Russian (?) Hacker/SpookThe Empire 1 – Hacker 0. The Georgian CERT (Computer Emergency Response Team) have caught a hacker, which they believe works for the Russian Official Security Agencies, so a spook, with his hand in the cookie jar. While investigating an attack from a botnet installed on a number of sensitive servers the CERT team uploaded their own Trojan with a tempting name, “Georgian-Nato Agreement” that had the capability to control the hackers webcam and send photos of the perp back to home base. The bots were distributed by infected... 

The UK Information Commissioner Office is starting to ramp up its efforts to ensure organisations are taking the Data Protection Act seriously. In 2012 alone the ICO has issued over eighteen organisations or individuals penalties; with an average fine of over £125,000 and total fines of over £2,200,000. A significant majority of the penalties were to government organisations but included a number of individuals. Most breaches came from data in transit, for example emailed data, faxed data or data left on portal devices such as laptops or memory... 

It seems something is up over at our blue themed overloads, Facebook. Bogomil Shopov a blogger is reporting that he purchased close to a million Facebook account details, including, the Users email address, which you need to be able to brute force the account password and break in to the account, the User profile link and the user First and Last name, all for the grand price of, wait for it, five bucks! The deal of the day was via, Gigbucks, which is a competitor to fiver.com, but offering gigs for up to $50. The seller was a user calling themselves... 

After losing their appeal to a previously lost judgement, Apple have had to publish an apology, of sorts, to Samsung for saying they had stole their ideas, specifically they are required to publish the lost judgement on their front page. You can read the full “apology” here, in a page that is completely lacking of Apple logos or Apple branding. If you just stumbled upon the page you would have no idea that you were on the Apple site, until you checked the URL. The link to the details of judgement is down the very bottom of the UK Apple front... 

How would you like access to a Fortune 500 company network, to you know, do whatever you like. Yeah? Okay, that will be USD$5. Dedicatexpress.com (now offline since the writing of this article) run by a bunch of Russian gentlemen offered access to corporate networks from across the globe via an RDP, (Remote Desktop) Connection. Essentially these chaps had scanned the internet for open ports on the 3389 TCP port number and brute forced the username and passwords. Every Windows box out there starts with a user called Administrator, once you know this... 

Apple today announced the new iPad, a slimmed down version of its big brother. However it seems to have a lot in common with the iPhone, for example the processor is the Apple A5 dual-core which is the same chip that was in the iPhone 4S, it will also have the tiny lightning dock connector introduced with the iPhone 5 and there will be versions that allow you to connect to cellular 4g data connections. Obviously it will have the IOS operating system that comes on all iPhones and iPads. The screen will be a healthy 7.9 inches, but will not be the... 

Back in the fifties everyone had an idea of what the ”World of Tomorrow” would look like, some of the concepts were not far off, for example we do have mono rails, and Under Ground rail, but alas no personal flying transport. According to the people of yesterday we should be living in the sea, maybe they knew more about global warming than we knew, and they thought we should have colonised the moon by now, to be fair Richard Branson is making some strides in the right direction on that one. Below are some images of Vintage Tech, and how the... 

Despite never having the full versions of Skype on their machines previously, many users are today waking up with Skype mysteriously automatically installed on to their desktops. Depending on when your system was set to automatically update users are widely reporting the automatic install of Skype. When investigating how the offending software was installed users will see an update in the “Update History Log” stating the software was automatically installed by the Windows update process. The log also refers the user to knowledge base... 

A French firm has taken a swipe at Anonymous by applying for a trademark on everything unique about the hacking group. Early Flicker has registered the Anonymous headless man backed by a globe image and the Anonymous slogan “Anonymous, We are Legion, We do not forgive, We do not forget, Expect us”, with the National Institute of Industrial Property in France. This theoretically would allow the French firm to produce and sell merchandising with the logo and slogan throughout the European Union. Not surprisingly the Anonymous boys (ahem) and Girls,... 

Paul Chambers, 27 year old, male from Doncaster has had his conviction for “menacing electronic communication” overturned. Convicted in May 2010, Chambers was fined £385 and ordered to pay £600 costs at Doncaster Magistrates’ Court. Chambers was found guilty after sending a Tweet stating the following “Crap! Robin Hood airport is closed. You’ve got a week and a bit to get your shit together, otherwise I’m blowing the airport sky high!!”, out of frustration on hearing Robin Hood airport was shut by snow in...