Hackers associated with well known hacker-activist group “Anonymous Operations” have released a massive cache of data they say was obtained when they hacked a website belonging to the United States Department of Justice. “Today we are releasing 1.7GB of data that used to belong to the United States Bureau of Justice, until now,” Anonymous wrote in a statement on its website. The hackers claim the file contains emails as well as “the entire database dump” from the DOJ web...

The United States House of Representatives has voted to pass the controversial Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act (CISPA), talk of which has swept the Internet over the past few weeks. The House vote was moved up to Thursday night, and CISPA passed as 248 members of Congress voted for the bill and 168 voted against. The bill is sponsored by Representatives Mike Rogers (R-Michigan) and Dutch Ruppersberger (D-Maryland), and it now faces further modifications in the Senate if it is to avoid being ve...

The controversial Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act (CISPA), which is supported by more than 100 members of the House of Representatives, is scheduled to be discussed in Congress on Friday, where it will be the first bill to go to a vote since the collapse of the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) in January. The bill looks to give businesses and the federal government legal protection to share cyber threats with one another in an effort to prevent online attacks. Internet privacy and neutrality advoca...

Security firm Trusteer warned this week of a trojan that is capable of stealing an individual’s credit card information from hotels. The firm’s intelligence team discovered the remote access trojan being sold on underground forums for $280. The malware is designed to capture screenshots from point-of-sale applications that access credit card numbers and expiration dates. These systems are located on front-desk computers at hotels, and they are often unmanaged and do not contain anti-virus protecti...

Following a massive security breach, Visa has dropped Global Payments from its registry of providers that meet data security standards, The Associated Press reported on Monday. Global Payments CEO Paul Garcia said that the company will continue to process Visa transactions, however being dropped from the registry “could give our partners some pause that they’re doing business with someone who experienced a breach.” Garcia fully expects his company to be reinstated once it has been issued a n...

Hackers stole credit card numbers belonging to as many as 1.5 million MasterCard and Visa customers, Global Payments, Inc. confirmed on Sunday. The international credit card processor was blocked by Visa after it reported the possibility of a major security breach on Friday. The company did not indicate how the hackers gained access to its system or who might be responsible for the attack. ”Based on the forensic analysis to date, network monitoring and additional security measures, the company believes...

The world’s two largest credit card processors have notified U.S. banks of a potential security breach that may affect more than 10 million cardholders, Reuters reported on Friday. MasterCard and Visa have said that the issue was the result of a third-party vendor and not their own internal systems. MasterCard said it has taken the proper steps by alerting law enforcement officials and hiring an independent data-security organization to review the possible breach. “MasterCard is concerned whenever...

Using nothing more than a few common tools, hackers can reportedly recover credit card numbers and other personal information from used Xbox 360 consoles even after they have been restored to factory settings. Researchers at Drexel University say they have successfully recovered sensitive personal data from a used Xbox console, and they claim Microsoft is doing a disservice to users by not taking precautions to secure their data. ”Microsoft does a great job of protecting their proprietary information,&...

Executive assistant director of the FBI Shawn Henry, who after more than two decades is preparing to leave the bureau, said in an interview with The Wall Street Journal that computer criminals are too talented and current defensive measures are too weak to stop them. “We’re not winning,” he said, claiming that the current public and private approach to fighting off hackers is “unsustainable.” Congress is currently considering two competing bills that are designed to strengthen cr...

A new study suggests that more than half of all Internet traffic is generated by non-human sources such as hacking software, scrapers and automated spam mechanisms. The majority of this non-human traffic, according to cloud service provider Incapsula, is potentially malicious. The study is based on data collected from 1,000 websites that utilize Incapsula’s services, and it determined that just 49% of Web traffic is human browsing. 20% is benign non-human search engine traffic, but 31% of all Internet...

Hacker group “Anonymous Operations” has confirmed that the custom Linux-based operating system released under its name earlier this week is not a platform it developed. “The Anon OS is fake,” the group posted on Twitter Wednesday evening. “It is wrapped in trojans.” The desktop operating system was released earlier this week by individuals claiming ties with Anonymous. It is based on popular Linux distribution Ubuntu, and it ships with a number of hacking tools pre-installe...

Notorious hacker group “Anonymous Operations” on Wednesday released the first version of its own desktop operating system. Dubbed Anonymous-OS, the computer platform is built on top of the open-source Linux-based Ubuntu 11.10 operating system, and it also utilizes the open-source Mate desktop environment, The Hacker News reports. It is unclear exactly who is behind the operating system, which comes with a number of tools pre-installed that are apparently Anonymous-approved. Included are Anonymous...

Hackers associated with the group “Anonymous” have published Symantec’s Norton AntiVirus source code on The Pirate Bay. The source code was stolen in 2006 and after alleged attempts to extort money from Symantec failed, the hactivist group released it late Thursday evening. The file is 1.07GB in size and includes the source code to a number of products within the software suite, such as the consumer version, the corporate edition, and other files for Windows, Unix and NetWare, according to ...

The laughs are reportedly over for five top members of the hacker group LulzSec who were arrested on Tuesday and charged as part of a conspiracy case filed in New York federal court. FoxNews.com reports that the arrests were part of a multinational sting across the United Kingdom, Ireland and the United States on Tuesday morning, and LulzSec leader Hector Xavier Monsegur, who operated online under the alias “Sabu,” provided the Federal Bureau of Investigation with information leading to the arres...