Hey everyone: Before you send an important email make sure you check to see that you didn't accidentally attach a webcam picture of a topless woman. That includes you, hacktivist collective Anonymous.
It was revealed Friday that hackers had hit the credit card payment processor Global Payments, and stolen potentially millions of Mastercard and Visa customer details in January and February. But on Sunday, Global Payments said in a press release that actually "less than 1,500,000 card numbers may have been exported." Heh, exported—like a fine, fraudulent wine.
Today's the big day, Anonymous: Operation Global Blackout. Hackers have been advised to attack the Domain Name System, which is responsible for taking a domain name like "gawker.com" and turning it into a series of numbers that makes sense to computers. Anonymous plans to bombard the system with junk traffic, thereby slowing just about everything on the internet down.
The racist smear campaign against Trayvon Martin, the unarmed black teen shot to death last month in Florida, has reached a new level of ghoulishness. A white supremacist hacker says he's broken into Martin's email and social networking accounts, and leaked his private Facebook messages. We've been able to confirm that at least one email account that belonged to Martin was cracked.
Most of the attacks carried out by the hacktivist collective Anonymous target governments or corporations in the name of freedom of information. But an anti-abortion hacker claiming links to Anonymous has been arrested after hacking Britain's largest abortion provider, with the intention of leaking patient information. Will Anonymous condemn him?
"I'm pissed off," the notorious hacker Sabu told me on the phone last September, lamenting the latest arrests in a worldwide crackdown on the hacking collective Anonymous. "I'm getting real sad, with all the bullshit. It's all media hunger on the side of the FBI, my nigga."
It was revealed today that the notorious Anonymous hacker Hector Monsegnur—a.k.a. "Sabu"—has been cooperating with the Feds for months, and even worked off a computer they gave him for some time. But that doesn't mean Mosegnur is a fed, as he learned last month when he was arrested by NYPD for trying to pass himself off as an FBI agent.
The most prominent and revered member of Anonymous, Sabu, has reportedly been an FBI informant for months. And thanks to his help, authorities today rounded up the last members of LulzSec, the notorious defunct hacking group he once led.
Christina Hendricks' publicist confirmed last night that the Mad Men star had been the victim of a hack, and that some candid cellphone photos of her had made their way to the internet. However, Christina's publicist says the most noteworthy photo from the Hendricks hacked photo cache—a pair of ample, naked breasts—is not of his client. "The topless image is fake and not an image of Christina."
A while ago, a twenty-something geek we'll call Martin arranged a meeting with some potential clients in an an unusual place: the sidewalk across the street from a police precinct on Manhattan's West Side.
Iowa Sen. Chuck Grassley is an incredulous old coot who likes to tweet unreadable shorthand nonsense, constantly, and then lash out at those who would make fun of him. Whenever the federal government gets around to killing off the dumb Internet once and for all, they should leave Grassley's Twitter page up as a memorial to fun times lost. Here's a useful perspective for considering how unorthodox Grassley's feed is: When hackers broke into it today, their tweets were instantly more professional than the graffiti that one of our most senior Senators usually vomits out from his phone.
