You probably remember the online outrage over the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) copyright enforcement proposal. Last week, the Department of Commerce’s Internet Policy Task Force released a report on digital copyright policy that endorsed one piece of the controversial proposal: making the streaming of copyrighted works a felony. As it stands now, streaming a copyrighted work over the Internet is considered a violation of the public performance right. The violation is only punishable as a misdemeanor, rather than the […]

Yet again the US business industry has underestimated their attackers, and they are slowly losing this war. Major U.S. bank websites have been offline a total of 249 hours in the past six weeks, and hackers are not doing all that they can. At most they are at around 60%-70% full throttle, and there may be good reason. To learn about someone’s defenses, the easiest way is to make them use them. You find out what […]

  The Federal Reserve has acknowledged a data breach. The Federal Reserve has acknowledged that an outside party gained access to its website and a limited amount of data, raising questions about the central bank’s cyber-security measures. “The Federal Reserve System is aware that information was obtained by exploiting a temporary vulnerability in a website vendor product,” a Federal Reserve spokesman said in a statement. “The exposure was fixed shortly after discovery and is no […]

Internet activist group Anonymous claimed responsibility for the apparent hack of a U.S. government website on Feb. 3, less than a week after defacing two other sites as part of the group’s ongoing Operation Last Resort. They are currently also looking into the US Drone program and memo released today. According to ZDNet, Anonymous hacked the website of the Alabama Criminal Justice Information Center and posted a spreadsheet on the site that appeared to contain the “login […]

Since his suicide, friends and admirers have cast free-information activist Aaron Swartz as a martyred hero hounded to his death by the government he antagonized. One newspaper columnist — whose piece on Swartz was accompanied by a photo showing him at his computer, his head encircled by a golden halo — even compared him to an Internet-age Martin Luther King Jr. But those closest to the 26-year-old Swartz say the hacker prodigy wasn’t out to […]

To the people of the Internet who knew his work, he was an “enormous intellect,” a “brilliant and determined spirit” and a “hero of the open net.” To federal prosecutors, he was a criminal. The suicide of Internet activist Aaron Swartz continued to send shock waves Monday throu Swartz, a digital prodigy who helped develop social-news site Reddit and RSS, the technology that allows websites to send updates to subscribers, was found hanged Friday in his […]

As stated before, Anonymous is a hacktivist group that carries out various attacks through DDoS, hacking, website defacement, and various other methods to try and speak out against internet censorship, surveillance, oppressive governments, and other groups/people. A group attached to the online hacktivist group Anonymous claims to have hacked the Web site of the Westboro Baptist Church in response to plans by the controversial church to picket the funerals of those massacred Friday at a […]

The hacktivist movement Anonymous made good on its promise to make life difficult for “revenge porn king” Hunter Moore today (Dec. 6), taking down his new website and apparently stealing and posting his personally identifiable information. Moore’s original site, IsAnyoneUp.com, published nude photos of young men and women, often sent in by angry former lovers, along with links to the subjects’ Facebook pages. Facing legal trouble, Moore shut the site down last year and sold the […]

Global hacking network Anonymous said it will shut down Syrian government websites around the world in response to a countrywide Internet blackout believed to be aimed at silencing the opposition to President Bashar al-Assad. The blackout is most likely a sign of things to come as well, up to and including a devastating retaliation against the rebels. Syria was plunged into communication darkness on Thursday when Internet connectivity stopped at midday. Land lines and mobile […]

Are you serious? How hard is the government going to try and destroy our privacy? Well apparently they are going to try really hard, and keep trying until they get it. A Senate proposal touted as protecting Americans’ e-mail privacy has been quietly rewritten, giving government agencies more surveillance power than they possess under current law (written in 1986 and beyond outdated). Patrick Leahy, the influential Democratic chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, has dramatically reshaped his legislation […]