… No announcement for third-party applications. Once again Facebook this week was in trouble again this week over privacy issues when it was announced (quietly), that facial recognition would be promoting tag suggestions on your photos.

More Apple news with more on the Lodsys patent suit where developers bite back and Apple tries to get in between them an Lodsys. Also, Apple settles with Nokia over long standing patent infringements.

An article and video worth watching on the BBC Click website is about concerns that schools and universities are not teaching the basic programming skills that are required and the introduction of a £15 tiny PC on a circuit board called Rasberry Pi… Thanks to Daniel for that one… See it here http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/click_online/9503255.stm

I’ll close out this week with a Mac app for you to look over, iTerm2 is a feature rich terminal app. If you spend time at the command line on Mac, it’s well worth it.

Twitter Provides new link shortening feature on the web

Twitter seems to be on a bit of a roll at the moment. Firstly they stopped new third-party developers from developing new twitter clients, then they bought Tweetdeck. Last week they announced an internal photo uploading service and updated search. Now they have announced their own link shortening service that will us the t.co URL going live on Twitter.com. Any URL link that is over 11 characters will be shortened to a 19 character link.

Recent Tech articles – 30th May-05th Jun

In is past week we start of with news that flows over from the previous week. To start we have seen more news about the MacDefender malware. First we heard that the Trojan had moved over onto attacking through Facebook profiles using the Clickjacking technique. Then Apple finally released the security update to removed old infections and prevent new ones… It was worked around in 8 hours… Since then nothing.

Also from the previous week, Lodsys crawled back into the news by retaliating over Apples letter by bringing forward their litigation timing to 31st May instead of waiting the 21 days originally given.

Moving into this week, Lockheed Martin reported a serious hack attempt on their systems. This prompted both UK and US governments to raise their objectives towards cyber crime,

Shortly after Google announces that they are introducing a new service this summer called Google Wallet… Then gets sued by Paypal shortly after.

At the D9 conference at All things Digital this week, CEO of Twitter, Dick Costello announced some new Twitter enhancements to search and photo. He talked about how they were enhancing their search facility and were releasing a new feature to allow users to upload photos and attach it to a tweet right from

My final article from this week was on buttons… It seems this week that the Internet has gone button crazy with Twitter, Google and LinkedIn talking about their offerings.

Is the Internet going button crazy?

When Facebook initially launched it’s Like button, no-one was really sure how it was going to work out… Would it be a fad that would fade away or be a runaway success? It would seem that the latter option was the one to come true and around a year later they have gone on to incude the addition of their Send button to allow sharing of Facebook Group information too.

Now others are starting to take notice of this success and looking to replicate if for their own domains. This week, Google and Twitter released their own options and then LinkedIn added their own variant to allow employers to add a “Apply with LinkedIn” button.

Twitter takes control of picture posting, revises search

Twitter has been busy recently taking more control over the ecosystem in a complete turnaround from where they were when they started up. The original idea behind Twitter was a very lean 140 character microblogging system working on mobile phones and then onto the web. A developer API was developed and a good many developers jumped on the bandwagon to create Twitter desktop clients and then onto third party supporting services to provide links, pictures, videos etc..

Twitpic causes backlash over Copyright claims

Twitpic, a simple Picture posting service popular with Twitter users came under fire this week for changing their terms of service to appear to say that they held the copyright to all the photo posted on their site. This prompted a spate of users moving over to alternative services. The site founder apologised for the lack of clarity stating that users still owned the copyright of the images and the terms and conditions have been rewritten again.

By changing the terms, Twitpic hoped to limit the abuse of images on it’s site which have found their way into reports about newsworthy events. One of the most famous images posted on Twitpic came from January 2009 when a US Airways jet crash landed on the Hudson river. . To try and prevent this it recently signed an exclusive deal with the Wenn news group to syndicate images posted on Twitpic. There does still seem to be confusion over who profits from redistributed images as by signing up to Twitpic, users do agree to let the service distribute their images to the company’s partners.